Super Plumber Bros contained some skippable dialog. It wouldn’t help you get a better high-score, but it fleshed out the setting and characters. I watched a lot of let’s players dig their way through the game, and often they skipped the text. Many, many times I heard players say aloud, “who is this blue girl?”.

{% pullquote You’re kidding me, right? How is this confusing!? %}

Big budget games have given us lots of reasons to skip text in games. NPCs in an RPG might bark at you, repeating the same inane bit of English again and again. A patronizing spirit guide like Navi might chime in for the 800th time about how you should hold your shield, or what this or that landmark means. In an MMORPG the quests are often distributed in the form of a block of lore followed by a check-list of useful details. Outside of RPGs the dialog between protagonists is often only there because it would feel weird if everyone was just quiet all the time. Basically, if a game with a big budget and lots of playtesters is offering you the ability to skip text, it is because that text is honest-to-gods useless and you will have more fun playing if you just skip it. Don’t worry, important stuff will come in the form of cutscenes or a bulletted list that you can always check later so that you don’t get stuck.

The games we grew up on have, for the most part, taught us that text is lame and should always be skippable.

In our neck of the woods, the story is sadly not much different. It might even be worse, because of a whole slew of problems the big guys don’t have. We aren’t writers, and we can’t hire writers. This means that even if the game designer thinks some text will support the theme, or improve the mood, they might not have the skills to really engage us anyway. Text in our games often feels flat, and sometimes it is painfully ungrammatical. A lot of us are young, and the things we think of as “profound” sometimes ring pretty hollow to the rest of our mixed audience.

Hey, listen! I want to address some of this.

The “bad” Writing

OK, so we aren’t writers: so what!? We also aren’t artists, or designers, or marketers, or even programmers in many cases! We are the small voices, so how shitty is it for us to harp on “bad writing” when we basically define our identity around “bad graphics”? How shitty is it for us to obsess over someone’s grammar, when a lot of us are speaking English as a second language and just struggling to be heard at all. When you read the text in a game, don’t think about the grammar or how “well written” it is. Think about the meaning of the words in the context of the game.

You are probably missing something

I’m not speaking English as a second language, but I’ll tell you what: if you skip the text in one of my games, you are impoverishing your experience. I’m very particular about including words in my game because I come from the same background as everyone else… these are my values too! There are no words in Gunship Souls, beyond the simple title screen. So I want you to believe that if I decide to put words in a game, then they are there to enrich the experience.

Playing SPB without knowing that the main characters are mario’s descendents might not affect your high-score, but it will reduce your experience of Super Plumber Bros to “that creepy mario game”. SPB isn’t a creepy Mario game: it is a game about the sins of the father; about being mortal in a world of immortals; about the evil we know vs the evil we don’t. SPB is about an uncaring beurocracy, and the reparations of war. If you are playing an indie game, and there is text on the screen, don’t just read it… read it and reflect on its meaning in the context of the game.

If you love text so much, why don’t you marry it?

I would force you to read the text if I could, but I can’t. Skippable text addressed a very important accessibility issue: people read at different speeds. For a slow reader, little is more embarrassing or shameful than to be cut off mid-sentence when the text advances to the next slide. For a fast reader, being chained down to a snail’s voice is intollerable. The player, for very practical reasons, should always be able to advance text at their own pace. Sadly, this also means folks with a vanishing attention spans will always be able to skip the text, or will read as quickly as they can without internalizing its meaning.

Sometimes text is bad

It may be that you’re right, it may be that the text in the game does nothing to improve the experience. After playing Purpose (which I enjoyed) I commented that I thought the text in the game was trite. I didn’t think it improved the experience; it felt unnecessary to me. In particular it felt like it was expressing something that would have been better expressed directly through gameplay. I could not have made that judgement, that criticism, had I not read the text. You can’t tell that the text is wasting your time until it has wasted your time. Your understanding of the role of text in games, as a designer, will not mature if you do not read the words in the game, and reflect on their meaning in the context of the game.

Read text deeply and ask yourself why it is there, and what it means. Think before you skip skippable text in games.