Post Script
Another game to successfully subvert a sacrosanct literary rule: show, don’t tell
For decades, the medium’s trajectory was unwavering: lines of text were to be replaced by 2D scenes, then 3D objects, then fully interactive environments with soft shadows and discernible pores on each character’s mocapped face. By the late 2000s, a passage of text was an admission of failure on a technical level: we couldn’t render this thing happening, so, here, read about it instead.
The indie gaming boom began to change the consensus on reams of writing, though. Viable digital distribution meant smaller target audiences, including players with a nostalgia for text adventures and 8bit visuals, both of which proved a necessity for singleperson teams making their first titles. But that nostalgia quickly gave way to evolution and innovation as Dear Esther and Emily Is Away created new forms of text adventure, where what the player isn’t shown is a deliberate and crucial part of the experience.
Even now it’s often a pragmatic design call as much as an artistic one to convey something in written language instead of visuals, and if the small teams behind Sunless Sea and Kentucky Route Zero had committed to bringing every scene to life in Unreal Engine we’d still be waiting for their release in 2030. Of course, if they had done that, neither game would be anywhere near as good as it is.
As any Football Manager devotee will tell you, the less a game shows us, the more active we are in filling in the gaps. Crusader Kings III
appreciates the subtlety of telling you just
enough to spark your imagination. In the gaps where the writing leaves mystery, you pour your own fanciful thoughts. What must the knights of my court think of me now I’m wounded and disfigured? What was it that made my wife go and have an affair? I bet that hunt I went on was brilliant fun. If every random event triggered a fully voiced cutscene, they simply wouldn’t mean as much, because they wouldn’t require anything from you.
This active participation you fall into is a clever combination of player-controlled pace, evocative but sparing descriptions of events, and a knowledge that each event’s triggered either by a decision you made, or a decision someone else did. They’re only as random as life itself is – the diplomatic summit you might find yourself invited to is a ripple from a far-off ruler’s decision to pursue a diplomatic lifestyle at some point in the last decade.
In truth, we’re probably still a long way from the era when all of Crusader Kings III’s
medieval subterfuge could be rendered as animated events. With core rules like a German board game, the sheer complexity of its underlying systems and the number of permutations to arise from its variables is the stuff of a Brian Cox monologue. But long before they reach the point when they feasibly could show the player everything, designers understand it’s often best to tell them instead.
In the rare instances like Crusader Kings III when they do it so well, every player’s story becomes as personal as a teenage diary and absolutely unique, never to be repeated by another player. Perhaps they’re rare because they ask so much of the player. Just as it seems a tall order to memorise all the levels of both medieval hierarchy and in-game menus, and so many other aspects of the typical Paradox grand strategy experience. Some players don’t want the burden of such active authorship, and they’re probably the same players who feel turned off by the absence of explicit objectives in this game.
These players are immune to Paradox titles’ especially evangelical acolytes, who adore a 20-deep stack of menus as much as an archaic political system. But what everyone can agree is that it’s often best to directly contradict your old creative writing lecturer: in games, at least, it’s often better to tell than to show.