A Video Game Writer’s Lament: ‘We Can Do Quite a Lot Better’
Jon Ingold, an author of celebrated narrative-driven games, thinks the industry fails to celebrate good writing or recognize it as a craft.
Ingold, an author of celebrated narrative-driven games including 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, acknowledged that his writing tastes were “fussy” and was reluctant to single out studios. But he was comfortable calling the text-heavy Disco Elysium, one of the century’s most acclaimed role-playing games, “massively overwritten and really tedious.”
“The game’s opening is 20 minutes of someone describing breathing,” he said, recounting the internal dialogue by an amnesiac detective who wakes up with a hangover. Ingold knows his opinion is not popular; critics praised Disco Elysium for its wit and political themes. “It is not the best thing I’ve ever read, and I’m not going to be able to pretend that it is,” he said. “It’s fine, but we can do quite a lot better.”
It does not help, Ingold said, that smaller game studios rarely employ in-house writers, and that writing is often seen as the nebulous pursuit of geniuses rather than as a craft to be studied.
