There’s discourse rumblings brewing elsewhere about video game dialogue, and I’m not interested in stoking the flames, so I’m weighing in here. This is all probably fairly obvious, but I’m seeing some takes that have lost the plot, so it can’t hurt to just say it.
Maybe I’m just tired these days, or maybe I’ve had to evaluate so many different types of writing in games, but for me right now the biggest question for commercial games isn’t whether dialogue is “bad” (a broad, non-evaluative, unhelpful term). Instead it’s: what expectations are established for the audience, given genre, IP, visuals, and a million other things that go into painting a picture? And then: does it succeed at those?
This is a bit of a chicken or egg issue; writing contributes to those genre expectations. But there are limitations—no one expects the elliptical allusive prose of Pathologic when they boot up Overwatch. (Sidenote: I would love to play Pathologic-styled Overwatch. But I do not drive market share decisions.) The question then is about figuring out what the holistic experience asks for, and then delivering it to the best of one’s ability.
I don’t know that my work on League of Legends is a career-high for my writing craft specifically. But the audience for Spirit Bonds is not the same as for 999 or Umineko or Doki Doki Literature Club or Amarantus or a million other things I could name. Did we execute on something both unexpected for players but within the genre that players expected when booting up the client? I’d like to think we did. A Legendary script doesn’t need to be Paradise Lost, but someone hearing Yasuo essentially go “it’s okay to go to therapy” when they’re playing their fourth straight losing match has a value.
Reactions of “yeah, this doesn’t hit for me” seem more grounded than “this sucks and is cringe”. The criticism of “too much media takes a flippant and detached tone, and I am burned out on it/never liked it” has (imo) utility; one can do something with that. But I do think asking “what is this game trying to do, what are the market forces bringing that attempt to bear, and does the game succeed at its stated aim” is much more likely to produce something—thoughts or work or whatever—more generative.