原作者：Jeff Vogel 译者ciel chen

“字太多了。减半。”

“减哪一半？”

“不用的那一半”

——详情可以参看Their Finest《他们最好的（Their Finest）》（电影介绍）

我的终身事业都致力于撰写重故事情节类的游戏，写了非常多的文字。我们的Spiderweb软件公司很小，所以我们做不起大型精致的图像效果，于是想要出彩，我们只能倚靠文字，有趣又有品的文字。

目前，我们想用最美妙的文字去重制我们最喜爱的故事。同样地我们还完成了一系列新的故事游戏，里面同样包含了许许多多的文字，然而我觉得这些文字应该不够好不然也不会卖不出去了。现在我们打算制作一系列全新的故事，这需要我们知道需要多少文字以及怎样的文字才能填满这里的空白。

我们要做很多决策，所以我要思考很多有关游戏中的文字，为此我做了许多观察，得出了一些见解。

以下供参考：

一篇篇幅适中的小说包含大约10万单词。《圣经》包含大概100万单词。

我字数最多，最流行的游戏——《Avernum 3》（目前我正在重制的游戏）有大概20万单词。在它发行的那时候，人们对它的词量之多有过热烈的讨论；然而，按照现在改过的标准看来，它变得十分简练。

对比之下，一款最近新出的具有出众的故事情节的RPG游戏《巫师3（The Witcher3）》涵盖了大概45万词。这里所谓的“出众故事情节”指的是“其中一个真正出众的情节加上其他很多很多基本还算OK的情节。”（说句公道话，我觉得它的《石之心》DLC的情节是真的不错。）

词量的膨胀仍在继续——当《神界3:原罪(DIVINITY: ORIGINAL SIN)》词量达35万时，《暴君(Tyranny)》则花60万词描述了一个告诉你如何变成世界上最邪恶的中层管理者的故事，由大胆的提问将游戏分成了73个派系。

Game Dev Story(from appannie.com)

这些跟《折磨:扭蒙拉之潮(Torment: Tides of Numenera)》的120万词相比都是小巫见大巫了。我承认我很好奇，到底是什么样的史诗般巨作需要《THE LORD OF THE RINGS》的三倍词量来叙述。反正我不会明白，因为我不可能去玩一个内容情节字数是圣经1.2倍的游戏。

这是我在玩你的RPG游戏时候的样子哈哈哈

Vogel总结的电子游戏的情节叙述规律

只要你给玩家机会忽略情节，玩家会忘记你游戏里面的精彩故事。

当人们评论一款游戏有个“精彩故事”的时候，他们的意思是——这个游戏是有故事的。

大部分的电子游戏故事都是走这个路线的——“看到那边的那个家伙了没，对就是它，它是坏蛋，打死它。”这可不是什么好故事的走向。

供参考，这是让我读你RPG里的文字的办法

对电子游戏的一些观察

有一段时间，游戏市场对于像《博德之门》和《异域镇魂曲:折磨(Planescape: Torment)》这样的游戏有较大的需求，不过那些都是些老派的基于立绘的RPG游戏，拥有宏大的故事背景，以及大量的文字叙述。但根据《暴君(Tyranny)》和《折磨:扭蒙拉之潮(Torment: Tides of Numenera)》的销量来看，可以知道这种压抑的需求已经从很大的程度上得到了满足。

凑字数真的超简单的，超级超级简单。任何有两把刷子的作家随随便便都能编出50万词的文章就跟玩似的。如果这个作家手写累了，那一个有志成为作家的实习生能添上个10万词。然后等那个实习生榨干了，你还可以让你的Kickstarter支持者为你的游戏撰写内容，他们还会私下为有次殊荣而捐资。

是真的，人们会为能给你的游戏撰写内容而付钱的！也就是说给你的游戏添词量可以有负成本效果！所以下次有人如果想以字数为卖点向你销售游戏，好好考虑下这点。

伟大的写作作品背后的秘密并不词量的添加——而是消减。大多时候你可以靠删减一大段内容以及精炼剩下的文字来改进游戏的情节内容。然而，因为游戏开发已经完成了，并且开发游戏预算有限，时间有限，这个重新编辑内容的程序基本没法达成了。

当一个作家出名了以后，他们就不再编辑文本了。这就是为什么《哈利波特》第五部书有900页却只讲述了两件事；这也是一款2017年由知名人士编写的大量词量的草稿，字里行间都充斥着无聊的原因。

这些游戏的故事都是写的不错的——《辐射：新维加斯》和《巫师3:狂猎(The Witcher 3:Wild Hunt)》。我还记得《博德之门2》和《异域镇魂曲:折磨(Planescape: Torment)》也还可以，不过那是20年前的游戏了，里面应该有很多怀旧的内容。（对于我还有大多数人来说都是如此。）《异域镇魂曲》很酷没错，不过我还非常清楚地记得，我要通过阅读大量的文本才能通关它。

“史特金定律”可以在这里用上：“90%的东西都是没用的垃圾。”对于《异域镇魂曲》每个系列来说，它们都用了很酷的背景设定、故事大意，并投入了很好的情节内容，并让这些情节和游戏玩法很好地结合在了一起，同时另外九款游戏有着大量Tolkein式的“杀死那个混球”类的故事，希望能吸引到玩家——然而不行。

在游戏里加入很多知识点是可以的。有一些玩家对这些知识爱得不行。然而——有很多玩家并不喜欢它们。我觉得如果你能把这些知识点和主要的游戏文本情节分开来是最好不过的了，就像《上古卷轴5:天际(The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim)》里面做的那样——把知识点放到书里，你可以放在一边不需要管它。《魔兽世界（World of Warcraft）》的任务窗口就在这点做得很好。所有的知识成为一个整体（“你的意思是矮人都喜欢挖矿吗？哇！”），而实际的任务文本（“杀死10只小哥林布”）被单独列出来了，所以你可以很容易就吸收这些知识点。

要把文本写的幽默挺难的，然而这部分却是最有趣的内容之一。如果你可以让你的游戏变得真正去，人们会永远爱着它的。（《疯狂世界》的实际游戏可玩性只能得B-，但是人们真心爱这款游戏，因为它真的特别有趣。）

游戏中的文本内容的最终目标是：让故事情节好到可以让玩家能为了它而好好地玩游戏。你的写作叙述要成为一种“奖励”。如果你的写作叙述让玩家觉得游戏玩起来好吃力，那说明你的叙述内容太累赘了。

这样你就让我集中了所有的注意力

自我抢救

我写的每一款游戏情节都有好多词量。我的粉丝对这里一部分的游戏文字特别喜欢，而对另外一些则没那么喜欢。

我对我下个文本的目标是尽可能用更少的词量让我的粉丝们能够得到愉悦、好玩且风趣的游戏情节体验。我希望我的文字成为一种“奖励”，让玩家能够更好地游戏。我对此表示担忧，因为要写出一些有趣而简短的东西比些那些冗长无趣的东西要难得多了。

同时，我还在重制我的老游戏《Avernum 3》，这里有这20小万的词量——这意味着我要把这些文字重新浏览编辑过一遍。我把很多时间都花在了削减多余的文字以及对剩下的内容进行修改，使其变得更流畅、更好读、还要尽可能地更有趣。如果新版本的内容反而词量变多了，那我肯定哪里出错了。

有很长一段时间，我都是以卖文字篇幅长的游戏为主。现在，这个领域有了更多的竞争，文字量则变得超级廉价。现在我需要以好的文笔来作为卖点。尽管我有可能永远无法在这个拥挤的游戏市场上做出一个出色的模因，但我要尽可能地抓住每个有利的条件写出好的文字。

本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao

“Too long. Lose half.”

“Which half?”

“The half that you don’t need.”

- Their Finest

My whole career has been based on writing very story-heavy games, with lots of words. Our company, Spiderweb Software, is small. We can’t afford fancy graphics, so we have to rely on words. Interesting, quality words.

We’re currently remastering the series with our most loved story and our bestest words. We also finished a new series, which had a lot of words which I suspect weren’t as good because it didn’t sell as well. Now we’re planning a whole new series, and we need to figure out how many and what sort of words to cram into that.

We have a lot of decisions to make, so I’ve been thinking a lot about words in games. I have made a number of observations.

For Reference

A decently sized novel contains about 100,000 words. The Bible contains about a million words.

My wordiest and most popular game, Avernum 3, which I am now remastering, had about 200,000 words. At its release, people talked about how very, very, many words it had. Yet, by current standards, it is very terse.

In comparison, one of the best-written RPGs in recent times, The Witcher 3, had about 450,000 words. For The Witcher 3, “best-written” means “One really good storyline and many, many other storylines that were basically OK.” (To be fair, I think the Heart of Stone DLC was really well-written.)

The word bloat continues. While Divinity: Original Sin had a mere 350,000 words, Tyranny spent 600,000 words telling the story of how you became the word’s most evil middle manager, on a bold quest to try to tell apart the game’s 73 factions.

And this is positively tongue-tied next to Torment: Tides of Numenara’s 1,200,000 words. I admit I am curious about what story is so gigantic and epic that it requires 3 times more words than The Lord of the Rings. I will never find out, as there is nothing that will tempt me to play a game with 1.2 Bibles worth of text.

This is me playing your RPG lol.

Vogel’s Laws of Video Game Storytelling

1. Players will forgive your game for having a good story, as long as you allow them to ignore it.

2. When people say a video game has a “good story,” what they mean is that it has a story.

3. The story of almost all video games is, “See that guy over there? That guy is bad. Kill that guy.” This almost never leads to a good story.
For reference, this is how to get me to read the text in your RPG.

Observations About Words In Video Games

1. For a while, there was a big demand for games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. That is, old-school icon-based RPGs with big stories, told in lots and lots of words. Early hits, like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity made a lot of money off this demand. Sales of later games in this style, like Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenara suggest that this pent up demand has largely been satisfied.

2. It’s really easy to make words. Really, really, really easy. Any writer with half a grain of skill can spew out 500,000 like it is nothing. And if that writer’s fingers get tired, an intern with aspirations of authorhood will chip in 100,000 more. And when that intern passes out, you can let your Kickstarter backers add words to your game and they’ll pay you for the privilege.

3. No, really, think about that last point. People will pay you to be able to write for your game! Adding words to your game has negative cost! Think about this the next time someone tries to use a giant word count to sell you a game.

4. The secret of great writing is not adding words. It’s cutting them. You can almost always improve your writing by slashing chunks out of it and refining the rest. However, as game development is done with limited budgets and limited time, this editing process almost never takes place.

5. When a writer gets famous, they stop being edited. This is why the fifth Harry Potter book is 900 pages in which only like two things happen. This is also why, when a game in 2017 is written by a Big Name and has a script with one bajillion words, most of those words are going to be pretty boring.

6. There are well-written games. Fallout: New Vegas and Witcher 3 are solid. I remember Baldur’s Gate II and Planescape: Torment were all right, but I played those 20 years ago, and there may be a lot of nostalgia in play there. (For me and almost everyone else.) Planescape was cool, but I definitely remember blasting past a lot of text just to get through it.

7. Sturgeon’s Law is in play here: “90% of everything is crap.” For every Planescape: Torment, where they had a cool setting and story idea and really put the time in to write good text and have it interface with the gameplay well, there have been nine other games where they just threw up a bunch of Tolkein-light Kill-that-Bad-Guy stuff and hoped it stuck. It didn’t.

8. Having lots of lore in your game is OK. Some players really love lore. But then, a lot of players really don’t. I think it’s best if you try to keep your lore separated a bit from the significant game text, like Skyrim putting the stuff in books you could easily ignore. World of Warcraft quest windows did this perfectly. All of the lore was in one lump (“You mean dwarves like to dig mines? WOAH!”), and the actual text of the quest (“Kill 10 goblin toddlers.”) was broken out of it so you could digest it quickly.

9. Humor is very hard to write well. It is also one of the most enjoyable things to read. If you can make your game genuinely funny, people will love it forever. (The actual gameplay of Psychonauts was only B-, but people LOVE that game because of how funny it is.)

10. The ultimate goal of writing in a game: Have it be good enough that getting past the gameplay to reach the writing is your goal. Your writing should be the REWARD. If your writing is something the player has to slog through to get to the game play, there is too much writing.

Physician, Heal Thyself

Every game I’ve ever written has had a lot of words. Some of those games, my fans really loved the words. Some of them, not so much.

My goal for my next series is to use fewer words, but to make them as light and interesting and funny as I can. I want words to be the reward, the thing that pulls people through the story. I am dreading this, because, again, writing something good and short is way more work than writing something dull and long.

In the meantime, I am remastering my old Avernum 3, with its pokey little 200,000 words. This means giving those words an editing pass. A lot of my time is spent chopping out extraneous words and revamping what is left to make it smoother, easier to read, and, whenever possible, funnier. If the new version has more words than the old version, I’ve done something wrong.

For a long time, I sold games with a lot of words. Now there is a lot more competition in that space, and words are super-cheap. I need to try to sell good words. Even if I never make a nice, dank meme, in this crowded market, you need to get every little advantage you can.（source：gamasutra.com  ）