There's a finite amount of text space in your game.
It's a terrible shame to waste any of it.
Item descriptions are actually one of my favorite things to work on in game writing and narrative design. It's an incredible opportunity to do all sorts of things that you couldn't do in your main story!
Yet, for a lot of projects, this sort of "flavor text" exists just to exist:
Something ought to go here, so here's something.This sums up 95% of mediocre videogame assets. An animation ought to go here – here's something. A texture ought to go here – here's something. Music ought to go here – here's something. A line of dialogue ought to go here – here's something.
THIS IS A GREAT TRAGEDY.
Nothing is just there.
THEME HAPPENS EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME.
Indulge me with a quick thought experiment:
1. How many items are in your game?
(Note: You can include anything else here that has flavor text – level descriptions, enemy descriptions, etc., etc.)
2. How may lines of text can fit in the item description area?
3. How may total lines is that?
4. How does this compare to the number of lines in your main narrative?
(Story dialogue, opening cinematic, etc.?)
That is a huge amount of potential to just throw away.
The truly remarkable thing about item descriptions (and any other bits of flavor text hidden in your menus and buttons and so forth) is that – unlike cut scenes – they are only read by people who want to read them.
That is an incredibly powerful thing right there. Cut scenes (with certain auteur exceptions) are always working a delicate balancing act, trying to say everything that needs to be said and then get out of the way of the next chunk of gameplay. Flavor text doesn't have to worry about this. The only eyes looking at flavor text are eyes that have sought it out and want to see what it has to say.
YET MOST OF THE TIME IT SAYS NOTHING INTERESTING AT ALL.
For some reason, we take this incredible bounty of space and then throw it away on text that just exists to exist.
Some text ought to go here. Here's something.
A tragic amount of flavor text ends up as the narrative equivalent of Lorem Ipsum, often unintentionally, often when we are trying to do the exact opposite.
There are a lot of ways to waste flavor text space, but the two most common are pointless humor and pointless detail.
This is kind of crazy to say, because I absolutely love both humor and detail and use them as much as I can (and probably more than I should). HOWEVER, as anyone who played with power tools as much as I did as a child can tell you:
THERE IS A WRONG WAY TO USE ANYTHING.
One of the first inclinations is to try to insert extra detail about the setting. Every single spaceman game has, at some point, had a plasma gun with a description like this:
Adjuticator KZ97 Assault Rifle
Manufactured by Tychor industries expressly to compete with Gambasec's Mach 9, this high-caliber juggernaut sports a longer barrel for increased accuracy and an expanded combustion chamber of reinforced Aionian alloy. Higher production costs have kept the model from wide adoption, but its high range and penetration have made it a popular choice amongst private sector professionals and privateers.
This… is a lot of words. They do the job of filling up space, but they don't really do much else, other than making me not want to read them. One of the dirty secrets of world building is that people don't actually want detail (even when they say they do!) If I am playing Epic Space Game the game, I already know that rayguns exist and that they are manufactured by companies out of alloys and stuff. I also know that there are assassins and privateers. It's space. Everything is manufactured. This kind of detail just to fill space actually ends up making the world feel smaller: now I know that there was nothing more interesting behind this cool new gun that I got. Whatever ideas I may have been forming as a player are immediately squashed by the big hobnailed boot of uninformative world building detail.
If there is one ironclad rule in writing games, it is this:
WHATEVER EXPLANATIONS YOU GIVE THE PLAYER HAVE TO BE COOLER THAN THE ONES THEY WERE COMING UP WITH IN THEIR HEAD.
If I pick up a new item and start asking questions like, "Where did this thing come from? It seems different than other items. Why does it look this way?" and then the game's narrative slaps me in the face and tells me the answer is "GENERIC CORPORATION 97 MADE IT," then the narrative has just made my experience worse.
Now, the great temptation after running into one of these is to pendulum swing far in the other direction:
Adjuticator KZ97 Assault Rifle
It goes boom. Harder. Farther. ...Boom-ier.
This is much fewer words, which makes people more likely to read it. It also says… basically nothing. I have certainly indulged in this kind of joke before:
However, I've always tried to limit this kind of humor. This can be fine for one or two jokes, but if every item description is like this, players quickly realize that all of the flavor text is just slightly flippant meme material that's chuckle-worthy at best. There is no reason to read them, and we are once again wasting precious text space.
Think of all the emotions that you want players to feel about your world. This is the place to do it. This is the place to evoke emotions that even your main story can't evoke!
Early on, I decided on a rule for myself:
Every item description should make the world feel bigger than what you see in the main story.
I rely on a handful of simple tricks to pull this off:
1. Tell the player something that they don't yet know.
2. Hint at a story outside of the main story.
3. Always leave players wanting to know more.
To illustrate these points, I'm going to grab some items from one of the very first games that I ever wrote for (cue shameless plug) – Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten.
1. Tell me something that I don't yet know. An item description that just reiterates stuff from the main story is, once again, just wasting space – they've already learned this. Instead, drop some little details that tell us something more about a character or culture already in the main story. Want to really get players' imaginations going? Pretend like they should already know about it. You aren't teaching them, you're just offhandedly making a reference to something they haven't learned yet. It drives them wild.
Strength of Wocolan
This green velvet brigandine features large, brightly polished spaulders typical of Quaid heavy infantry.
The gilded crest depicts the Quaid hero Wocolan crushing a bear's head with his hands. Below, his children Wastan and Wacella drink the blood running from the bear's mouth in order to survive the family's grueling march into exile.
(This little piece of mythology is never mentioned anywhere else in the game, and the handful of characters from this culture are pretty tightlipped about such things. This item is one of the only glimpses into the culture's origin story.)
2. Hint at a story outside of the main story. It's entirely too easy to create a world that feels like it exists only as the background to your main story and ends at the edges of the screen. One of the easiest ways to combat this is to create little micro stories about entirely different people and wrap them up in your item descriptions. The best part is that you don't actually need to tell the whole story – just hint that it exists. Nothing gets players believing that your world is this massive, deep, living thing like tiny little glimpses of all the things that they will never get to see.
Glory of War
This exquisite Quaid armor luxuriates in style. Each ring of maille is blued, and the last rows of the
shirt are gilded to create a golden border. The reinforcing plates are ornamented with gilded patterns and prominently display the symbol of the Imperial family. Scratched into the surface of the metal are
the Quaid words ''how late it is to think on these things''. Several more words are scratched around the corners of the plates, but the haste in which they appear to have been written has rendered them illegible.
Gilded Death
This horn-tipped warbow is ornamented with numerous golden rings. The leather grip carries an archaic Quaid inscription: ''Lucawan, you who have murdered honor for tawdry gold, in the gold of this weapon see your death. Its dart shall find you, and your traitorous corpse shall be the plaything of dogs and worms.'' Below, scratched into the surface of the leather are the words ''it has been done.''
3. Always leave players wanting to know more. There is no more powerful force on earth than the fan conjecture. This is the golden rule of everything I ever do. The moment that players don't want to know more is the moment the story dies. A story that doesn't make players want to know more is a story that isn't actually enticing them to keep playing the game – it's just dead weight getting in the way of gameplay. Fortunately, it's really easy to leave players wanting to know more: just don't tell them everything. "We're not entirely sure what the rest of this is" is an incredibly effective item description. Remember, whatever explanations you give the player have to be cooler than the ones they were coming up within their head. So… give them a crumb of an explanation and leave them to come up with the rest. Leave them hungry for more clues – hungry enough to keep playing the game.
The Beast's Weapon
This remarkable staff is carved from a single piece of ivory. What monster could produce a horn of such size is a truly terrifying thought. Ornate carvings down the length of the staff appear to tell the story of some unknown hero. It matches no Ash, Nomad or Quaid motifs, and there are no identifying words, leaving both the identity of the carver and the monster from which the horn originally came a mystery.
(I once read a user review after this game came out that said that they were more interested in the stories hinted at by the items than they were in the main story. I wish that I could take it as a compliment, but I also wrote the main story…)
So, with these rules in mind, let's take a look at that plasma rifle description again:
Adjuticator KZ97 Assault Rifle
Manufactured by Tychor industries expressly to compete with Gambasec's Mach 9, this high-caliber juggernaut sports a longer barrel for increased accuracy and an expanded combustion chamber of reinforced Aionian alloy. Higher production costs have kept the model from wide adoption, but its high range and penetration have made it a popular choice amongst private sector professionals and privateers.
1. This doesn't tell me anything that I don't already know (it's space: there's corporations and high-tech alloys and privateers.)
2. It doesn't really hint at any sort of story outside of the main narrative. (My goodness – corporations compete with each other?!)
3. It really doesn't leave me wanting to know more. (Come on, how about some tasty focus group reports? What's its average star rating on Space Amazon?)
Let's see if we can flip some of those…
We know that this item has higher range and better penetration than other weapons in the game. We know that the setting is full of space-age technologies and big corporations like Tychor and Gambasec. We know that there are privateers and assassins. How can we make the world feel bigger rather than smaller?
1. Tell me something that I don't yet know:
Executive Function
The extended barrel and reinforced expansion chamber of this finely tooled marksman's weapon are both engraved with the fanged mirror runes associated with Tychor Industries' executive cult, suggesting that it was designed for use within the organization's leadership division.
Tychor Industries just went from Generic Space Corporation 97 to WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON AT TYCHOR INDUSTRIES?
2. Hint at a story outside of the main story:
Heavy Traveler
One of millions of military surplus weapons left behind after the failure on Keziah. The rustbelt locals have turned their usual ingenuity towards improving range and penetration with several modifications to barrel and expansion chamber, although the alloy used appears to be extra-planetary in origin. The only hint as to its provenance is a cryptic icon of a worm devouring its own heart branded into the blood-wood stock.
What the heck is/was Keziah? How did they get a bunch of extra-planetary metals? What is that worm about?
3. Leave the player wanting to know more:
Exalted Carbine
This seemingly standard military surplus weapon remains slightly warm to the touch regardless of ambient temperature. Despite remaining mechanically identical to standard models, both accuracy and penetration perform at significantly higher levels. When placed under ultraviolet light, a series of regular, spiraling hatchhmarks can be detected running down the length of the barrel, though translation programs are unable to match it to any established linguistic pattern.
And there you have it! If you want to see some more examples that (mostly) follow these rules, there's bunch more item descriptions from Defender's Quest in my portfolio (and also a bunch of monster descriptions from Stellar Squad HD that break all of the rules I just talked about because I'm just a rebel like that.)
Have fun, and happy writing!
And one more time, for good measure:
1. Tell the player something that they don't yet know.
2. Hint at a story outside of the main story.
3. Always leave players wanting to know more.
Because every item description should make the world feel bigger.
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