The Evolution of Textual Immersion in Video Games
How the development of text in video games through the ‘90s brought us closer to their worlds and characters
If appearance and actions show us what characters are, their words and thoughts reveal their soul.
A mute and thoughtless character may be beautiful, profound, expressive, and efficient, but their desires and motivations will always be opaque to us. We need to think for them, give them meaning for what they do, interpret the meaning of their affections, and follow their steps with our own desires and impressions.
Words have been used in video games since their inception — if not in the course of a narrative, at least in terms of the user interface or cover. Even a simple title or character name can hold the power to influence our interpretation of the game.
We see the power of words with art. For example, in Picasso’s Guernica, the title suggests that the work deals with a bombing of the city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The presence of this title can shape the way we interpret the images in the work. Text can bias players towards certain interpretations of sounds and images. This can even occur from the simple name of a character, such as Pac-Man, it’s name coming from the Japanese word “puck” which translates to “munch.”
Before the 1990s, text was already present in video game interfaces, titles, dialogue, and even in complex narrative interactions. Two notable cases that impressed were Zork, which popularized the text adventure genre for a long time, and The Oregon Trail, one forerunner of the serious game genre and probably the most famous example of an educational game.
In Zork, the player could explore a vast universe made entirely of words. It was like being in an interactive adventure book. This was an incredible thing, the richness of exploration and narrative in this format (text adventure) was much greater than any other exploration or narrative in graphics-based games.
With The Oregon Trail there was a large number of statistical data to be considered and many variables linked to natural phenomena or character interactions that it would have been impractical — with the technology of the time (in the 1970s) — to communicate to the player with graphics only.
From these examples it is possible to see five of the main functions of the textual apparatus in a game:
- Establish a meta-narrative link with the player to introduce them to the game, offer tutorial, hints, etc…
- Partially or fully tell the story of a game
- Transcribing dialogue and describing events, locations or scenes in a game in order to build or imaginatively complement its universe
- Serve as a means for narrative interaction (dialogue trees, etc…)
- Increase the number of variables that can be considered by the player beyond what they can see in the graphics
These functions have been around for a long time, but in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with games like Ninja Gaiden and The Secret of Monkey Island, these functions underwent considerable improvements, especially in terms of items #3 and #4.
This was because there was an intention to increase the immersion of the player’s narrative experience when there was still no dubbing in games. The greater memory capacity, along with the improvement of the audio and video cards, provided other forms of textual interactions.
From here, we will see how these three items developed over the 1990s and shaped the textuality of video games as we know them today.
The meeting between pixels and words
Before the 1990s, you could see words in the game interface or in dialog boxes, but, with rare exceptions, your relationship to words was meta-fictional. This means every word you read didn’t exist within the fictional world, it was just a representation of the characters’ readings, speeches and thoughts. If we were to recall a well-known quote from Metal Gear Solid V, we can say that the player did not have access to the language that was part of the soul of the inhabitants of the worlds they explored.
“It is no nation we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our true fatherland.”
Emil Cioran, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
In the 1990s, with the improvement of computers and consoles, it became possible to place more text inside games and relate it to concrete objects found by the player during their journey. Good examples of this are Myst (1993) and the Resident Evil series games, whose story background largely depends on reading documents, letters, books and other similar items that can be discovered.
It was possible now to put words directly on in-game objects with enough resolution so players can read them. In Final Fantasy VII (1997), developers used pre-rendered images as backdrops. It was common for the player to find boards with Japanese text that could be read without a problem.
However, this kind of phenomenon was not yet a successful practice. Thus, Super Mario 64 (1996), by contrast, had practically incomprehensible inscriptions, because of the low resolution textures.
How to make countries with languages
Some games, such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), used this capability to create a new way of writing that were coherent with the game’s universe.
This concept was already present in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1993), but mere random symbols represented the fictional idiom without well-defined syntax and semantics. In the 1990s, the use of decipherable or non-decipherable linguistic creations for greater immersion in a world foreign to the real world would become more common.
Sona areru ec paldeel? (Panzerese)
Art thou the bringer of ruin? (English)
— Panzer Dragoon (1995)
In Ocarina of Time, specifically in Kakariko Village, you can read signs in the village written in the native Hylian language. This is because the alphabet of this fictional language was properly structured and inspired by the Japanese syllabic alphabet (hiragana).
Creating an artificial language for a fictional world is not as unusual as you might think. It has been employed many times in film and literature, for example Klingon in Star Trek and elvish in Lord of the Rings.
In video games, as in cinema, a fictional alphabet or even a mere set of icons applied in a visual medium results in a greater immersion in the game.
Also, these implementations can have gameplay consequences. It becomes possible, for example, to assemble puzzles based on deciphering symbols, as in Riven (1997). In the case of a larger world to be explored, it is possible to know which nation the player is from — or if is in a foreign or ancient location — based on the language used on a headstone, plaque, wall, etc…
How to imbue worlds with personality
Since the mid-1990s, words have been included in video games on boards, cards, books, inscriptions, etc., but they have also enabled richer expression on the part of characters themselves.
While there was no shortage of pre-1990 games with robust scripts, they were often far removed from the characters seen by players. In contrast, technical improvements to fourth- and fifth-generation computers and consoles provided more detailed graphics and smoother animations that left them with a more tangible representation to gamers.
But that wasn’t all. Game texts throughout the 1990s — especially in adventures and RPGs — saw great refinement in vocabulary, speech, style variety and interactivity. Such refinement probably peaked in December 1999, with the release of Planescape: Torment, a CRPG considered by many to this day to be one of the best-written games and a treatise on what games are capable of in terms of narrative and plot in combination with interactive mechanics.
One of the important things in this period was the attention some titles paid to the linguistic identity of the characters. When dubbing was practically non-existent, the primary way to simulate the characters’ accents was writing itself.
For example, a character that was marked in that decade by his foreign accent was the protagonist (Manny) of Grim Fandango (1998). And a game that excellently explored this textual aspect in several characters of its cast was Final Fantasy IX (2000).
In the Final Fantasy IX cast there are characters with the most diverse accents. Though those accents varied from location to location. For example, highlighted John Barré:
Marcus tends to end most of his sentences with “und so” in German or with “ou quoi” in French. In Italian, he is given a German accent, while in the Spanish one he pronounces most “s” as “z”.
Cinna speaks in a very strong Bavarian accent in the German version and is keen on throwing the word “zefix” at the end of his sentences. In Italian, “Er Cina” was given a Roman accent while the Spanish version made him sound Andalusian. In French, Cinna — spelled Cina — has a speech impediment and lisps.
The only female character of the group, Ruby, bears the name of Carmen in Italian and consequently speaks with a Spanish accent. In Spanish, however, she expresses herself with an Argentinian accent. She is one of the only characters to speak in the English version slightly differently, which makes her sound like an American southern girl. The German localization team was even more creative, making her pronounce words successively in Bavarian, Rhenish, and Saxon to eventually make up her own type!
How to mix words with actions
On the other hand, some franchises have integrated text in an interactive way fundamental to game mechanics.
A notable example was Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei II (1990) for the Famicom, which allowed the player to talk to demons that got in their way and, instead of fighting them, could persuade them to join your team. They preserved this proposal in the series reboot in Shin Megami Tensei (1992) and inspired other games in and out of this series.
Manichean distinctions between “good” and “evil” have also been questioned among alignment choices in RPGs, giving rise to several alternatives to this duality. Among them, the distinction between order, chaos and neutral alignment in Shin Megami Tensei.
Developers have also implemented moral alignments in dialogue trees in tactical RPG games, leading them to interact with issues not only moral but also of a historical and political order (even with an archaic vocabulary). We can find good examples in the Ogre Battle series, such as Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (1995) by Super Famicom.
The entire Ogre Battle series is from the beginning permeated by a depth of political themes unusual until then in video games. In this direction, Final Fantasy Tactics (1997) also deepened a plot of political repercussions, involving religious, family and aristocratic interests, among others, in a Shakespearean-style plot.
All the games mentioned here — and many others throughout the 1990s — have been profoundly influential in games that have become acclaimed for their textual refinement or their interaction with gameplay, indeed many games over the next few decades, and even in recent years.
Thus, if the 1970s and 1980s were the infancy of video games in terms of learning to speak, in the 1990s the video game industry experienced adolescent experimentation and expressiveness that had previously been missing, eventually reaching the sensitivity, charisma and maturity of scripts such as Undertale, Disco Elysium and several others that currently leave some of their words — and the soul of their characters — inscribed in our memories and in our hearts.
