Lore.

The word sends a shiver down the spine of every wiki archivist. There’s a wiki for everything these days. Crash Bandicoot was the first game when I was younger that I looked up online, and was genuinely kind of confused as to why there was a wiki for it. It’s a game about a bandicoot that wears pants and jumps on evil scientists. I’m pretty sure it isn’t complex enough to write thousands of words on! Or so I thought at the time. When you think about how much goes into the making of each game, of course, it’s great – a way for even the tiny nuggets of information in long-inaccessible games to remain accessible for new fans, or for casual fans to breeze through and pick up on additional context they might have missed out on. Human beings really are natural archivists – we have a quiet desire, a lot of the time, to create order out of the chaos. To give things purpose, and structure. That’s why you can look up the moral standing of Huey, Dewie and Louie.

Lore is neat, but it often comes as a byproduct of a good story, well-told. A good story will slip in perhaps casual details about the world, leaving a few stretches of exposition to fill up some holes. And the larger a world gets, the more popular it is, and the more wiki articles it gets. I’m a pretty big fan of some things, and I know that I can get kind of obsessive and nitpicky over certain details, wanting to know everything and anything more I can about design, writing, symbolism, etc. That’s just the kind of person I am. But I find myself thinking recently – is too much lore good for us?

Lore, the backstory of a story, is supposed to remain in the background. As a writer, you have to be careful with your exposition! That’s why you never open a fantasy novel with some long-winded diatribe about the formation of your world and the seven hundred gods you built to have dynastic squabbles with. That information comes later, and even then, it can’t just be all dumped haphazardly on the reader without purpose. You’ll notice that wikis are quite bad at leaving things untouched, shall we say. If there is the merest hint of a character’s presence somewhere – if some offhanded line said “Oh, they might have been a spice miner in the back regions of Klatuu-IV sometime”, there will no doubt be an entry on the wiki about that person maybe being a spice miner in the back regions of Klatuu-IV.

I used to be the kind of person who loved their media chunky, a text I could really sink my teeth into. It’s not to say I don’t like that any longer, but the problem comes with the particular flavour of the chunkiness. If the artist has managed to create a positive, chunky work using a story that’s actually worth telling, then more power to them. But so many artists make the mistake I used to make. They look towards the ideal of a massive wiki, stuffed with so many different entries, and sprinkle liberally through their work little tidbits – or big tidbits, if it’s going poorly. It’s hard to tell a good story! But the wrong way to go about it is to stuff the story with more exposition. It deadens the reader’s interest, and only excites the author and perhaps the mega-fan. The mega-fan, realistically speaking, is not really the person you always want to please. It’s always nice when they are pleased, but your world doesn’t need to be fully, completely fleshed out to be engaging. You don’t need to know everything about everywhere! Mysteries spark the imagination, and unsolved mysteries or a few smaller lingering questions keep the fire alive. And if you can tell a story in half the words, arguably just as well, isn’t it right to be economical about the whole thing?

So we come to the main topic of this article, the thing that made me think about this in the first place. In the original Pathologic, there is a letter system. In the bottom right hand corner of the screen, a symbol will sometimes appear, along with an audio prompt of paper rustling. This indicates that you have received a letter. Hitting the ‘L’ key opens a menu that reveals the letter. Letters do two things. They are generally quite a long piece of text that adds some information about a character’s backstory or the world. This is done mainly in the case of Artemy’s campaign, whose letters take the form of journal entries from his father’s diary, a welcome and fascinating insight into the mind of someone else, someone who you cannot talk to. It gives him a voice you otherwise would not have heard. Bachelor also gets letters from the Powers that Be, yet another valuable insight into a character who might not otherwise receive a strong presence throughout the text. This is a really cool way to add to the depth of the world, while also not being completely essential for players who are less interested in the inner workings of the world and characters.

The second thing letters do is provide you with objectives, often to start sidequests or the main quest for the day. As such, they have to be read carefully, and the player has to make sure they know what the letter means and where they have to go. While these letters also often provide a window into characters’ thoughts and motivations (even if they are lies), these letters must be carefully read, otherwise certain quests can be failed or missed entirely. Pathologic 2, alternatively, ditches the whole letter system, and instead sends civilian messengers to enter dialogue with you. That way there is both less information to relay and a clearer way to relay it. However, in removing the letter, you have removed a very valuable way to interact with the game characters in a different way other than in dialogue. Yes, not all the letters are great; Changeling’s letters are fairly repetitive and short, for instance. But there is something to be said for these additional windows into the soul.

But should game objectives be given in an unclear fashion? Should we as players have to parse long paragraphs of text to determine where it is we need to go? Or are we, as the players, owed an easier, more fluid solution, with the extra info as “extra for enthusiasts”? I think the answer cannot be a one-size-fits-all. Yes, I prefer the letter system in Pathologic, but certainly I would not appreciate it as much if it was a different kind of game. In fact, I’ll modify that statement: I prefer the letter system in Pathologic, but I think Pathologic 2’s method is much more natural. Look, game objectives shouldn’t be unnecessarily hard to figure out. The goal should always be in sight – what should be in doubt is how we get there. What I find interesting then is the inundation of information we as players can receive.

Sci-fi games in particular are terrible with this. They drop countless new sci-fi jargon words at you, expecting you to keep up, because, well, they’re sci-fi games. Huge codexes, as in the Mass Effect series, can be all fine, but the information in there should be non-essential. As I say, extra for enthusiasts. Most importantly, a story should never be written to fill out a codex or a wiki. I have to say, the modern era of media consumption is kind of exhausting – at least in terms of huge, blockbuster content I am supposed to be keeping up with. Star Wars is exhausting these days. Marvel? Exhausting. Should it be exhausting to watch a TV show, only to realize that there are about five more about to crash down on top of you like a tidal wave?

Video games have the potential to tell stories in fluid ways, without a need for long winded expository dialogue. Tunic is a good recent example of this. A game that tells a story almost entirely through exploration and imagery, relying on a player’s imagination and ingenuity to get through the game. Outer Wilds does much the same. People also like Elden Ring for these reasons. The interactive mystery is the point. Spoon-feeding us information is only good for the mega-ultra-fans, the ones who will luxuriate in the finer details. But you don’t need fine details of your world’s background or lore to tell a good story. Silent Hill 2 is chock-full of symbolism, and it’s not something you’ll necessarily notice on your first playthrough. One could consider that “fine details”, but in truth, there’s never a moment in the game that’s like “oh, the water symbolism is relevant because…” – it takes replays and careful thought and analysis of the game to bring that information out.

Long text or awkward expository dialogue, when you break it down, only serve to interrupt the flow of a story. Tell the audience what they need to hear, and save the extra for enthusiasts for something you can interact with optionally. This isn’t me saying “all stories must be told in as few words as possible”, but stories should be told as carefully as possible. I love long stories as much as the next person, and I don’t mind if they’re a little verbose, but there is a difference between a story well told and a backstory well told. You never want to be quite as clumsy as this: “Hi, I’m Haggis Clawface of Klatuu-IV. I used to be a miner in the back regions, which we around here call “The Ogredash”, due to the fact giant ogres dash over us and kill us all. That’s how I broke my fingers, you see. I see you’re opening your mouth like you want to talk, but, in fact, I have information about the local price of salt, which I’ve been keeping track of for the last three years. Did you know, that in the year 2789, salt prices – oh, the year 2789… what a year. That was the year I…”

It’s tempting to lavish love and attention on your world as a writer – because you do love it. You do want people to know about how much time and effort you put into it. And that’s a good thing! But there has to be a fine line between lore and story, especially in a story that the player ultimately has control over the pacing with, that they need to be the ones to guide the game to its finishing point. Expository letters and journal entries and long-winded dialogue trees – there’s a time, and a place, and you have to be very careful when you use them. Using them too often could confuse or irritate the pacing of the entire game, and even get less patient players to put the game down. Writing should be a delicate tool, not a sledgehammer of exposition. We don’t need a wiki article about Klatuu-IV, let me tell you…