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Showing versus telling

By: Mattgamerr

  As we all know, a storyline can make or break your game. The graphics can only hold people so long. If you game is just plain boring or hard to read, you won't hold many player's attention. In order help you all write better, I will be writing a series of articles to share with you some of my knowledge about writing, and coming up with good plotlines.

  For my first one, I figured I'd start with something simple, "showing instead of telling." While it's not as applicable to games as to books, the rule still holds in your writing.

  "Showing instead of telling" is a complicated way of saying you need to let the player/reader make thier own decisions about what is happening and how a characters are feeling. This is made much easier in a game, as opposed to a story because you have more than one means of showing -- writing and graphics. Anything you make with graphics is automatically "showing," because graphics can't really "tell" to the player.

  Here's an example of this difference in writing. Let's say that Suzy and Dave are two characters in a game. Suzy kicks Dave in the head. Dave leans down holding his head.

Telling:
Dave - "Ow! You hurt my head you stupid &@%#*!"

Showing:
Dave - "Ow! What'd you do that for you stupid &@%#*?!"

  The difference may seem irrelivent, but it is actually very important. When Dave says "You hurt my head," the player is instant bored (whether the player realizes it or not, he actually is). Of course she hurt his head! You just showed her kicking the guy in the head! What happened, did you suddenly decide that the player was too stupid to come to the conclusion that if Dave got kicked in the head it would hurt? The 'Showing' line brings the character right back into the emotion and meaning of the event by saying "What'd you do that for?" The telling line is bland, boring to read, and worst of all it assumes the reader is dumb.

  In the example above, telling destroys the emotion of the game by giving too much information. It could also work the other way, by not telling the player enough. Here's another example.

Telling:
Sally - "The evil witch lives in the haunted woods. Let's go find her and make her give us the magic potion!"

  You can tell there's something wrong with it, you're just not sure what, right? That's because it leaves the reader with too many questions that should've been shown. "The evil witch"; just how evil? 'Evil' as in she grinds children's bones for the fun of it, or 'evil' as in she doesn't pay her taxes on time? We're left unsure. "Haunted woods"; How haunted are they? "Magic potion"; What kind of magic? Is it special magic? Here's the way the same kind of line can interest the reader.

Showing:
Sally - "There's a witch in the Woods of Lenark who killed my friend James in a raid on this village. However, if we find her revivification potion, we can bring him back to life! The Woods of Lenark are haunted with zombies though, so we have to find some way to get around them first."

  Isn't that a bit more interesting? Often, you'll find that by adding detail into an otherwise boring sentence, you'll also find that you've created a common goal for the characters, a reason to exist, or a reason to be fighting together.

  To create rich environments with interesting characters not only takes a skilled artist, but skilled penmanship. You can only give life to your wonderful graphics with wonderful words, so make sure that each and every line is shows the player something unique and new about your characters and world, because telling them the same thing will only make them hit the escape button that much quicker.