Jeff Urciuoli GuestSpotter

Now Playing: Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow, Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, Deus Ex: Invisible War Eagerly Awaiting: Half-Life 2, Hitman: Contracts, Thief: Deadly Shadows

The Low, Low Bar of Being As Good As Television

The best television shows, the best movies, and the best books are always praised for the quality of their dialogue, storylines, and characterization--whether it be hyperrealistic, like a Mario Puzo novel, or over-the-top cool, like a Tarantino movie. Despite these established benchmarks, game after game comes out with a story and dialogue written by someone who has another job title that "writer" was hyphenated onto. As a complete novice who knows next to nothing about how games are produced, it seems to me that most of the writing in games is being done by programmers. The grammar, where there is grammar, is inevitably poor, and the word choice is high-schoolish, thus representing a stiff pantomime of "coolness," at best.

Unfortunately, Ray Liotta does his best talking with a shotgun in GTA: Vice City.

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a great example of this. Vice City arguably has the best voice talent of any game to date--and it unquestionably has the most star-studded. Yet everything that everyone says and does is executed in the most amateurish, least-cool way possible. Lance's insecurity and Diaz's insane temper were both well-conceived ideas that were poorly executed. One can't help but think that if Rockstar North had more respect for the writing, what was "only" an amazing game could have also had an entertaining--and even engaging--story.

You can almost hear the violins...

Drug kingpins--again, I speak as a complete amateur here--seem like they'd have a lot of good reasons to be paranoid and consumed by rage. They'd probably also have a lot of opportunities to express it genuinely, without having to resort to flipping out at random and shooting their VCRs. Pablo Escobar, the infamous cocaine kingpin, was notoriously violent and dangerous, but he was almost certainly capable of making it through entire weeks without shooting his own house. (In all fairness, Elvis supposedly shot his all the time.) Similarly, the way Diaz kept calling everyone "d***heads" wasn't as cool in practice as it probably sounded to a roundtable of nerds at two in the morning. To top that off, the way he uses it isn't quite right grammatically, if such a thing can be said about the word d***head. It doesn't sound right to the ear, and you can tell by his delivery that Luis Guzmán, the talented actor voicing the part, knows it. You can hear a similar disengagement from Ray Liotta throughout the game as well.

Contrast Vice City's dialogue and voice acting with that found in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which stands as one of the rare exceptions of a game with a legitimately well-crafted story and characterization. The difference is that the actors in KOTOR are given fully fleshed-out characters to work with and believable dialogue, all wrapped in a complex and engaging storyline. You can hear their commitment to it when they read their lines, even when plot twists necessitate two different versions of the same dialogue--one "virtuous" version and one not-so-much-so. It's no surprise that people who have played KOTOR have reported having a genuine emotional reaction to some of the choices they were asked to make.

It has long been considered the Holy Grail of game development to evoke such an emotional reaction from the player. This has been achieved by games like Resident Evil to some degree, but if designers want to elicit a more subtle reaction, they're going to have to learn to do what Bioware did in KOTOR. That is, they must respect both the art of storytelling and the artists who spend their entire lives practicing and refining it--the writers.