Spoilers: FNAF: Security Breach (Steel Wool Studios), 1-DC (89o), Ori and the Will of the Wisps (Moon Studios), Ori and the Blind Forest (Moon Studios), Fallen (Lauren Kate), CrossCode (Radical Fish), Five Nights At Freddy's (Scott Cawthon), Little Nightmares (Tarsier Studios), EXAPUNKS (Zachtronics)
Everyone has already hated enough on the story of Five Nights At Freddy's: Security Breach, Steel Wool Studios' newest installment in the apparently infinite list of FNAF games. Some aspects make no sense, such as why Gregory doesn't trust Vanessa from the very beginning, while others are painfully obvious and make the player cringe almost as hard as playing Minecraft: Story Mode, such as Vanny being Vanessa.
What recently caught my attention, however, is the dialog and what it tells us — or rather, that it tells us nothing — about the characters. There is, I think, a fundamental flaw in the way the writers planned out the story, and it's something I noticed in a ton of games, including my own.
Let me first compare the story to that of a book or movie. In general, you have Freytag's Pyramid (beginning-challenge-climax-resolution-ending), you have the characters facing challenges and attempting to overcome them while developing in the process, learning new things. Some games do emulate this structure, for example the Uncharted series or God of War (neither of which I actually played, just recounting from the top of my head based on my limited knowledge of them). They are made of a series of well-paced challenges and puzzles, interspersed with cutscenes that develop the story in parallel with the development of the gameplay.
Most (if not all) of my own games either completely don't have a story, or the story develops minimally in response to the player's actions; one could also say that the story is the player's actions, but also that the story is much more abstract and mundane than a movie story.
Let me explain, taking my game 1-DC as an example. In the game, you just write a bunch of programs to develop a computer. Every 8 levels beaten, you unlock a new "voicelog" which reveals more of the lore. None of the characters really develop over the course of the game, and the gameplay itself (programming) is only linked to the story by being what the protagonist is forced to do. In other words, what the character and player do reflects the character's development only superficially and literally.
In this case, I think this was a fine choice, as 1-DC's story is really just about how the protagonist lands in the antagonist's trap, and is more of an emotional journey of discovery for the player than an actual story with events and challenges. Moreover, as the protagonist himself doesn't really say anything (he only hums the soundtrack), it creates a closer bond between him and the player and it is inferred that he starts to reflect upon his past actions (especially prominent in the music to the credits).
The point is, such a story structure is simply not suited for a big, blockbuster game like Security Breach. When you've got so much effort put into all other aspects of the game (even if Quality Control apparently forgot to do their job...) such a minimal, emotionless story sticks out like a sore thumb. None — and I mean none — of the characters develop emotionally in a significant way. If you can point out such a development, I'd be glad to hear about it in the comments.
The story/dialog of Security Breach (and Ruin, too) is like a real-life-ification of game mechanics, and that really hurts because it feels incredibly artificial. Only minimal emotional value is provided by Roxy's wailing and Freddy's surface-level bond to Gregory. Apart from that, all dialogue acts as an extremely simple tool to ground the game mechanics in the game world, and nothing else.
The animatronics' voicelines? They tell you to be scared of them.
Freddy's voicelines? They tell you what to do next, what your current "quest" is. (How overused quest systems are in video games... ugh)
Gregory's voicelines? They are just informing Freddy, in the most basic and literal way possible, of Gregory's surroundings so that Freddy can give him advice.
See what I mean? The whole of Security Breach's writing essentially acts as a "wrapper" for the gameplay, with no real depth of its own. It feels as if all the characters are just puppets used by the writers to "engage" the players in the game.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps falls in a similar pitfall. I generally think its story is rather basic and predictable (except for Shriek, the antagonist — the villains are always the most interesting characters in stories). I condemn the use of the in-your-face and un-deactivatable quest system, which often breaks immersion and removes a lot of the emotional impact of quests (especially for A New Home, where you get a nice little musical jingle after telling a Moki that his family is dead; a shame that you don't get a reward to go with it).
The biggest gripe I have with this game's story is, again, the lack of meaningful character development. While it is poignant that this is the case for Shriek (the point is that he doesn't try to learn love like Kuro does in Ori and the Blind Forest), the other characters could have some more depth than "The world is bad, I'm sad for your loss, thank you, the world is good again." For instance, it would be nice if Naru and Gumo played more of a role in the story instead of just appearing in a cutscene every now and then to remind you that they still exist, and that they miss you.
The addition of all the other characters is nice as it changes the tone compared to Ori and the Blind Forest, making the world feel more alive and inhabited; however, most of these characters serve a single purpose (usually selling something), and once you realize that, once you look past their surface-level existence, it completely ruins the immersion. Again, as in Security Breach, these characters exist for the game without having any real autonomy, without existing for the story or just for themselves. (Something that certainly does not help in this regard is how, for example, every time you talk to Opher, he concludes in opening his shop; it feels as if the game is constantly reminding you that he's only there for the game mechanics.)
An antithesis to this is Quirrel from Hollow Knight. While his gameplay purpose is clear — helping you destroy/free Monomon the Teacher, he does appear to have a wandering vibe of his own and you can sometimes meet him in unexpected areas. Same with the Relic Seeker Lemm — at a seemingly random moment, he goes to the fountain to ponder, and you have to find him for him to return to his shop so you can keep selling him the useless king statuettes. Point is, it makes the world much more believable when the player feels like they're not the center of the life of every single character.
I think it's worthy to note that "the Ori phenomenon" can also occur in other media. I think we can all think of characters who apparently only exist to fuel the narrative in some way, "forced" characters. (Think of the old joke that every modern TV show needs a black character and a gay character, just because, well, every modern TV show needs a black character and a gay character.)
The only example I can think of right now is from a very mediocre book called Fallen by Lauren Kate. At first it was quite intriguing, a quite original concept, but once I realized that it was just a reskinned version of Twilight (yes, suffer, my dear Mr Lloyd), I noticed the roles played by all the characters: the hopeless protagonist in a scary new setting, the charming but inaccessible boy that she wants to love her and who secretly does love her, the other boy who wants her but she doesn't want, the cheerful sidekick who tries to keep her happy... And it's not just the characters, but the events, too. The scene where she sees him for the first time, the scene where she gets bullied (I don't remember by whom), the scene where Bella and Edward — I mean, Luce and Daniel — confess their feelings and she sees his supernatural powers, the scene where he narrowly saves her from death... it's all there.
The problem here is simply a lack of originality, of having characters play different roles than one might expect. (Of course, I believe it's best for characters not to have any easily distinguishable roles, but beggars can't be choosers.) This can be extended to Ori and the Will of the Wisps — for example, by having Lupo, by far the most annoying and uninspired character in the game (who I'm actively avoiding now), have a more interesting backstory, having him appear in more varied situations and perhaps even quests (well, more than the one where he sits at home while you map out an area for him). At the moment, he's just standing there in all the areas of the game, waiting for you to come and buy a map, and does almost nothing else. Opher is a step in the right direction: he accompanies you in your journey to the Wellspring, from his own motives, and actually saves you from certain death once. However, apart from that, all the characters are just standing puppets.
So how do you write dialog for video games, Internet Writing Guru? Well, I'm glad you asked. I'll look at a handful of games, what they do right, how they overcome Security Breach's challenges and what lessons we can learn from them.
Firstly, CrossCode, a game I recently fell in love with. It kinda lucks out on the criterion of game-y dialogue because its very premise is that the characters are consciously playing an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online role-playing game), so the explanations of game-y game mechanics in that world seem plausible — it's diegetic. There are characters who are clearly labelled as "existing only within the MMO and not having personal lives outside of it", and they explain the quest system, the map, the MMO's mechanics, etc. It feels natural because Lea, the protagonist, would also hear this information and respond to it the same way the player would. It's a quite clever solution (although obviously it couldn't be applied to all games).
When it comes to explaining things that Lea would do differently than the player, e.g. equipping equipment or navigating menus, there are separate tutorials which are clearly outside the game world, pause the game (including the characters outside the MMO) and are focused on being clear and comprehensible rather than diegetic. They are a necessary evil, a break from the immersion to communicate something to the player without mudding the waters of what the characters see and what they don't see.
Security Breach has such tutorials too, of course (including the infamous tutorial boxes that tell you to do things that you just heard a voice tell you a second ago), but I'd say that they're used ineffectively. If you're taking the player out of the game world to explain something, you should only do it if what you're explaining is something that couldn't be possibly explained diegetically, like controls (assuming you're not doing the cheap joke of a character asking "What's a W key?" after explaining them) — although even controls can be explained diegetically if they're simple enough: for example, by having graffiti on a wall with the WASD/arrow keys (one of my favorite methods). Well, technically it's not exactly diegetic, but it's subtle and quick enough that player's won't notice, and it's usually near the beginning of a game, before any real worldbuilding.
So, how could we go about fixing Security Breach's dialog problem? Obviously, we can't use CrossCode's solution as the game world of Security Breach doesn't feel like a video game to the characters inside it (although the terrible dialog could lead you to believe that it might).
Instead, let's look at the great-grandfather of Security Breach: the original Five Nights At Freddy's. The mechanics there are far simpler, but we can look at the way they're introduced to the player and the differences between it and Security Breach. Our only tutorial in that game is the famous Phone Guy, leaving a message every night with advice, some helpful and some not, and a lot of gossip and storytelling. The only real gameplay advice he gives you on the first night — "Uh, check those cameras, and remember to close the doors only if absolutely necessary. Gotta conserve power." — feels much more natural, as it's not only diegetic advice, but it's also surrounded by "useless" information that only adds to the atmosphere and makes the "tutorial" at the end feel like a natural conclusion to Phone Guy's monolog, rather than a forced bit of exposition.
How can we contrast this with Security Breach? Well, in that game, little is done to disguise the "linear guided adventure" aspect of the mechanics. An example: "Well done, Gregory. You are in the East Arcade. You should be able to get to the Prize Counter through the security office. Look for the door with a security badge symbol on it." The only part of this that has anything to do with story or character is the "Well done, Gregory," and even that is repeated so much that it loses any emotional impact whatsoever.
The problem, I think, lies in the very concept of the character of Freddy. His entire character is based around being helpful to children, almost like a parent. Contrast this with Phone Guy, whose instructions are more like "this is what I managed to figure out here, it may help you out" rather than "I live here every day, I know exactly how everything works so I can give you a list of instructions on what to do". I just don't think it's possible not to write Freddy's dialog like a list of instructions.
You might argue that a game like Security Breach requires more precise explanations than the far simpler FNAF 1 — however, I believe that the choice to supply such precise explanations is yet another mistake of the writers. FNAF 1 gets a lot of its value from the unclear tutorial, which makes the player unsure how to react and defend themselves and thus builds tension and powerlessness. (In fact, it leads to a greater feeling of mastery once you get good at the game as you learned everything from your own experience.) In contrast, every step in Security Breach is carefully guided by Freddy and the game's quest log. In effect, much of the horror value is lost: instead of feeling like a tense game of survival, trying to hold it out until 6AM like in FNAF 1, it's more like a sightseeing tour with some elements that are supposed to be scary. The player is led like a dog on a leash and is aware of it. (Now I'm curious now how it would be like to play Security Breach with an evil instead of helpful Freddy...)
Now, I'd also like to comment on the game Little Nightmares, mostly because I really like it, but also because I think it's possible to link it with Security Breach's story problem. Little Nightmares is an absolute jewel in the realm of "show, don't tell" — the only text that appears in-game is the tutorials that sporadically tell you how to run or grab or do other basic actions (and even those tutorials are done better than Security Breach's — they don't pause the game and appear at the top of the screen, away from the gameplay itself). There is no dialog, no signs, no instructions to tell you what to do. And yet, when you look back at it, it's still a "sightseeing tour" akin to Security Breach — but, crucially, the player is unaware of it.
Little Nightmares pulls off a trick just like CrossCode — the game is simply completely linear (in a quite literal sense; you're always moving to the right), it's impossible to sequence break or even approach areas you're not supposed to go to yet. Thus the problem is avoided altogether, and this solution cannot be used for Security Breach — but another aspect could at least serve as inspiration.
At the start, I was contrasting video game stories with book or movie stories: it's difficult to link what the player does to a general storyline the way you can in a movie. However, Little Nightmares still manages to link a crucial character development of Six, the protagonist, to a game mechanic — hunger, which requires you to quickly find some food nearby. This hunger leads Six into a trap, and later escalates to her eating live creatures and, eventually, the final boss herself after beating her. Apart from those moments being masterfully executed with the soundtrack and screen effects, they develop the character without using actions outside of the player's interaction — locating the food is as much a part of the gameplay as any other part of the game. It barely feels like a scripted moment. While Security Breach's game events are linked literally to the story events, those don't impact the characters' thoughts and emotions... at all. (The closest we get to that is Roxy's "Give me back my eyes!" in the Ruin DLC.)
Okay, okay, one last game that nails the link between player-game interaction and character and world development: EXAPUNKS. As a hacker, every level you beat has real consequences (in the game world) that you can immediately see by the messages from your friends in the CHATSUBO chatting platform. For example, after changing a company's peanut bar recipe to not include peanuts (hilarious joke), someone mentions how they bought a Peanut Blast bar and it had no peanuts. Or when you hack a pizzeria to include your order which you didn't pay for, you later get a cutscene where you get it delivered. The little fourth wall break in the ending (and especially in the final level of the bonus campaign; trust me, it's worth it to get there) are just the cherry on top.
This game shows that it really doesn't take a lot — in this case, just a few lines of "internet speak" dialog per level — to make all the difference in the player's immersion. I think it's the writers' awareness that counts — the awareness that you must treat the game world like an actual world if you really want the player to feel like a part of it, and not like they're playing a video game.
So what have we learned? Five Nights At Freddy's: Security Breach fails to create any meaningful story that the player might care about. It feels like something I could have written two years ago as a side project: the dialog is extremely basic, uninspired and barely tries to breach (haha) the plane of describing player-game interaction. Finally, the characters simply don't develop as a result of their actions: they're executing a series of events, akin to a speedrunner, rather than living them as if they're actually happening. As a result, the game suffers tremendously from a lack of immersion.
Writing for video games is harder than one might think. You're not just putting what the player does into pretty words that sound right, you're trying to link what the player does and what the characters do with what happens internally to the characters and world. As we saw in EXAPUNKS and Little Nightmares, all it really takes is a nod in that direction, a subtle mention of this relationship, to engulf the player in the game world; but if the awareness of this issue isn't there in the writers, the game comes out emotionally flat.
Thank you for reading this essay. If you have any criticism to my conclusions or want to add something, I'd be very happy to hear it in the comments.
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