Does Not Obey the Laws of Physics

I've read a lot of hot takes on why video game writing sucks. There's the structural issue, the under-qualification issue, the Dunning-Kruger Effect issue, the leadership just doesn't care enough issue, the too many tropes issue...

And despite the many, many perspectives, the focus is always on the craft of the writing and not on the motivation of the writing.

Most major game publishers hire professional writers to do the writing. In terms of actual craft, they actually all pass the muster. They understand the basics of pacing, plot, character, story arc. That's not actually the problem.

The problem is the writers don't have anything to say. A good video game story that really sticks with people isn't necessarily one that has the best crafted writing as much as it has something interesting, a new perspective about the world at large, about the nature of humanity, about a difficult life experience like grief-death-anxiety-depression-exclusion-bigotry-isolation-etc.

In essence, a good piece of writing is something that brings something new to the discussion. That's why despite Dickens writing laboriously long novels because he got paid by the word, his works are still considered classics. That's why Hugo can go on long winding tangents about France's sewage systems and still keep the audience's attention. This is why Austen continues to be the gold standard of romance and scholars still can't agree on if she was feminist or not. These were all writers who had something to say about the world, people, and politics around them. They showed us a truth, held up a mirror for us to look into and go, "Hey, that is how this world works, isn't it? I never thought of it like that."

(I use Western writers as examples, but go ahead and examine your own favorite authors from non-Western cultures and you'll see that their works also had something unique to say about the world around them that you don't find in the less influential works. For example, the Chinese work Romance of the Three Kingdoms has the famous opening line of "分久必合，合久必分" — "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide" being a popular translation — that precisely summarized an interesting pattern of civilization, and then spent the rest of the novel illustrating this point.)

Good writing, regardless if it comes in the form of a novel, a movie, a tv show, a graphic novel, or a video game, always says something interesting. There is a theme and a message that the author(s) wants to convey.

But the problem is that the majority of video games are driven by profit and not by an idea. Usually, no one on the project has anything interesting they want to discuss, and the writer is given a project with no soul. So the writing comes out bland and uninteresting, even if it passes the technical quality checks.

It is not the technical aspects of video game writing that makes it good. It is the theme and the idea that elevates a video game from just a game to something more.

For example: why was a poorly translated FFVII still able to capture the imagination of so many fans that they wrote reams and reams of fanfic? Because even if the fans didn't recognize it, they still responded emotionally to the depth of the story's themes about exploitation, unequal distribution of wealth, the imagined dystopia of a late-capitalist hellscape, the personal struggle of processing grief, and how all of these traumas are intimately entwined because the world is a living, breathing ecosystem and no man is an island.

Sadly, works like FFVII that actually had a point to make are few and far between. There are some video games that try to establish a mood or evoke a feeling, but very few have anything of interest to say about the human condition. (Some other classic video game writing that actually had a point include: Deus Ex, Xenosaga, pretty much any classic Tales of games, FFIV, V, VIII, IX, X, and even XIII, Ico-Shadow of the Colossus-Last Guardian trilogy, Bioshock, etc.) It's not that "hero saves the world" is somehow inherently uninteresting (LOTR would like a word), but rather in many modern video game projects, even the creators themselves can't seem to explain why they wanted to tell this particular story.

So why should the gamers care about the story when the writers can't seem to give two shits? And is it even a surprise that the writing is bland and bad when there's no intent behind that writing?