In a shocking turn of events, it turns out the leftists were right all along

Do you get it guys? 0451? Never mind what it signifies or whether it's relevant, DO YOU GET IT

Because, as we have established, I am the worst person alive, I decided to get myself an early Christmas gift in the form of a few games I'd been looking at for a while, but never actually played due to induced frugality. Among them was Convoy, a game which, to put it gently, isn't very good. But the reasons it isn't very good have been illuminating, so I don't really regret my purchase. Specifically, it clarified a number of sticking points where I disagreed with the prevailing notions among people I otherwise tend to align with.

This took way too blood-damn long to write. Fuck depression.

You just don't understand the lore

cw for this section only: actually idk how to do this because the game just names a traumatic experience without further elaboration so I can't accurately warn it without being as potentially unpleasant as the game aaaaaaaa

If you aren't familiar with the term, the Thermian Argument goes something like this: things in a work of fiction are the way they are because it isn't set in our world, so that's just the way it is, and judging the author for that is wrong.

I would hope that, if you have a brain, you can see this is absolute poppycock. However, I'll spell it out: since the rules of the world are as much a product of the author as the specific plot and characters that make up the part of the story most of us care about, they're also part of the text and can be critiqued. To be clear, the Thermian Argument isn't purely defending worldbuilding alone, but using an in-universe explanation for why something else... questionable is present.

This is all well and good and a valid rebuttal but then we get to the conclusions people draw from that rebuttal and that's what I took issue with. Still take, as I'll get into, but at least now I can understand them a bit better.

Typically, a bunch of reactionaries will come out of the woodwork and say "but how are you supposed to write a story with stakes if depicting evil means you are the evil?!" which, and I'm sorry to literally everyone on this one, is a bad-faith argument that I have gut-wrenching sympathy for.

The response to this is usually something along the lines of "the author needs to be explicit in the text that $problem is bad, otherwise even if $problem is something done by the bad guy, the author supports $problem." This, jabs monitor, this is what I have a problem with.

The simpler reason that I don't like this is that it makes creative works do something they're not meant to do: defend the author's honor as a "good person," whatever that might actually mean.

I agree that just plopping something nasty in because something nasty "happened" is bad. But, crucially, this is not only morally but artistically bad. If it has no effect on the characters, they cease to be believable as people. If it does have an effect on them, that's enough proof for me. Anyone with empathy can see that it's a bad thing being depicted as such because it hurts $person. Anyone without empathy is not going to have their stance changed for the better by a book, so why even write with them in mind? Also, getting people without empathy to have empathy is the job of psychologists, not the literati or game-ati.

caveat: If a harmful event has minimal effect on the character, this can be acceptable IF, for instance, due to past abuse they think this is normal. Then the character's indifference to $present_harm serves as an example of how $past_harm isn't just bad in the moment but has lasting insidious effects.

caveatception: If we apply the "must make disapproval explicit" rule rigorously, we see that for the first caveat to hold, we have to point out in some way that the present harm that the character has been traumatized into thinking is normal, is in fact harmful.

And, forgive me if you can, but I'll say it even if I go to the gulag for it: that's a load of old bollocks. This entire argument rests upon the assumption that the reader is some kind of zombie with no capacity for empathy or moral reasoning. It leaves no room for moral ambiguity, which in turn means that art, the thing tasked with examining the human condition, isn't allowed to explore fucking doubt of all things.

Okay. Okay. Deep breaths.

That's all fairly abstract reasoning, and I stand by my refusal to infantilize the audience. Convoy gave me a concrete example of where the above critique of the critique of the critique of the critique of the Thermian Argument goes afoul.

The main quest of the game involves collecting rare parts to fix your spaceship. One of these requires you to find a monopolistic corporation and either buy the part off them for a ludicrous price, or do the corporation's dirty work for them and receive the part as an under-the-table deal.

I'm going to sort of ignore the part where all it took to talk me out of my actual principles was the prospect of being charged a large sum of fake vidya currency, but only because that sort of thing has been done to death in pieces on ludonarrative dissonance, and the idea that buying the parts is the moral answer isn't correct either because it's not as if any of your scrap-money in this game is ethically sourced.

In any case, the dirty work in question is getting someone to give up his land, which the corporation needs for expansion. It turns out the guy just lives in his car, and would like to return to traveling. So you end up with this screen.

Also, what asshole designed this UI?

This is... about as bad as can be. "You wonder if you made the right decision." Really? Your idea of moral ambiguity is letting some old git (his name is Bad Max, because of course it is) return to his old ways of terrorizing civilian settlements, but it's in service of fixing your spaceship so maybe it's justified? Come the belgium on.

Perhaps it's just my general disposition to give people the benefit of the doubt that makes me averse to the standard of "must make it clear that the author disapproves." But I do draw the line at implying that loosing this monster on the world is worth it, or thinking that this counts as a deep moral quandary that reasonable people can disagree on.

The real kicker is that upon meeting him, the game gives you the option to just shoot him in the head. Once you learn that he wasn't merely a traveler but a menace, you have no opportunity to try and stop him at all. You just wash your hands of the incident and pretend that you have morals because you "wonder if you did the right thing" instead of just intervening to correct your mistake. Even as you end up going up against raiders in the rest of the game.

Fuck you, Convoy, and the truck you rode in on.

Would you like some Poe Slaw with that?

We might as well continue in the vein of "I'm too quick to assume audiences know the author knows something is wrong."

If, for whatever reason, you are reading this loosely video game-oriented blog without much familiarity with games, or just haven't been paying attention to the renewed interest in game writing, let me fill you in.

Most video game writing is very bad.

More specifically, the "story" side of the game tends to be walled off from the "game" side of the game in some way. Characters will do things in cutscenes that they can't in the game proper; a major character might die as a plot point but earlier missions might have you trying to protect them and you have to restart if they die at that point, that sort of thing. Or, for one reason or another, explanations of the game world and explanations of the game mechanics end up being written in jarringly different styles. There's also the fact that, for games with an overarching, pre-written plot, "writing" is assumed to just constitute the literal words displayed or spoken, and not the pacing of overall story beats or the ways in which the story will change things about the gameplay.

Convoy and games like it get around this last problem by writing a giant pool of possible events and having the game string them together in a randomized order, and allowing the game mechanics to take care of major plot points. I can see you writing comments, I know it's not exactly like I said, but from the perspective of viewing each run-through as a story that's more or less what it ends up being.

Convoy wears its inspiration from FTL on its sleeve, and FTL is probably the best game (that I've played, at least) at creating a narrative out of these event-puzzle-pieces. In that sense, the developers have sort of set themselves up to fail with the inevitable comparison. But there seems to be a bit more failure than that going on.

Specifically, some of the event writing seems like someone is trying to parody the style of event writing in FTL. You find a thing, investigate, scrap it, avoid it, wat do? The poor villagers give you a ludicrous amount of equipment as reward for defending them, which they could have easily used to defend themselves. You promise to do a random thing for someone, they give you a reward, and the reward is always in scrap. That sort of makes sense because both FTL and Convoy have scrap being used as currency, but it's all very... mechanical? Obviously game-y? It's sort of like the event text is written the way purely informational tooltips would be.

To an extent this comes down to suspension of disbelief (obviously, to be a game, it has to act like a game) but there's a sort of nasty instrumentality to it. In Convoy the only reason you a good thing is in order to get a reward. There was one quest where a hitchhiker asks you for a ride across the desert, and when you get to his destination he has nothing to give you because he's just a wanderer with nothing more than the clothes on his back. When I first ran into this, I was ecstatic. It seemed to be actually making a point about how games have you, more often than not, treating non-player characters as just tools and means to an end. I was going to make a post singing the game's praises for this single quest alone. Mind you, this was before I encountered the really nasty event I mentioned in part one.

The game gives you the option to prod him to give you something anyway. He tells you the location of a buried equipment stash.

Well, okay, so the writing in a game is excessively gamey. Shoot me. But it doesn't end there. Another problem with game stories that gets trotted out with some regularity is their overreliance on tropes and archetypes to set the scene. Good thing we haven't crashed on a single-biome planet and aren't ultimately motivated by escape and aren't roaming the desert with gas-guzzling cobbled-together vehicles while playing the part of an amoral cowboy trying to get shit done in a harsh world where empathy is sin.

... Oh wait.

It also does the annoying video game thing where the only real interaction is violence. Your actions determine which of the three factions comes out on top, but in practice this only means "you end up meeting whoever you kill the least/help the most in battle more often." And how about those factions, eh? There are "we want your tech (and will kill you for it)," "we want your stuff (which includes your tech, and we will kill you for it)", and "killing is fun." Wow! I'm sure invested in which of these lovely groups takes power!

Maybe this is somewhat justified. The game's heavily inspired by Mad Max, and I only know that franchise by reputation (amoral, dystopic wasteland nihilism - correct me if I'm wrong.) And someone more clever than I am can probably take this faction mechanic and turn it into a metaphor for "no ethical consumption under capitalism" - your decisions have immense moral weight and yet none at all at the same time.

The question on the tip of your tongue, which I can see with my magic omniscience powers of death, is "So is the writing bad to parody bad game writing, or is it just bad game writing?" And, looking at individual quotes... it's hard to tell. But looking at the big picture, I see a bunch of typos that should have been caught by a basic spellchecker, a generic motivation, and just not a huge amount of effort on the writing front. What I'm left with is a game that feels very cold and lifeless, with that horrible feeling of inevitable despair and suffering that seems to hang over Real Literature and choke out anything hopeful or revolutionary or just plain fun, but with the additional knowledge that what I'm playing is not Real Literature and anything meaningful it manages to say is purely accidental. No, it's not apolitical. Nothing is.

Citation Unwanted

Last and least (I'll learn how to structure these someday) is the problem of reference humor. "Reference humor is bad" is less of a left-wing criticism than the others, but it still ties into ideas of anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism, and so has its place here. I tend to be less offput by reference humor than the average person, but even I have standards and Convoy violates them.

Just to lay it all out, the standards I use are:

• It must make the audience think themselves clever for noticing and connecting a detail, rather than roll their eyes at an obvious reference. Wordplay, for instance, is good. Just naming a thing is not.
• It must be somewhat, but not completely, marginal to the main thrust of the work. That is, it must connect to the work in some way rather than just being thrown in for the sake of it; but it must not be so integral that the rest of the work has to visibly contort to accommodate the reference.
• The very worst thing a reference can be is obviously-a-reference. There is no worse feeling than coming across a weird passage and knowing something is definitely being referenced, even though you don't know what.
• If the reference in question is being used to throw shade on someone else's work, it has to make at least a credible critique (and even then, it can be pretty iffy.) It's fine to dis your own work without explanation, though.
• Most subjectively, references must be somewhat thin on the ground.

I should also stress that these aren't, and shouldn't be, hard and fast rules or a checklist. It's entirely a matter of "I know it when I see it" and these bullet points are meant to explicate, to the greatest possible degree, the thought process that happens between seeing and knowing. I can think of examples off the top of my head that violate one or all of these that I'm ultimately okay with.

Convoy tramples these rules and mounts their heads on pikes and then asks me if I intend to side with it. "Surely you must be exaggerating?" you say. "Surely this small indie game cannot transgress your taste so thoroughly?"

There is a quest in the game where some goons say that they must construct additional pylons and ask you to travel to the pylon construction facility. There is a random event where you can run into some kind of crashed box thing in the desert with several exquisitely described corpses nearby. I have no idea who they were but with the level of specificity they must have been from something - from the situation I thought maybe Doctor Who was involved but I didn't recognize any characters, so I guess that makes me a fake nerd or whatever. In the first event of the Multicellulose-Infused Ethanol quest chain there is a character who says "It's not like we're dealing with gigawatts" in such a way that it's painfully clear that someone, somewhere said "okay team, we have this reclusive mad scientist character, let's wedge the word 'gigawatt' into his dialogue somewhere. Context doesn't matter, just wherever it fits." As stated above, there's a character called Bad Max, because of course there is.

As much as it pains me to say it, these references gave the game a bit of a "gives zero shits what you think"-style charm at first. A handful were even clever! Something like "sonic screws" is an inauspicious, plausibly-meaningless-technobabble name that clicks into place and makes you realize - wait a second, I've never seen a sonic screwdriver used on actual screws before! You probably just rolled your eyes and said my standards are too low, but even if you did you can still tell that sonic screws are "meh" and Bad Max is towering, fierce, terrible (no, stop, we're not doing the haha-we-are-bad thing today, we just showed the holes in that) an utterly unforgivable mistake. Past a certain point, though, every reference just seemed like someone jumping up and down saying "Do you get it? Do you? See, I know the thing! Give me imaginary internet points!"

If my descriptions of the endless seas of empty, shallow references haven't convinced you that something is awry, please look at this abject monstrosity from Ready Player One that the rest of us have already seen and cringed at, as it is a million times worse than anything Convoy manages to conjure. Just imagine this vibe stretched over the course of a poorly written, poorly balanced game that seems like it's trying to sell you on moral nihilism.

(Incidentally, Jay, if you're reading this, I will not forgive you for liking RPO even as mindless entertainment. Yes this is a callout post now I guess.)

But ytho?

What is the purpose of this post? I don't know. Some lukewarm takes on bad game writing are hardly worthy of your time. I like to think that if examples like these convinced me, my bringing them to light and explaining the problems with them may convince someone else, if I ever make this blog visible to search engines. That almost feels like narcissism though. Argh. Conclusions are the worst.