First, Samuel, I don't think "inexperienced" is the issue so much as untaught.
Well said, though I still feel experience and having gotten it wrong helps you see where all the strings are attached. You do make a point, though, and I think City of Heroes' Doc Aoen era content shows precisely this problem of being untaught, or rather unguided. I don't think the Doc was a bad writer, but I do think he had very little experience in how his stories affect his audience, and because of Matt Miller's policy of "let the writers write whatever they want," nobody was there to reality-check his writing. Nobody butted into his job to ask "Are you sure this is a good idea?" or ask "OK, why are you going down this way?" Nobody made him think about what he's doing and ask the hard questions, nobody told him his baby was ugly. And I'm not saying his baby IS ugly, but that being told so is valuable. It forces you to defend your baby, and it forces you to fix your baby.
I myself have been writing for many years now, and I can tell you one thing for a fact - nothing, but NOTHING, is as valuable as a person who's read your story and wants discuss it with you. Nothing as valuable as a person who gives you feedback on both the good and the bad. This sort of guidance is what experience is born from, because it teaches a writer what he can and can't do, how he can do what he can do better and how he can avoid doing what he can't do more covertly. I, for instance, can't write love scenes to save my life. Just can't, I'm shit at it. The very few times I've painted myself in a corner of having to write one, I've found outs to skim over it, because I'm trash at the things. Fair's fair.
I really do feel the studio needed an editor, by which I mean a person whose sole job was to read what the writers have written and then speak with them about it. This includes fixing basic errors like leftover HTML tags, "diffusing bombs," the department of redundancy department, etc. It would, however, also include checking the writers for continuity, theme and basic skill and making them think about what they're doing. Aeon, for instance, had the consistent tendency to write in vague terms. Remember my rant about Roy Cooling's "tech" that's referred to as a chip once and a circuit board another time? How it can't be copied except when it can? A write is his own worst editor.
So in my opinion, video game producers apparently commission "darker and edgier" content in the (correct) belief that such material sells, but have no understanding of theme at all. From a writing perspective, that's brass-ackwards. Until they take storytelling seriously, they will continue to produce beautiful, grim, emotionally effective but thematically pointless gaming experiences that, as Damon Knight put it in Creating Short Fiction, end not with "The End," but with "So What?"
Funny you should mention that. One of my favourite games of all time is THQ's Darksiders (the first one) because it's almost singularly based around theme before it's based around plot, setting or characters. Yeah, the theme is a bit derivative - WoW meets Wahammer 40K - but it's still omnipresent in every single part of the game, from the art style to the voice cast to the gameplay to the story. If you happen to like that theme - and I do - there are few games as good for it, and it ends in precisely the opposite of "so what."
To go back on my word, I don't really find "And they all lived happily ever after!" endings to be very satisfying because I'm basically being told "We're done, everyone's happy." Darksiders has the sort of "I want more!" ending that really works for me, because it's a cliffhanger ending without being a cliffhanger ending. It's the sort of awesomeness that makes me, at least, stand up and cheer and feel everything that's taken part in the game has been worth it... But man would I want to see a sequel because what's being suggested is just awesome! It's satisfying in the sense that everything in the game has been wrapped up, and it's exciting because it leaves the door open for a new story.
Shaman King had a similar ending. The evil shaman has been defeated, the world is saved and everyone's sort of going back to their normal lives. You're almost sad to see these characters fade into the background and... Well, "grow up." BUT THEN! Their manacles flare back up and they are all summoned again! New adventure awaits! New foes to battle, new friends to make and new discoveries to make! And that's how the show ends, and it's awesome. We've seen the story we were following through to its end, but we're reminded that more stories will be told, just as more stories have been told already. This isn't THE end, it's just a very good place to stop.
To turn this back around to City of Heroes, I was actually really happy with the original theme the game started out with, which is "You are a hero, you do the right thing and you should feel proud of yourself for doing it!" Yes, it's a bit simplistic and childish, but so what? It works. It makes me feel happy to be part of it and it keeps me engaged. Villains took it up the ass with Launch content because their theme was more along the lines of "You are a horrible person and you should be ashamed of yourself1" That sucked. It sapped all the fun out of the game because it was actively making me regret playing it. That was its theme. However, it hit its stride with Dean McArthur and his "You're a big bad villain and you don't take shit from nobody! Go show the world how awesome you are!" Yeah, it's childish in just the same way as the hero version, but again - it put a smile on my face and it made me fist-pump to myself, and that's a win in my book.
It wasn't until Aeon's "darkity" storytelling that I started feeling like shit again because that seemed to be his aim - make the story deep via emotional manipulation. Show a dog getting shot and we'll react because that's disturbing, but that's not a theme, it's just a story element... After story element after story element. I'll always remember a quote from
Bennett the Sage's review of Grave of the Fireflies: "We're not sad that Sata and Setsuko are suffering, we're sad because we're watching kids die." That's precisely my problem with SSA1 in its entirety, and with much of modern gaming's "edge" these days. We're not sad on an emotional level from sharing in the pain of characters we care about, we're sad on an instinctive level because we're being shown depressing imagery. And you need look no further than Tomb Raider's ad campaign which tried to disturb us not by making us sympathise with Lara and wanting to see her survive against nasty odds, but by watching a young woman stabbed, crucified, nearly drowned and nearly getting raped.
Far too many game writers these days ignore having a theme of their own for the sake of beating us over the head with a specific mood they want to exude, completely forgetting that THAT specific mood is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. Whether that end be fun or emotional impact or just telling a story with a unique angle, "angst" and "drama" are tools to achieving it and nothing more. To linger on them to the detrement of the story's theme is to shoot yourself in the foot. I think Jim Sterling said it well in his
Crying Through the Laughs video. Yes, his main point is that you need levity in order for drama to be effective, but the deeper point is that both levity and drama work together to a greater end result than just wallowing in base emotions.
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Here's where I get a tad controversial, but to me the angsty games of today are no better than porn, say something like Sexy Beach Zero (I can't share it, please don't ask), in that... Well, porn may masquerade as a movie or a game, but that's not the point of it. Let's be "decent" and say it's about "sex." It may dress itself up in different settings, give itself different themes and even try to tell a story, but all of it is just window dressing to provide variety for the sex. It's not trying to be a story. Angsty games are very similar, in that they pretend to have a plot, a story and a theme, but simply use those as a backdrop for the mood they're trying to convey. They don't expect you to seek them out for the storytelling, they expect you to seek them out because they're going to show you emotionally draining imagery in much the same way that you go to a porn because it's going to show you titties.
I'm not saying that every sad story is "like porn," of course not. I'm merely suggesting that games which overfoucs on being darker and edgier are targeting a similar base emotion to that of porn, which is something we want to see even if it ruins the story it's presented in. And that's my key problem with the course of storytelling in gaming - this need to be darker and edgier is ruining otherwise good stories.
