Shutting Up

I just got around to listening to the 12/27 episode of Active Time Babble, in which Jeremy Parish advised RPGs to "shut up," i.e. stop forcing players to wade through so much text and/or dialog to get to the action. As someone who wants to see games continue to get smarter, that's the kind of statement that would usually incite my wrath, but Parish is one of the smartest people in games journalism, so I decided to treat his remarks with rational consideration rather than blind rage.

When I first became aware of the term RPG in the 16-bit era, there were three things that you could count on from the genre: some form of stat and equipment management, and the most intricate (if not always the best) stories. In general, that did mean lots of text, but that was alright, because it was new. All the talking could get tiresome in a game where the writing wasn't up to par, but in general it not only worked, but had the added bonus of making the games feel more evolved than most of their peers.

Things have changed, though. Advances in graphical technology have more or less necessitated that all games have stories (imagine a game that looked like Uncharted 2 but boasted a Bosconian-level of narrative complexity), and allowed for those stories to be relatively sophisticated. RPGs have dealt with the competition not by having better stories, but by having more story. Twenty years after the genre's 16-bit glory days, we're still playing as the rag tag band of heroes out to save the world from our evil dads. A genre that once felt like a great leap forward now all too often feels like a black hole of creativity.

So shutting up could be a good thing, albeit with certain conditions. For example, excising story entirely from RPGs would almost certainly be a financial disaster. It's probably a safe bet that the majority of people who play RPGs would reject a game that offered nothing but stat management and dungeon crawling totally divorced from narrative context. But as games like Shadow of the Colossus and Limbo have shown, narrative and wordiness are hardly the same thing. It is possible to scale back a script's word count without sacrificing plot and character development. It may be a risky strategy, but the rewards could be immense.

Of course that would require game publishers and developers to be concerned with advancement, when so many seem content to tread water. But for those of us who want to see progress in the RPG genre, "shut up" might not be such a bad battle cry after all.