Thread by @thelintspeed

#GameWriting Lore thread time!

Everyone loves lore or loves to hate lore. But lore is a pretty nifty tool in your writing toolbox, if you know how to use it 🧵

The biggest lore mistake you can make is building tons of lore without context, and then turning that lore into a strait jacket that limits what you can do with the game or game world.

Like anything in game writing, it helps to take a step back and look at your player experience goals. What fantasy are you trying to deliver to the player? How are they expected to interact with the world? What emotions do you hope to evoke? What meaning?

An exploration-heavy world rife with arcane and forbidden knowledge in which every discovery the player makes causes them to wonder if they really want to know requires a very different approach to lore from a party-based cinematic action game.

Sekiro vs. Bloodborne is an instructive comparison. Both worlds have secrets and mysteries, but Sekiro is much more direct about what it expects from the player. This fits that game--the Wolf is not a newcomer. He knows things about the world, and the player should know them too.

Bloodborne, by contrast, is all about the consequences of seeking forbidden knowledge. The player is an outsider. The world is not entirely knowable. Making the lore difficult and requiring a high amount of engagement with the world serves the theme.

How the player is expected to play the game matters too. Ever tried reading all the text while playing with a party in an MMO? Multiplayer pacing usually doesn't allow the player to slowly comb over every bit of lore, so it's mostly there to inform worldbuilding and as garnish

A game like Outer Wilds, meanwhile, is mostly lore! But it gives the player the tools to piece that lore together into useful information about the world, and because it's single-player and doesn't feature combat, the player has the space to concentrate on their discoveries

Which builds to a very important point: the more you want your player to interact with lore, the more useful that lore needs to be to the player.

Generally speaking, very few players want to spend time reading up on the history of your world. Not if nothing they read has any real impact on their experience.

In fiction writing, I've seen the same principle described as "detail vs. information." Detail reveals something meaningful about the characters, the stakes, the story. Information is just the writer showing off that they've done their research. No one likes a show-off.

Good lore is detail, not information. It changes the experience for the player. By providing the solution to a puzzle, unlocking new choices, ensuring the player sees the characters, story, or their actions in a new light, or informing the game's asthetics.

Which leads to my next point: to do lore well, you can't write it all out in a vacuum. You have to know your mechanics, your story, how your player is expected to experience the game world

I usually take is start by answering some high level worldbuilding questions, often related to what kind of story I'm trying to tell, what the themes are, etc. Like "Is there magic in the world?" "Do things generally work out well for heroes?" etc.

My answers are often, again, closely tied to the type of game I'm building and the type of audience I'm building for. Once I have those questions answered, I'm focusing on two things: the high level story and the mechanics for delivering the story & lore.

Once I know how the player is expected to engage with lore, what mechanics reinforce that engagement, and what the general story is about, then I start to dig deeper.

At that point, lore and story inform each other. If it's a lore light game, then the lore exists primarily to bring surprise, depth, and humanity to the experience. I focus on little character details or surprising or entertaining discoveries for the player to make

If I have more space to play with lore and the impact it makes on the experience, then I'm looking for ways for lore to dramatically influence how the player plays or perceives the story. Depending on the genre of story and game, that could be deep mysteries or mechanical changes

I make space in the story for lore if needed, and I adjust the lore as everything that constitutes the player's journey comes into place--the coalescence of their actions, the game's systems, and whatever authored narrative there is.

My goal is that story and lore should always feel as if they're ping-ponging off each other. I want the player to understand the story without digging deeper into the lore, but I want them to understand it differently and perhaps even be able to change the story if they do invest

This is similar to what I do when researching historical fiction. I start by getting a high level understanding of the period, and once I know what my story and scenes are, I can start doing deeper research to get the right details that will enhance the story

Sometimes I learn things in the process that force me to change the story--either because I discover an exciting possibility that I hadn't considered, or because I made a wrong assumption and need to adjust.

Being flexible on lore has a few additional advantages in games, though. It's often easier to shift some lore to support art or design than it is to change whole story beats. And you can involve those other disciplines in developing the lore, which is fun for everyone