The Importance of Exposition

[exHominem]

So, funny story I thought people might find helpful.

I recently showed a friend of mine a game I've been working on. This friend is not too big into video games in general, and has barely heard of VN's. But hey, I figured it'd be pretty easy to figure out, right?

WRONG.

Now, in this case, my game was fairly complicated and necessitated a lot of user input, but it got me thinking about the importance of explaining stuff to your audience. Sometimes when we build games, it's kind of easy to get a sort of 'toolkit' bias going. YOU know how everything works; heck, you spent all your time coding it! But when someone who has never seen your project before comes along, it can be pretty daunting to play even the simplest of games.

It goes for more for just gameplay as well. A lot of the time I'll check out other people projects, looking for ideas to... borrow. But when I look at the code, it's barely intelligible at best. More importantly, lots of times I find myself forgetting how my own code works, and having to backtrack to figure out how exactly gizmo 1 affected gizmo 2.

Also, the importance of exposition in storytelling is invaluable as well. I've seen games get torn down for having too much exposition, which is always a danger, but it's always interesting to me to see a game, especially one set in a fantasy world, that makes an active effort to explain stuff to the player, rather than assuming they all know the latest happening going down in the Magic Pony Kingdom of Wisteria.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had thoughts on stuff like this.

[A Terrible Rabbit]

Ahh. . . exposition.

I think, in a VN, it's hard to find a spot exactly for exposition. You could have your characters explain, but then they seem fake, because why are they telling each other things they already know? You could have a big introduction, but that's boring, and there's no reason to expect your reader to want to put up with that.
VNs are usually mostly dialogue driven, and dialogue is difficult. One of the first things I noticed when I started writing was that my usual third-person limited just wasn't going to cut it. I ended up putting the story in first person for the protagonist, with the choices in first person for the player. @_@ And It's still difficult to make sense sometimes.

So I usually end up showing it to my mother, haha. If she can follow it, a regular gamer should. It's really surprising, isn't it, how between the story and the coding and the art and the sound, your game can suddenly stop making sense and you don't even notice. It's a lot to keep track of.

e. As an aside, if you thought I was 'tearing down' Hierofania the other day, it was just a critique, not an attack.

[chronoluminaire]

It's a classic dilemma. The aim should be to have the in-story content fill the reader in on the background they need to know, but not be blatant about it, and do it realistically.

See As You Know. That page also provides some ways to avoid doing this in a painful way: one classic way is to use TheWatson, someone who's new for whatever reason and doesn't know the ropes, so the experienced characters have to explain it. But that can itself get tired. Other ways are to do things like have the explanations also be communicating the characters' feelings about these background elements, perhaps.

In VNs, we have the option not available in many media, of branches, and optional sections. One way you could use this is to provide a skippable section that explains some stuff.

[number473]

Something I've seen is that since you have the protagonist (the player character in the case of a VN) narrating the story, you just have him explain stuff as you would normally have the 3rd person narrator do.

Anyway, about the coding, I didn't learn much theory, but what I do remember is something called black-box code - which means you treat things as isolated entities. This was in object-oriented programming. Once you've programmed an object to do something you just forget about how it does it and use it cut-and-paste style in whatever you need it in. Don't know how this fits in with Python and Ren'Py though.

[Cironian]

Yeah, I think having a first person narrator who learns things (mostly) at the same time as the reader greatly helps ease people into your world. In fact, when you find that something might be confusing to the reader at some point you can just have the protagonist ask the same question of people around him, or at least give the option through a dialog choice.

Since my current story is set in the current time, I've also added a glossary function that's available to the protagonist through a smartphone. There, I can dump background information that might be interesting to some players but which would break up the flow of the story otherwise. And since the glossary is constantly changing with the current state of the story there is no problem with spoilers, as there might be when adding such things to the end of a book.

[Shake0615]

I think the glossary-on-the-smartphone idea is a good one for modern games.

Some people may find it a little tacky but if there's something that I want to explain further but don't want to take up game time, then I sometimes add a hyperlink to the word/phrase in question for explicative purposes. That way it kind of acts like a footnote in an actual book: the player can click if they want or ignore it. It also saves the player from an awkward idiot lecture. If used very sparingly, its actually a pretty good system for minor exposition. You just have to change the style of the hyperlinks so it isn't as visually obtrusive in the text.

[duanemoody]

You just have to change the style of the hyperlinks so it isn't as visually obtrusive in the text.

I ran into a situation last night where playtesters from outside the US were confused by the term 'biscuit' as a dinner food, and following this post decided to add a simple glossary.

Code: Select all

    $ style.hyperlink_text.color = "#bbbbbb" # only slightly darker than the default #ffffff
    $ style.hyperlink_text.hover_color = "#ff0000" # SAY IT IN RED
    $ style.hyperlink_text.underline = False

I could have used bold instead of color for the hover, but the font I'm using appears to have a different linespacing for the bold face, causing the entire line to shift during the hover. Similarly, italic fonts can be narrower than their roman faces, potentially altering line wraps.

[pinkmouse]

I just wanted to add a general comment on exposition - IMO it's partly a trust issue.

You see, not only do you actually not have to add all the details that you know about how the story world works, you actually shouldn't. You just have to add the parts that are relevant to the story. The Turkey City Lexicon http://www.otherworlds.net/turkey.htm calls this writing about the "edges of ideas".

So if you've got, say, starships in your story, you don't have to get involved in all the physics (though writing "rubber physics" can be kind of fun, too) the only thing you have to pay attention to is what affects the plot. So in this case the characters couldn't care less that it's a development of wormhole superstring theory. All they care about is the rumor that if the cryofield isolators malfunction during the voyage then passengers can wake up thinking they're somebody else. If the readers are confident that you're giving them all the relevant information, then they'll take the rest on trust.

I actually quite like the feeling of not completely understanding what's going on - it makes me aware I'm in an unfamiliar world and pay attention. Still, I used to worry that while this was fine for static text stories, our readers are asked to make choices. It seemed mean to ask them to make a choice when they didn't have all the facts. Now I think that's the wrong way to look at it.

I've decided that a choice menu in a VN isn't really about getting a "good" or a "bad" ending. It's the result of me writing the story and thinking - "hey - what if..." and exploring that thought. So it doesn't matter that all player choices are essentially blind, they're being offered a choice of different but equally interesting routes through the story world.

Hm. Ended up as a bit of a ramble. But - comments?

Edit: oops! the full Turkey City Lexicon is here: http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city ... workshops/. Full of useful writing tips.

[number473]

[quote=pinkmouse]So if you've got, say, starships in your story, you don't have to get involved in all the physics the only thing you have to pay attention to is what affects the plot. [/quote]
Unless you're writing some good old-fashioned hard sf, that is ^_^ but they certainly don't make it like they used to.

I agree though, whatever physics/setting/technology you introduce is ultimately to facilitate the story and the character development in the end.

[pinkmouse]

Unless you're writing some good old-fashioned hard sf, that is ^_^ but they certainly don't make it like they used to.

You can say that again! [Insert usual moan about current state of SF writing]

On a brighter note, I found a good new-to-me writer recently; have you read any Richard Morgan? His first was "Altered Carbon," though it was "Black Man" which I read recently and which really impressed me. Good, tight SF/Detective stuff in a society where genetic engineering is the norm. Parts of it rather bloody and violent, but it's all for a reason.

[number473]

The name rings a bell, but I haven't read anything by him. I'll keep an eye out.