The Power of Text in Gaming
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an awesome article by Kieron Gillen on the role of written text in games - both in the early days, and more specifically the continued use of text today. An excerpt:

"Words remain one of the more enigmatic yet efficient tools available to a professional game designer, and certainly one of the most overlooked. And its efficiency cannot really be overestimated – both in terms of player and development time. 'Language (and prose in particular) remains an important tool for game designers because it’s malleable,' notes Sheldon Pacotti, writer on Deus Ex and now at Spector’s Junction Point, 'One sentence can go from the Bronze Age to 21st-century Shanghai to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Imagine the development budget to represent that last sentence visually. Especially in adventure games, language is critical for conveying history, prophecy, and the multiplicity of a gameworld/society.'"

One thing Gillen doesn't point out is that the decrease in the use of text for communication of ideas within games has also coincided with the drop in the number of mainstream PC-exclusive titles. The television isn't so great at being a medium for the printed word, even when plugged into a console that has computing power unimaginable when color TVs were new.

And, curiously, where is printed text thriving? Hmmm... I have played a couple of MMO's lately that have been very dependent upon text for storytelling and communication. These huge worlds have to have content requirements to satisfy players for hundreds or even thousands of hours, and text is powerful enough to broaden that content very efficiently.

Interactive Fiction (IF), the modern-day name for the Text Adventure, naturally gets a significant mention in the article. In fact, the entire article lingers extensively around RPGs and Adventure games, two genres that can derive some of the greatest benefit from text.

Check out the article here:
Word Play at Rock, Paper, Shotgun


(Vaguely) related text gibberish:
* Are Graphics Really Killing Gameplay?
* Warhawk Movie and Endings
* Does Textfyre Have a Chance of Reviving the Commercial Text Adventure?
* Adventure Gaming Alive and Well?
.

Labels: Adventure Games, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:41 AM (Permalink)