🎮Why Video Game Writing Fails — And How to Actually Fix It

A Manifesto Against Narcissism, Disconnection, and Narrative Decay in Modern Games

Video games are the only art form where players directly shape the experience. Yet narrative—one of the most powerful tools we have—is often misunderstood, misused, or outright ignored.

Dialogue is overwritten. Plots are disconnected. Characters serve agendas, not arcs. Entire stories feel like they were crafted to impress colleagues, not connect with players.

The biggest reason?
Narrative design has become self-absorbed.

🧠 How We Ended Up Here

It didn’t start with bad writers—it started with bad creative culture.

The industry stopped treating stories as bridges to players, and started treating them as mirrors for developers. Writers now center their own emotions, ideologies, or traumas instead of creating emotionally scalable experiences that resonate across a broad player base.

The assumption became:

“If I make this personal enough, it will be profound.”

But that’s not how storytelling works in games.

This has led to:

• Stories that rely on players decoding metaphors instead of feeling emotion.
• Narratives that reflect a single worldview with no space for alternate readings.
• Dialogue that mimics social media discourse instead of building immersion.

Worse, the industry rewards this behavior. Awards, funding, and hiring trends favor “personal” storytelling—often judged by whether it represents, not whether it resonates.

🎯 What Game Writing Should Be

Game writing isn’t a monologue. It’s a collaborative act between designer, system, and player. The best writing in games:

• Honors agency
• Reflects player decisions
• Is delivered through systems, not just scripts

A story should live in the moment-to-moment experience—not be locked behind menus, lore terminals, or cutscenes.

Every mechanic, every UI label, every animation cue is a chance to reinforce narrative. When designers and writers align, they create gameplay that tells story without saying a word.

This is where many games collapse. Not because they lack voice actors or high-end scripts, but because they treat story as content—rather than function.

🚨 Five Deep Industry Problems

1️⃣ 🎭 Narcissistic Storytelling

Far too many stories are driven by creator ego. Writers mistake personal relevance for universal resonance. Players are expected to sit through emotional TED Talks instead of being given tools to express their own emotional arc.

These aren’t stories. They’re self-portraits, framed as gameplay.

The audience is not your therapist. The game is not your diary.

2️⃣ 🔌 Writers Disconnected from Design

Writers are often added after gameplay systems are locked. By then, the verbs and loops are already defined—and writers are asked to patch narrative around them.

They become decorators, not architects. And story becomes disconnected from gameplay.

If your game is about movement, your story should be too. If your game is about failure, that needs to be built into the emotional arc—not overwritten in cutscenes.

3️⃣ 🎬 Cutscene Cramming

Many narratives still rely on linear exposition to carry emotional weight—despite the fact that players spend 90% of their time in systems, not cinematics.

You can’t build emotional payoff through dialogue alone. Especially if the gameplay loop undermines it.

Your plot twist doesn’t matter if the player feels nothing during the 10 hours leading up to it.

4️⃣ 🤬 Contempt for the Audience

When stories fall flat, studios don’t ask what they got wrong—they blame the audience.

• “Players just didn’t get it.”
• “They’re not the target demographic.”
• “They don’t understand nuance.”

This arrogance isn’t just toxic—it’s creatively fatal. Because it shuts down the feedback loop. It turns criticism into perceived oppression.

If players aren’t connecting, the story failed. Full stop.

5️⃣ 🧩 Stories That Don’t Scale

Themes like duty, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, freedom, and love always work—because they’re embedded in human experience. But too many modern narratives avoid them in favor of obscure metaphors, niche identity frames, or social signaling.

These stories don’t scale. They collapse the moment they leave the dev bubble.

A story isn’t successful because it “represents.” It’s successful when it connects widely and powerfully.

🛠️ The Fix: Five Strategic Shifts

1️⃣ ❤️ Start with Emotion, Not Plot

Before writing a single word, ask: What should the player feel?

Then build systems that deliver that emotion through choice, friction, reward, and rhythm. Only then do you write the words.

The player’s arc should drive the story—not the other way around.

2️⃣ 🤝 Writers Must Influence Systems

If your narrative team doesn’t sit in gameplay meetings, they don’t have enough power.

Writers must:

• Help define verbs
• Influence mechanics
• Contribute to progression design

They’re not decorators—they’re user experience architects.

3️⃣ 🎯 Focus on Meaningful Universality

You can still write bold, personal, even political stories. But they must be relevant beyond yourself. That means designing experiences that:

• Reflect human stakes
• Allow space for player interpretation
• Reward agency over ideology

If your message can’t survive player freedom, it doesn’t belong in a game.

4️⃣ 🎮 Mechanics Speak Louder Than Words

Use gameplay to tell the story:

• Guilt can slow reload speed
• Fear can shrink FOV
• Regret can change ambient audio
• Hope can brighten palette after key decisions

If you need a monologue to explain it, the design isn’t doing enough.

5️⃣ 📊 Respect the Market

Players know what they like. If your retention drops, your reviews crash, or your fandom fades—it’s not a fluke.

Players are not obstacles. They’re your reality check.

If you ignore the audience, you’re not an artist—you’re a ghost shouting in an empty theater.

💥 What Happens If You Ignore This?

• You get games people skip through
• You lose IP value because no one cares about your world
• Your story team burns out trying to write around broken systems
• You fail to convert your narrative into emotional retention

And your story becomes one more thing players forget by the end of the week.

🌌 What Great Narrative Looks Like

Imagine a game where:

• Your weapons evolve based on moral decisions
• NPCs recognize player choices from hours ago
• Failure reshapes the world—not just the checkpoint
• The soundtrack shifts dynamically to reflect emotional state
• Cutscenes are optional because the play itself is expressive

In that world, every action feels like part of the story—not a pause between plot points.

That’s not fiction. That’s the future—if we start designing for it.

🧨 Final Word

Writing in games is broken not because of the medium—
—but because of the mindset.

We let ego replace empathy. Message replace meaning. Control replace collaboration.

It’s time to fix that.

Players don’t care about your past.
They care about what the game lets them feel, do, and become.

They are the story. Not you.

And the sooner studios accept that, the sooner we’ll stop writing forgettable fiction—and start designing unforgettable experiences.

✍️ About the Author

This article was written by Rev Design, a consultancy founded by veteran game developers — not corporate HR generalists.

At Rev Design, we specialize in helping game studios build better teams by designing recruitment pipelines tailored specifically for the games industry. We work hands-on with your leads to define roles, evaluate candidates meaningfully, and create hiring processes that actually reflect what game development requires — creativity, collaboration, and competence.

If you’re tired of losing talent in translation, struggling with mis-hires, or watching brilliant candidates get filtered out by generic processes — we can help you fix that.

👉 Visit us at www.revdesign.jp
📩 Or reach out directly: info@revdesign.jp

Build better teams. Make better games.