More Than Exposition - Building Worlds without Info Dumps - Extra Credits

So, we've held off on doing this episode for a long while because it seems like something you've all probably picked up at some point in a high school English class. And yet, there are so many games that fall short in this regard that we decided to just go ahead and do it anyway. Today, we're going to be talking about exposition. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, exposition is simply explanatory text. You know when a character in a movie or a book starts delivering backstory in their dialogue? When they start describing the place they're in or explaining the technology that makes things possible in their world? That's exposition. If you've ever heard a character almost monologue the details that you, the reader, need to know about the time period or the political environment or the setting of a piece of fiction, that's called an exposition dump, and it tends to happen a lot in fantasy and sci-fi. In the worst cases, which tragically are the cases seen most often in video games, this is done on the thinnest of pretexts, and even worse, done solely for the sake of the audience. If you've ever heard a character tell another character very basic facts about their

world, facts which every single person who inhabits that universe should be very familiar with, then you have experienced the clumsiness of a bad exposition dump. The only reason the characters have for sharing that information with each other is to allow the reader or viewer to hear them secondhand. The Metal Gear series is rife with these moments, especially once you get further into the series and characters have to start explaining things about the previous installments to players who might not have played them. The problem with these moments is that they bog down the pacing and rarely do anything to develop the characters or move the story forward. They're just a delivery mechanism for the facts that we need to engage with the story. One of the biggest challenges with a sci-fi or fantasy story is the massive amount of world information that needs to be conveyed. It's the groundwork we need to be able to understand the space we're playing in. So, when you find yourself in a moment where someone's explaining to you why your power armor works or who these aliens invading our planet are, that's sort of the price of entry to participate in the narrative, but it doesn't actually drive the story being told, does it? This means that good writers avoid the exposition dump as much as possible. And when they have no other option, they formulate it in such a way as to tell us things about the characters who offer the explanation as

well. More on that later. But video games have a unique challenge here. Besides simply having to give players information about the world, the technology, the backstory behind the characters, and filling them in on things that might have happened before the narrative began, games also have to instruct the player on what to do in the game. You've all heard plenty of it. We have to go take out that bunker. You have to stop the Reapers. The princess is in trouble, you have to hurry. There's a whole new form of exposition that's unique to games and takes up an incredible amount of textual space in our experiences. The truth is, games have remarkably little actual text in them. Even dialogue-heavy games like Mass Effect or The Witcher probably only contain a quarter as many words per minute in them as your run-of-the-mill TV show, and clearly far, far less than any book. This means that every word is precious, but we spend so many of those precious few giving exposition, telling the backstory, getting the player up to speed on the world so they can understand the narrative at all, and giving the player instructional cues that we rarely have time left for anything but the most bare-bones dialogue to move the plot forward. I don't want to spend half the episode of running time showing it here, but just go look up the first 5 minutes of Resident Evil 5 if you want a textbook example of what not to do. So, what can

be done to avoid it? We've already talked a great deal about both environmental storytelling and the power of delivering narrative through play, but suffice it to say both of those are great ways to cut down on the amount of exposition you have to do. Look at Fallout 3. Look at how much of that world is made clear through the environment alone without lengthy explanations. But better yet, look to Journey. Even look at the beginning of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. There was a game where the beginning had to be saturated in exposition because there was a lot the player had to know before the story could begin. walking the player through the environment, they let the visuals do half the exposition for them. Or heck, just look at Half-Life. Anyway, a lot of the nonverbal, nonwritten elements of your game can help to cut down on the amount of exposition needed. Not taking advantage of environmental storytelling is just sub-optimal narrative design. Next, make sure you know what exactly needs explaining. Try to decomplexify your world. Is it absolutely imperative that you explain the workings and lore behind your magic system, or can we just call it magic and use that saved time for something else that really does need the explanation. Do you have to go into detail about some obscure religious sect in your world, or can you just condense it in a phrase? How much jargon, how many proper nouns do you really need?

We've all encountered a game at some time or other where there are so many proper nouns, so many Zohars and New Jerusalems, so many Ormuses and Galactic Federations that it's either completely incomprehensible or requires more cutscene time than gameplay to make it all make sense. If you can really drill down and figure out what's unique about your world and save all of your exposition for that, it'll give you the time in your narrative to actually do interesting things with the unique stuff that make your world stand out. Lastly, remember the power of the player to interpret. Even if you can't spare many words for some aspect of your world, not everything has to be fully spelled out. If your players come to a temple of some strange cult and see an altar covered in blood, carvings of Cthulhoid figures, and human bones on the floor, they may not get the exact same picture as you have in your head, but they'll be able to put together everything they need to know. Even a single line can deliver all the information you need to convey, so long as that line distills the essence of what you're trying to describe, like, "He was a slaver." Or, "She had two sons before the war." Say no more, the player already gets it. All right, so that covers how to cut down on exposition a bit, but as we mentioned, games also have to deal with exposition that tells the player where to go and what to do. And since we can't cut that exposition

out entirely, how can we make the best use of it? How can we have it not only tell the player what to do, but also help enrich the narrative? Next week we'll talk about how simple word choice can be the difference between a moving narrative and a string of unending exposition. We'll see you then.