Originally Posted by (My bold)
Oh hey, something I'm somewhat qualified to talk about; I wrote the Banner Saga and have worked at BioWare. I also know Jon Ingold! On the first Banner Saga we used Inklewriter (his branching dialogue program) and even had them develop some features for us. I coincidentally watched the video already.
From the point of view of his talk, I think it's very well presented with some great ideas about structure and remembering to convey the intent of the story. I agree with his assessment that most game writing is "bad", but I don't think it's the developer's fault. It's not because the games industry is filled with amateurs compared to other industries. Game writing is a casualty of game development, to the point where most developers "give up" on good writing because it's extraordinarily hard, resource-intensive and only a small percentage of your audience even cares about it in the first place (for most games). In fact, it's a liability- if you don't try to make a good story, your audience shrugs and doesn't care and still has a good time. But god help you if you try to write a good story, because suddenly everyone becomes a literature professor.
As some comments have already mentioned, the fact that tv or movies is a linear experience lets you precision-tune the pacing to your exact needs, and pacing is king. If the story beats are "off" by even a minute or two everything falls apart and feels wrong. Some directors can make exceptions that work, with extraordinary effort. Now take even the most simple gaming experience- maybe you're engaged in dialogue, then expected to walk to the next bit of dialogue. The player can ruin this in a million ways. They can get distracted by the environment, or side content, or just have to reload a couple times or engage in actual gameplay. Imagine a movie where the protagonist grinds mobs for literally 20 minutes between conversations, or a movie where you watch him drive his entire commute to work for 15 solid minutes while nothing happens. This is 90% of what makes up most games.
There are other issues he doesn't have time to mention, beyond the actual quality of the writing. A movie is a passive experience- the viewer doesn't have to understand what is going on for it to end the right way. A lot of movies will even intentionally confuse the viewer. A game player needs constant motivation, they need direction, they need to always know what they're doing or so-help-me-god they will feel lost and blame the game. Presenting all this information to a player through dialogue is extremely unnatural. Take the Assassin's Creed example: the speaker has awkward, ham-fisted lines telling Kassandra where to go- twice- and at the end of the conversation the player is still probably thinking "wtf am I suppose to do?". We give them literal GPS so they don't get lost. In a movie, all the viewer has to do is try and keep up with the narrative, not direct the movie themselves.
Additionally, what a character says in a game, and what they do, are completely at odds. To fill hundreds of hours of gameplay, the player performs an impossible series of tasks, from killing hundreds of people, or being essentially invincible to not needing food, shelter, sleep, entertainment or companionship. In an RPG we steal everything we can find and then have to pretend to care about an NPC being hanged for thievery. The player will naturally make decisions that are good for gameplay, even if they make no sense in the context of a story. Then, in conversation, the player has to pretend that their character is a real, relatable human being. How, exactly, do we expect good writing to erase this? These things sit poorly in the back of our minds, and we start to think the writing must be bad.
Movies or books often give the viewer a wide breadth of things to think about : feelings, relationships, different aspects of life. Games usually funnel down into retreads of the same tiny number of plot points which accommodate gameplay. How many games stories are about either survival or duty (such as saving the world)? How many times can you be impressed by a story trying to tell you the same exact thing? Movies can offer an almost infinite spectrum of topics that make up good stories, games offer: survival or duty.
Agency is its own entire can of worms I could write a whole book about. Being able to come up with a plan or goal on our own and then act on it is what makes us real people. In a movie, the protagonist has complete agency, to the point that the viewer themself often doesn't know what he intends to do. Their motivation does not have to match the viewer's motivations. In a game, if you tell someone to take on a role they'll inject themselves. Take something like Fallout 4, where the conceit is that your child was stolen from you, and you have to find out what happened to them. In a movie- perfectly reasonable premise. As a game, a prime example of bad writing; most players didn't come to Fallout to roleplay looking for a baby. And as this relates to agency- even in a sandbox game, we're constantly told what to do. We cannot come up with our own solution to find our son, we can only perform the series of tasks handed to us. Every moment that doesn't feel like our own decisions are playing out in believable ways comes across as bad writing. A narrative can only be hand-held so many times before it begins to feel subconsciously artificial.
So on that topic, there's also the fact that gamers are coming at a game experience from so many different directions. In a movie, you have one option: just let it all wash over you. At the end, decide whether you enjoyed it or not. In a game, some players want to control the situation. Some will want to "play along" with the story. Some are just trying to figure out which choices will make the characters ****, some are spamming the "next" button to get back to the action. Good luck accommodating all these things- and believe me, the number of kind, lovely players who come into a game willing to experience the creator's vision is the minority at best. Most are trying to "win" the conversation, or bend the game to their will. Ingold's idea of giving players an accept/reject/deflect option isn't bad, and a lot of story-driven games do this (like old BioWare). But it also leads to a character who can feel bi-polar, because their responses from one conversation to the next can swing wildly, and this again leans into a subconscious feeling that the writers are at fault for bad writing. The alternative- giving the character a consistent personality or attitude- takes away player choice and will frustrate players who don't want to role-play that personality. See: LA Noire, in which I thought Cole was a wonderfully consistent protagonist, but which many players considered "terrible writing".
Lastly, anyone who has made a game can tell you how hard it is to communicate even the most simple ideas in an interactive environment, much less complex ones. If a player is confused by something, it's bad writing. If your writing is so simple that everyone understands it, it's bad writing.
In conclusion, when gamers say that games have "bad writing" what they're really saying (most of the time- this is a generalization) is that the game didn't meet their expectations. They wanted to do or say something they couldn't, they expected the game to respond in unreasonable and infinite ways, their character behaved in a way that they wouldn't, or they expected movie-level subtext and pacing from a medium that simply can't deliver it. All the things that we easily accept from a linear experience like movies, tv or books are brought into question in an interactive one.
It's my opinion after doing this for nearly 20 years and having more experience with branching, interactive writing than most people on the planet, that game writing will never be as "good" as bespoke movies, tv or books. There is no secret-sauce combination of words that will somehow be more effective at delivering a written story than a non-interactive experience. However, games deliver an unique experience. If you can overlook the inherent flaws, and stop yourself from overthinking things, you get to be a part of the story. That non-passive experience can be a truly powerful and personal one, and occasionally a better one than anything a passive experience can provide.
Thanks for taking the time to read my take on it, and hopefully I didn't come across as too arrogant!
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) , but it never seems to hinder or improve the gameplay enough to warrant the time spent. 
