Max, Pain In My Ears

While we've all been sniping a bit lately about writing about games (nice tie-in with Justin's recent shooting post, that "sniping" bit, isn't it?) I thought we could perhaps start a discussion cooking on writing in games. And to that end, I begin with the venerable Max Payne.

When the first title in the franchise was released, besides getting all round good notices, many of those reviews complimented -- if not outright lauded -- the game's film noir dialog style. And the reviewers weren't kidding and I don't believe they were commenting on camp or mimicry, either. Flat out, it seems a lot of people were impressed by Max Payne's dialog as it fitted the storyline. Well, no. It was awful. Graphical achievements, wonderful attention to detail in textures and overall atmosphere, and innovative gameplay, all of that aside, the dialog in Max Payne was egregious. (You might put it off to Remedy being Finnish and not getting the whole noir renaissance, but the script was vetted stateside.) It wasn't worth even the sort of floor-rolling hysterics brought on by Edward G. Robinson's turn as Dathan in DeMille's Technicolor classic The Ten Commandments.

And again pointed at the sequel to Max Payne, similar comments about the dialog style following along the lines of its predecessor and what a goodish thing that is. Now I think Rockstar Games can handle the criticism, as they certainly are getting enough of it these days -- yes, I know the original PC title was published by Gathering, sister label to Rockstar; I worked there at the time and that's how I know the script got a working over in the US -- as they are stellar performers in the arena of sandbox games. Some may balk at my description of top-tier Rockstar titles as "sandbox", as we tend to think of Zoo Tycoon, Airport Tycoon and Emotional Roller-Coaster Tycoon*, but, for example, the GTA franchise is at heart a sandbox series. Sure, there are missions and something of a plot, but you can do whatever you want to a great degree, and also to great degree you are encouraged to do just that: whatever you want; to tinker; to drive aimlessly; to rob and beat at whim; to carjack and what have you; all to no specific point other than perhaps seeing just how fast you can get the military called out to stop you. Now that's a sandbox game.

This is not to say that the Max Payne franchise doesn't produce good games. It does, by any reasonable standard, though some gamers are more fond of these titles than others. But as we hear more and more about the convergence of film and interactive entertainment, I'm wishing -- nay, begging -- some existing screenwriting talent to converge on the gaming industry. Max Payne is not alone in possessing really bad writing; indeed, I'd say it's only a single well-known and eminently profitable example of otherwise well designed games that are, and I'll be nice here, written like shit.

It's not impossible to write a captivating screenplay for a game. Square, who, of course, makes games, also made the film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Granted, an American screenwriter wrote the script, a man with some industry experience on other projects, including a co-writing credit for Ron Howard's acclaimed Apollo 13. But Square wrote the story; indeed the man who wrote the story and directed the film produced a number of the Final Fantasy games. Now, best I recall, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within did not win an Oscar for best film or screenplay, not even nominated in those categories. Yet the film did get some passable reviews, was not thoroughly panned, and served alright as a decent spin at popular action moviemaking. It was no Moonlight Mile but did hold together for what it was: game studios can write passable screenplays. QED. So why don't they?

Some would argue that storyline in games is secondary, even tertiary, to gameplay: not in a story-driven title, though. Studios are not bound to create story-driven games as the medium supports a host of other formats; but if you're going to do it, you may as well do it right. And game studios en masse are not doing it right, yet still garnering outstanding reviews for titles replete with dialog that I don't think my cat could listen to for very long. This leads me to believe that gamers as a bunch -- and we all know that the gaming demographic is now broad and wide, no longer limited to the fourteen-year-old shut-in with permanent thumbstick calluses -- don't have particularly high expectations of games in the area of plot execution. That's lamentable. Stable plot and execution -- and good goddamned writing -- is the next hurdle in game development. Gamers: demand some meat on those bones. Studios: recruit from the ranks of talented writers and leave your level designers and office managers to their respective jobs.

*The phrase Emotional Roller-Coaster Tycoon is copyright by me, Sanford May, and generally being a non-litigious individual opposed to all manner of intellectual property lawsuits, I will still sue all hell out of you if you use that phrase without attribution, or were it to turn up in a novel or screenplay you wrote. So there.

Comments

[Scott Miller]

With Max 2 we tried to bring in an experienced Hollywood writer to help lead writer Sam Lake with some of the plotting and dialog, but, much to our dismay, this effort was summarily quashed by Rockstar's execs.

Had we not sold the franchise to Rockstar a year earlier, thus losing ultimate control of the game's quality, we would have taken the extra time (maybe six weeks) to improve much of the writing. But, Rockstar made the final call and told us not to let an outside writer interfere with the game's script.

My only guess is that they made this decision to avoid the game coming out later than its planned Oct. release. Oftentimes with publishers, the release date is everything. Quality be damned.

[san]

Well, talk about convergence of filmed and interactive entertainment: the creative team wants to improve the art and the studio just wants it released. Scott put that well enough; the game industry is suffering from the same dearth of quality consciousness at management level that other creative mediums struggle with.

This begs the question, When do you bring in the niche experts? I say, in light of Scott's experience, early on, the minute after the specification is written, before that even. To carry non-gaming talent into the creative process, the only solution may be to make that talent part of the package at the initial pitch. Get all the players and contributors signed into the contract before the publisher can start capping efforts to expand the creative team to improve the product. Of course, in this case, that might have meant bringing in a screenwriter on Max 1, before the game was a bona fide hit, before it could attract, and afford, talent from other mediums.

[Ken]

I find that the general opinion in the industry is that words really don't matter. Dialogue and in-game text is written by game designers and rarely proofread or researched before being put into the game. One more than a few occasions I've heard from producers or developers that they "aren't interested" in text bugs. As long as there are few enough mistakes that the game passes standards checks, it's fine by them.

And this is just spelling and grammar, let alone quality writing. Not to get to fogeyesque, but there was a time when writing did matter in games. Some used to actually come with novellas, or, for that matter, were composed entirely of text. Though we've come so far since that time in terms of graphics, writing has really taken a turn for the worse.

However, I think one recent example of really good writing is the GTA franchise, specifically the radio stations. That is some funny shit.

[BrainFromArous]

Not to mention "Taxi Drivers Must Die," in GTA2 - the best video game song ever.

[Bowler]

I really enjoyed (mostly) the dialog in Max Payne (the first). I thought it was intentionally overly gritty.

What I really would have liked to have seen changed were the constipated facial expressions of the guy (designer?) who played Payne. And the broken wrists. Always the gun-toting broken wrists. Even when not gun-toting.

[eli]

"I find that the general opinion in the industry is that words really don't matter."

Sounds just like the movie industry! Perhaps the gaming industry would serve themselves better by NOT getting involved with Hollywood, after all it is Hollywood that brought us movies like Demolition Man and Die Hard with their wonderful dialogue. It seems like most of the GOOD movie dialogue is from independent screenplay writers working out of their respective homes.

[pajamo]

Aw, come one people! I LOVED playing MP2. And a big reason was the dialogue.

I thought the over-the-top "noir on speed" approch was sweet. And it's also the reason I've been toying around with the idea of writing a game. What better compliment can I give than to say that I found myself inspired.

I play MP2 straight thru. Thne I bought the GBA title and loved the cheesy dialogue in it. I will admit though that I have since bought the original MP for xbox and it's not as good.

For me the importance of good writing isn't just dialogue it's the situations the charactes find themselves in.

I loved the story in Beyond Good & Evil. They had characters I actually cared about. Whao.

Now, I really like final Fantasy X but the writing felt hampered by translating Japanese to English.

[pajamo]

Aw, come one people! I LOVED playing MP2. And a big reason was the dialogue.

I thought the over-the-top "noir on speed" approch was sweet. And it's also the reason I've been toying around with the idea of writing a game. What better compliment can I give than to say that I found myself inspired.

I played MP2 straight thru. Then I bought the GBA title and loved the cheesy dialogue in it. I will admit though that I have since bought the original MP for xbox and it's not as good.

For me the importance of good writing isn't just dialogue it's the situations the charactes find themselves in.

I loved the story in Beyond Good & Evil. They had characters I actually cared about. Whao.

Now, I really like final Fantasy X but the writing felt hampered by translating Japanese to English.

[Robert L. Hoover]

I appreciated the dialogue in Max Payne. But I think there is a distinction to be made: dialogue is a part of writing. It does not compose all of the writing process, such as in C++, it would be a derived class "Dialogue" of the class "Writing"... Sorry, the programmer inside of me emerges...

Anyway, part of writing involves carving out the background story, as well as (attempting) to get the player (or viewer, in the case of a movie) emotionally involved, among other things. We need to move forward in the whole context of writing, dialogue and all, which is what games suffer from at the moment. Has anyone ever read "Creating Emotion in Games" by David Freeman? I think a better question to be asked would be, "Was anyone emotionally drawn into the story for Max Payne and Max Payne 2?"

Just my two cents.

[Scott Frazier]

Eli,

To get totaly off of the subject of things, you mention the movie Die Hard as being a terrible "Hollywood" movie. Fact of the matter is, the script for the original Die Hard movie is quite possibly one of the tightest movie scripts ever written. There is not a single piece of misplaced dialogue or exposition, every character is pitch perfect and the structure is nearly flawless.

That is, unless of course you were referring to Die Hard 2... In which case, yeah... That's some pretty bad writing.

[Andrew]

Interesting point. Even the Metal Gear series, which is lauded for its storytelling, is filled with cliche-ridden and over-melodramatic dialogue, and the story pacing is kind of off too.

[plaidchocobo]

Dialogue is obviously not an easy thing to master. Even professionals stumble, and often. Think of any genre fiction you've watched/read recently. I'm willing to bet that there was at least one line that made you wince. The balance between exposition and character development is tricky, and aparently subjective (see Die Hard debate above).

Professionals are a step in the righ direction, but I don't expect it to fix the dialogue problem as a whole. It will only scrape those bottom-level games (like Resident Evil *shudder*) up off the floor.

[plaidchocobo]

Dialogue is obviously not an easy thing to master. Even professionals stumble, and often. Think of any genre fiction you've watched/read recently. I'm willing to bet that there was at least one line that made you wince. The balance between exposition and character development is tricky, and aparently subjective (see Die Hard debate above).

Professionals are a step in the righ direction, but I don't expect it to fix the dialogue problem as a whole. It will only scrape those bottom-level games (like Resident Evil *shudder*) up off the floor.

[Mike Drucker]

I enjoyed Max Payne's little narrated interludes because of their cheesiness. I mean, I thought that's what they were going for was a really, really, really cheesy 70s film quality. I mean, c'mon, the scene in the game where the guy's chanting the names of gods and he mentions Cthulu? That had to be intentionally bad.

Writing in games is not always bad, though. Or is it always so obvious.

Look at a game like Eternal Darkness. Okay, maybe the concept of the game was completely lifted from Lovecraft, but the game was genuinely interesting with well written dialouge and characters that weren't just stereotypes of their eras. They popped, if you will.

Other games like StarCraft and WarCraft have witty writing both inside the story and just for the characters' speech.

Heck, Beyond Good & Evil is also pretty well written, if not a tad heavy-handed. And it was written by the main game designer.

I think the issue is realizing that a game script and a movie script should be different. My main problem with Metal Gear Solid 2 was that I played the game for fifteen minutes and then watched fifteen minutes of talking. A game should have a good story, I'll grant that. But at the same time, the story should be used to make the game, not the other way around.

Ah, well. Just thought I'd add a little somethin'.

[BrainFromArous]

I thought the running monologue in Max Payne 1 was a great send-up of film noir and hardboiled detective tales... until I realized it wasn't a joke.

Then it hit me, hit me (as Max would say) like a truck full of memories speeding down streets of my mind. No escape, except the grave. The grave was where I'd left my last partner, a happy-go-lucky kid who didn't know the price this cruel and hungry city takes from those who dare to smile in the rain. I can still hear the gunshots, and the screams. And that song playing on the radio - the extended dance mix, actually. Pretty funky, now that I think about it. Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, the grave. I pulled my coat tighter against the cold, invading hands of the night air and walked back to the toystore. All alone, of course. Maybe this time, I would be lucky and they'd have that Admiral Ackbar figure. Maybe.

But it didn't look good.

[Sal M]

Surprisingly for me, Fire Emblem for the GBA kept me going for the twists in the story pretty well. In game cutscenes were nicely done, and spun a good (if slightly hackneyed) tale of political intrigue, while the ability to go through subplots based on what characters you chose to keep near each other for support opportunities added an extra little element to the general strategizing during combat.

[pajamo]

Has anyone played Duex Ex: Invisible War yet?

I just started played it on my xbox. I got it specifically for the story and characters which I heard was pretty engaging.

I'm only about 2 hours into it but I gotta say that it's a little hard to get into BECAUSE unlike Max Payne 2 the player isn't being sent down a clear path. I can agree with folks who don't get into the humor of Max Payne's "inner monologues" and hence feel the game is basically stoppping every few minutes to let the player shoot some baddies but since I AM lovin' the cheesy dialogue I look forward to 'em. It's akin to the old intermissions on Pac-Man.

But back to Invisible War...
It's structurally a lot like Knights of the Old Republic. Sad to say, I never finished that game. THe world was great and I'm a big star wars fan but I hated all the side quests that had to be done. And I'm kinda feeling the same way with IW.

Anyone else feel like this?

No? Then I'll get back to Invisible War...

[Iain]

Personally I enjoyed MP2, and especially enjoyed what was for me an awkward tension between what appeared to be genuine pushes towards more adult (as distinct from just more explicit) content and a clumsy style of adolescent noir dialogue. In my time I have been known to enjoy self-aware clumsy adolescent noir dialogue, but it seemed this was without intention. Coming from the developers of Duke Nukem, I think my assumption was that irony was going to be served liberally with the title.

For me, this issue of dialogue is best highlighted by the emergence of machinima, and in particular work like RedvsBlue. The fact that this simple conceit works so well and can be so funny illustrates just how deeply ingrained the conventions that developers such as 3dRealms are having to work against actually are. I wonder if the development of this kind of work is going to influence developers, or more importantly the studios?

The MP franchise hints at some really interesting potentials for me, it's both heartening and encouraging to play something like it - but excrutiating to see not developed to its best realisation.

[eli]

"Fact of the matter is, the script for the original Die Hard movie is quite possibly one of the tightest movie scripts ever written."

You're right, Die Hard was pretty awesome, and yes I was thinking of Die Hard 2 (the one at the airport). I picked those examples because they keep playing them over and over again on TBS... But now they've moved on to the film about super-smart sharks.

[deadguy]

At the risk of sounding cranky...

...there is a tremendous tendency within the gaming community to confuse lots of writing or visible writing with good writing. The writing in Max Payne is up front and in you face, in big comic book letters on the screen. Whether that's good writing or not is irrelevant; it's there, it's noticeable, and as such it gets talked about. Ditto for dialogue. There are plenty of well-written games that are written subtly, and as such don't get the attention that showier ones do.

There are a lot of reasons writing in games isn't always up to snuff. Part of it is the general disregard in which developers hold the craft of writing. Let's face it, everyone thinks they can write, and they don't need to hire a writer because the designer/the artist with some free time/the producer's boyfriend who ran a kickass Rolemaster campaign back in college can do it. At this point, games are professional products and demand professional game writers. I cringe when people look to Hollywood for our writing saviors, and do so for several reasons. First of all, there is plenty of writing talent in the industry. It's just not being recognized or appreciated, and frankly it's ridiculous to pay more for a Hollywood pedigree when you're not willing to pay for the good stuff that's in your backyard. Second, anyone who's been to the movies knows that Hollywood writing isn't automatically equal to good writing. And finally, games are a different medium, period. The tricks that work for movies might work in some cases, but in games we're trying for something very different. Harlan Ellison made ominous reference to what happened when he tried to bring "real" science fiction writers in to do Star Trek scripts - the results were generally dire. Why? Because TV was a different medium than fiction, and what works in one doesn't automatically work in the other. We've already seen some of this in collaborations between Hollywood and games; I'm sure we'll see more.

[misuba]

If they did make a game where all the dialogue was supposed to be an ironic piss take on gaming dialogue, how would we be able to tell?

[caninusrule]

I think most the narrative in games is horrible, and it's unfortunately most noticeable in RPGs because they tend to make a showcase of the story every bit as much as the battle mechanics or inventory system. As an adult, I can't remember the last Japanese rpg I played that didn't make me cringe or hope someone didn't walk into the room as a "scene" was being played out. And that's not to rescue Western developers. When they are creating a RPG, the fantasy fiction cliches come at a fast and furious pace, though it's interesting that something like KOTOR could manage to be more entertaining narratively than the recent movies the license is based on.

I think the primary problem is that gamers haven't created any demand for more serious or interesting plot devices no matter how their age increases. Their more than happy to make the latest FF outing a huge seller as long as the graphics improve, and Zelda WW can win countless GOTY awards by not even using voice acting and staying with a children's cartoon motif as long as the gameplay is good. Look at how Beyond Good & Evil has sold, all it's kudos for story aside.

The ugly truth about gaming, even with so-called "hardcore" gamers, is that we crave the familiar and hence the franchise or remake. Since grand narratives have never been part of the genres history, we generally don't require one to feel an emotional reaction to a favorite game played out in tired tropes again.

And also, many older gamers I know still don't read that much. Many like film, but simply read the same sort of predictable plots in fantasy novels they've always enjoyed. There's even an older audience constantly growing for a lot of video-game like anime.

It's too bad though, I know there's a lot of talented writers out there looking for work or outlets for their vision and a venue with the gaming industry might someday be more feasible.

[caninusrule]

...and not to pile on, but I thought MP2 was horrible. The first I took not too seriously, and felt like a B movie with the dialogue, slow-motion action and constant shoot-em up scenes. The second added a better physics engine and nothing else. Hence it was really, really boring.

I thought R* made put out some good games this year (midnight club 2, manhunt, GTA DP) but that wasn't one of them.

[amar]

glad to see someone addressing the issue of horrible dialog in games. metal gear struck me as particularly egregious given that i read so many reviews where people *praised* the writing. were they on crack?! this is why it's hard for me to take the stories in most rpgs/adventure games seriously (especially those, like final fantasy, where the dialog is translated from the japanese).

[Chris Burke]

One of us (either me, or Sanford) didn't "get" Max Payne.

I loved the dialogue in Max Payne because it captured the idioms of noir pulp. Sure you can make great art out of noir but much of it is pulp - meaning cheap work printed on cheap paper to satisfy the reading habits of a well-established repeat audience.

No, Max Payne wasn't The Maltese Falcon - it wasn't trying to be. Good is good enough, and I think Remedy got it just right.

I loved it so much, I wrote my entire review for Mindless Games in the same pulp noir style. If anyone had criticised my writing in that review as terrible (nobody did), I'd laugh and suggest to them that they should take a Valkyr chill pill and try to "get it". I hope the writer on Max Payne does the same, in this case.