\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\npeople seem to enjoy watching charismatic actors playing emotionally resonant characters in a lovingly rendered setting with a consistent and unique aesthetic where the plot is merely a rough scaffolding that makes no real sense
Which is funny, because plot is at least theoretically the cheapest aspect (in some cases it can be done by one person working alone with no special equipment!), and therefore the one it makes the least sense to cut corners on.
\nBut I suppose movies and tv involve a lot of editing, re-takes, doing things out of order for various pragmatic reasons, cutting things out for time or because they didn\u2019t look good onscreen, and with all that maybe it\u2019s not surprising that plot falls by the wayside, because plot is about the gestalt and not about any individual scene.
\nPlus, it\u2019s easy enough to suspend your disbelief until it\u2019s over\u2013if you\u2019re immersed, you probably won\u2019t worry too much about what seems like minor inconsistencies or whatever, because you\u2019re trusting that by the end it\u2019ll all hang together.\u00a0 And when you get to the end, well, you may have forgotten or at least no be longer thinking about various quibbles!\u00a0 So it\u2019s entirely possible to watch a movie, enjoy it, come out of it thinking \u201cgosh that was great, very emotionally satisfying\u201d, and only later go \u201cwait, actually what happened there\u201d\u2026 especially if you rewatch it.
\nthat\u2019s just it! you would think that good writing would be prized, considering it\u2019s so cheap relative to a single visual effects shot, but in practice you would rather sacrifice it in favour of literally any other aspect of the production.
\n\u201cit looked terrible and the acting was wooden and the actors unappealing but gosh that plot was fantastic, 10/10\u201d just isn\u2019t a common review summary
\nA lot of this just has to do with the structure of filmmaking by which the director is the boss (though accountable to studio funders/moneyman producers)
\nadjust to the other factors - actors and sets have already been paid for and film has already been shot, actors might be tied to production or promotions deals, but scripts can be rewritten easy separate from all of that, on the fly, even a new writer (this was how Joss Whedon really made his name)
\nIn TV this is different writing has higher priority, some structural reasons relating to time pressure \u2013 you NEED to deliver a coherent time block by this deadline, every week, but the sets and actors are paid for for the season, at least the first 13/22s of it
\nA lot of the \u201cGolden Age\u201d of \u201cPeak TV\u201d has to do with the formation of writers rooms\u2019 and the rise of the showrunner - the head writer who runs the whole production, has approval over casting, writing, directors - in the early \u201880s
\nBefore TV tended to be more like standup comedy or magazines - you might have a core group of staff writers pitching ideas and guiding episodes but they solicited a lot of outside writers to submit stuff, or took pitches on spec, which is why a lot of old shows kind of play like commedia dell\u2019arte, with the characters representing broad types with trademark quirks that any writer can pick up and run with
\nThen in the \u201880s you started to get more funding for staff, which let you bring on more writers and have them spend more time rewriting what outside stuff you had. That\u2019s when shows started to get more distinct - Miami Vice was an obvious example but that was more in the way the action played to the visuals; that had something to do with writer-showrunner Michael Mann being one of the first-generation film school graduates coming out of the \u201870s, who\u2019d been trained on the field as a tradition to innovate with. This is also how you get the densely knit comedy of early Simpsons, with money into writing
\nThat was well-funded network shows at least, first-run syndicated shows \u2013 ones that weren\u2019t run on a network but directly took bids from broadcast stations in each market \u2013 tended to be lower-funded genre pulp stuff. But even there there were standouts in the \u201890s, Xena, Babylon 5, even Star Trek: The Next Generation were syndicated
\nThe Star Trek franchise of series was one of the last to take a lot of outside scripts, too, their tradition was always drawing on the wide pool of SF print writers. Anyway the syndicated angle kind of died as FOX and WB and the UPN gathered a lot of spare channels and regularized them, ran stuff like Buffy and Voyager themselves
\nSo as the \u201890s went on you started to see more and more seasonal arcs as shows gained in their narrative capacity, then you saw the premium channels (which had more been doing anthology shows or soft porn for their original series) latch on and away we go
\nnow that you mention cartoons, I guess they are one of the rare venues that can sacrifice aesthetic and actors for writing, although notably that tends to mean comedy rather than plot per se.
\nI think these explanations fail when you realize how many video games also have terrible writing. I\u2019m not talking, like, excuse plots where they don\u2019t care about the writing because it\u2019s just there to justify the gameplay, either.
Exclusively looking at games with 3 in the title you have Bayonetta 3, The 3rd Birthday (aka Parasite Eve 3), Diablo 3, and Borderlands 3. (Mass Effect 3 is also on the list of badly written 3s but we know why that happened and only the ending was bad.) Each of these games has a story that is absolutely fucking God-awful from beginning to end such that you want to turn off subtitles and switch to a language you don\u2019t understand, but you can\u2019t, because then you don\u2019t know what your objectives are.
And you can say \u201coh ho ho ho video games are not high art, the audience doesn\u2019t care,\u201d but the audience definitely NOTICES, from fucking minute one the vast majority who played these games was like \u201choly fuck this story is so bad.\u201d More importantly, \u201cthe audience doesn\u2019t care\u201d would be an excuse to treat story as an afterthought, put no effort into it; but that\u2019s not what happens!
Each of these games puts a huge amount of effort and pride into their stories! A lot of budget goes to their story cutscenes, they\u2019re front and center, characters are always talking to you to bring up the story, you cannot get into the game without constantly having to interact with the story, and these are, just, I cannot overemphasize how inexcusably bad these stories are. There are games where they didn\u2019t give a fuck about the story and it shows, but the worst ones are the ones who put huge effort into stories that are just so, so fucking bad.
The production schedule and constraints aren\u2019t the same for a video game. You need story locked in a lot earlier to know what assets you need, but you also know well ahead of time what\u2019s available and never have to deal with \u201coh shit this actor is unavailable at the last second.\u201d It\u2019s much easier to splice together and repurpose content when there is a last second change, but that is only a factor in 3rd Birthday and then only kind of (a different director came on last second to salvage a game with an inexcusably bad front and center plot the previous director was proud of and couldn\u2019t manage to). You need more writing in terms of # of scenes, but your overall writing cost is much lower as a proportion of budget. There\u2019s no reason not to get it right. And these all have stories that any person could have seen and said \u201cThis is completely unacceptable.\u201d
So if terrible terrible writing being acceptable in films and TV is explained by the particulars of film and TV production, how come the same happens to video games without those production constraints?
maybe writing is just really hard \ud83e\udd14
I CAN ANSWER THAT ABOUT THE VIDEO GAME WRITING.
So some of the assumptions Brazen has made here are just Wrong. For starters- in game dev, aesthetic and overarcing narrative in a video game are determined very early on. But story- everything from plot to scene-to-scene writing- tends to change heavily over the course of development.
This is because video games are developed in iterations, and the focus in these iterations is core mechanics and level design. If something about the core mechanics and level design isn\u2019t working, the story has to change to match the new mechanics\u2013 and sometimes, that happens last-minute.
To take a pretty famous example- Banjo-Kazooie was originally intended to be an anime-style Zelda-like adventure game and was code-named Project Dream.
![](\"/media/3f2e1071af44ed78a1f186af1eb92d0b5a45dc55_1a34f8e1f3fb.png\")
But Banjo went through development hell, and after changing platforms, changing genres into a 3D platformer, and changing from a 2D game to a 3D game, it came out looking like this:
![](\"/media/81440908f7013ca9d66cafad1bac6663cdade158_809b8e3368bf.png\")
Everything about the original Project Dream story had to be scrapped. And Banjo, as a collectathon platformer, has a minimal excuse plot story- but it\u2019s still completely different from what Project Dream was going to be. The story was determined early on, but it had to change to meet the needs of the game.
Most games don\u2019t go through this dramatic of a shift, but the principle is still there on a micro scale. Every game has to change story elements to fit the needs of the gameplay- even the ones where story is a major factor.