Games Basically Always Get Newspapers Wrong

I love picking up a good document in a game. I wrote about this with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake 2 last year, because that game is better than any I've ever played at making it worth your while to read every single thing you find. But, even when it isn't executed quite that well, there’s little that helps a world feel more real and inviting than a well-written journal entry, memo, or email. Though I inevitably end up skipping past a lot of these, knowing they’re there makes the world feel bigger than a level’s strict geometry can on its own. Building new, highly detailed assets is time-consuming and, as a result, expensive, but writing a quick recipe the player can find in a kitchen or a discarded love letter in a trash can is comparatively quick and cheap.

But there’s one type of wr൲iting that video games almost always get wrong: newspapers. I notice this because, before I switched to writing about games, I was a news and sports reporter at a small town paper for two years. That experience has ensured that I have rarely encountered a video game newspaper that🌟 passes the smell test.

Developers tend to do a great job with emails, group chat𝓀s, and tweets because, like journalists, they are creatures of the web. They live online and can recreate its cadences. But journalistic writing is a different kind of writing, and one that takes time to get to grips with. When you first start writing at a paper, you’re doing an impression of what you think news copy should sound like. It takes a while to figure out how to have a voice without having an opinion. This is the part where games seem to struggle, too.

It also takes time to figure out what, exactly, is newsworthy. When I was first learning journalism in the vacuum that a college classroom provides, this was the part that really stumped me. U🦋ntil you get into a newsroom and see how an editor assigns stories and, eventually, begin finding your own, understanding what even constitutes news can be difficult.

In a game I'm currently playing (I can't name it because it's under embargo), I encountered a newspaper article simply titled, "The Great Depression," that was providing a general overview of the Great Depression. To be clear, this is a game set during the Great Depression. ꦿAnd the artಞicle was just kind of a general rundown of the events of the time they were living.

This kind of article doesn't exist. For context, imagine an article in December 2020 that was just titled The Pandemic that seemed like it was written for someone who was conked on the head with a rock immediately before picking up the paper. Articles that tackle a big subject exist, but if you were to find an article tackling a topic as broad as COVID-19, it would likely be an in-depth reported piece with a specific angle or a highly detailed timeline. It wouldn't be a loose summary of a few important moments. This left me feeling like the developers couldn't figure out how to communicate the time period the story was taking place and, instead of picking a key event from that time, like the Stock Market Crash or Roosevelt's election, just threw general information at the player.

Seeing games struggle to nail the precise rules of journalistic writing has me wondering if there are other kinds of art that I'm less keyed into that games are off on. This seems most likely for technical kinds of writing, where there are stricter rules. Are games getting scientific articles equally wrong? Legalese? Government memos? The world may never know.