John Ingold feels that most video game writing is empty at best and stuffy at worst.
Ingold, the creator of well-known story-driven games such as 80 Days and Heaven's Vault, admits his writing tastes are “picky” and is reluctant to name studios. did. But he offhandedly called the text-heavy Disco Elysium, one of the most acclaimed role-playing games of the century, “heavily overwritten and very boring.”
“The opening of the game is 20 minutes of someone explaining breathing,” he said, detailing internal dialogue by an amnesiac detective who wakes up with a hangover. Ingold knows his views are unpopular. Critics praised Disco Elysium's wit and political themes. “This is not the best thing I've ever read, and I can't pretend it is,” he said. “That's fine, but it could be better.”
Ingold said it doesn't help because small game studios rarely employ in-house writers, and writing is often seen as a vague pursuit of genius rather than a studied skill. Ta.
Ingold's style is dialogue-heavy, with short passages that quickly scroll off-screen. However, the range is wide, from the poetic to the farcical. In one of the possible endings of Heaven's Vault, a game of lost languages and archeology, the protagonist Arya says that nothing is permanent. Not fame or fear. What used to be kind becomes a monster, and what was once understood is overturned. ”
For Ingold, writing is about settling. He writes the words on paper and thinks about why it is broken. The branching threads of his story explode outwards and piece by piece weave them together.
“In theater, the way you move on stage creates drama, tension, and flow. It's intentional, it's chosen, and it's partly intuitive, but you can't help but wonder if it really works. I understand,” he said. “And writing allows you to do that. Writing does that. Words allow you to do that. They have momentum and rhythm, but no one talks about this. ”
Ingold lamented that it was difficult for players to find the best video games out there. (He said he had trouble remembering examples, even though he enjoyed them, and then mentioned The Last Express, an adventure game released in 1997.) Is a game's popularity determined by its quality? Ingold said they are often influenced by the whims of the biggest companies. Twitch streamers, or the algorithms that power Steam, the leading distribution platform for computer games. Independent studios are struggling to break through. Many are nearby.
“It's like Steam spins a spinner every month and suddenly a winner comes out,” Ingold said.
“All of a sudden, everyone was playing Palworld,” he continued, referring to the Pokémon-like survival game that briefly became one of the most popular games in the world. “And you don't know why, they don't know why, nobody knows why. A lot of studios say, 'Hurry, we need to copy Palworld,' but the Sometimes it’s too late, because the spinner has spun again.”
After co-founding studio Inkle in Cambridge, England, in 2011, Ingold worked out of a building in his backyard, where the winters were so cold that he had to wear gloves when typing. did. He kept a spreadsheet that calculated how many months the studio could survive.
Currently, Inkle's library generates enough funds to allow Ingold to create only the games that interest him. He has won three Writers Guild Awards for 80 Days for writing video games inspired by Jules Verne's novels. Overboard! And over the Alps.
Ingold's favorite author is Gene Wolfe, whose writing he calls “crisp, clear, and powerful” despite its often nonsensical plots and deep misogyny. But Ingold shares more in spirit with Woolf's contemporary Ursula K. Le Guin.
“She was really trying to prove that science fiction could be literature at a time when most science fiction was crap,” he says. “And it feels a lot like what we do in the game.”
Sam Barlow, who wrote the narrative games Her Story, Telling Lies, and Immortality, found Ingold's writing concise, rich, and evocative.
“There's an extreme literary bent,” Barlow says. “The real respect for the players' intelligence is very rewarding.”
Barlow said that while most choice-based games offer smoke and mirrors, Ingold is building a world that responds to the way players express themselves, adding, “What he's doing is much more… It's ambitious,” he said.
Ingold's writing process is influenced by his academic past. He studied mathematics at Cambridge University and taught mathematics at a north London school for five years before taking his first job in the games industry at a subsidiary of Sony, where he met Joseph Humphrey, co-founder of Inkle.
Ingold defines his writing as “top-down, bottom-up,” similar to a mathematical proof. At the top is a sense of what he is trying to achieve – an interesting conversation or the development of relationships, and at the bottom – words and phrases to get him there. As proof of that, he said: “These two things come together and meet in the middle in a messy way, and then you can solve the problem where they meet.”
Finding a top-down purpose for a story sounds somewhat mystical, but Ingold said his job is to find the “truth” that exists among disparate ideas that are “stuck together.”
In Heaven's Vault, those ideas include translation mechanisms, robots, and a setting inspired by the book “Citadels of Mystery” found in the Jesus College library. The game became about the experiences of people from poor backgrounds in university environments and how knowledge helps construct and enforce social inequalities.
For Pendragon, an Arthurian turn-based strategy game, Ingold struggled to understand why he was writing it until Brexit came along. “I was like, 'Oh, yeah, now I get it,'” he said. “It was because someone was taking what I thought was Britishness and trying to turn it into something much, much worse. And I was angry about that.”
Ingold said he doesn't mind if his message is missed because the underlying truth should make the game more satisfying. But he seems concerned that the narrative complexity of Inkle's games could disrupt moment-to-moment storytelling.
Heaven's Vault allows players to explore locations in any order. Ingold needed to ensure that Arya's relationship with her robot sidekick Six evolved in real time, regardless of order. The branching system is so complicated that even Ingold doesn't know what Arya will say next. Ingold said it's a smart solution, but he's concerned it will seem forced.
“I feel like a lot of the work I'm writing isn't very polished and smooth,” he said, adding, “I hope it's interesting and engaging.”
Ingold wrote 80 Days with Meghna Jayanth and called him a systems designer with the soul of a writer. “It's the dissatisfaction that drives his ambition,” she says.
Jayanth said that while she always tries to be kind to players, Ingold sets traps and challenges. “He taught me the importance of lying in games,” she said. “I think he's a bit of a sadist as a designer.”
Inkle recently released “A Highland Song,” about a teenager's journey through the Scottish Highlands, and collaborated with Google on “The Forever Labyrinth,” a browser-based game featuring historic artwork. I did.
Next up is Miss Mulligatawny's Promising Girls' School, which Ingold said will likely have a more descriptive name by the time it opens this year. Its origins lie in a conversation Ingold had with her aunt about her school days in the 1940s, specifically about one of her teachers.
“It got me thinking about how stories portray teenagers and young adults in the past. They're always polarizing,” he says. “Victims and innocent people, arbitrary bathtub bangers, working class money. But real young people are always dirty.”
Ingold described the game as a “mysterious” clock-up machine. Eleven characters move through a confined space with their own detailed routines, knowledge, and assumptions.
He tried different narrative approaches over the years until he cracked the code by separating what the characters believed to be true from what actually was. How the player interacts with the story changes assumptions and can throw the diorama off course.
While the industry favors Fortnite-like experiences that can be played forever and monetized, Ingold said there are no grand plans to revolutionize gaming.
“The only way to make a difference is to just make something,” he said, adding, “If it happens to pop up and get attention, maybe it will change the way people feel.”
