A Video Game Writer’s Lament: ‘We Can Do Quite a Lot Better’

Jon Ingold finds most video game writing empty at best, turgid at worst.

Ingold, an author of celebrated narrative-driven games including 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, acknowledged that his writing tastes were “fussy” and was reluctant to single out studios. But he was comfortable calling the text-heavy Disco Elysium, one of the century’s most acclaimed role-playing games, “massively overwritten and really tedious.”

“The game’s opening is 20 minutes of someone describing breathing,” he said, recounting the internal dialogue by an amnesiac detective who wakes up with a hangover. Ingold knows his opinion is not popular; critics praised Disco Elysium for its wit and political themes. “It is not the best thing I’ve ever read, and I’m not going to be able to pretend that it is,” he said. “It’s fine, but we can do quite a lot better.”

It does not help, Ingold said, that smaller game studios rarely employ in-house writers, and that writing is often seen as the nebulous pursuit of geniuses rather than as a craft to be studied.

Ingold’s style is dialogue-heavy, with short sentences that scroll quickly offscreen. But his range is wide, from poetic to farce. In one possible ending for Heaven’s Vault, a game of lost languages and archaeology, the protagonist Aliya says that nothing lasts: “Not possessions. Not fame, not fear. What was kind becomes monstrous, what was understood is overturned.”

For Ingold, writing is fixing. He puts words on paper and then figures out why they are broken. Branching strands of his stories explode outward and, piece by piece, he ties them together.

“In theater, the way you move around a stage creates drama and tension and flow, and that is deliberate, and it’s chosen, and some of it is intuitive but you can definitely tell when it’s been done really well,” he said. “And writing does that. Sentences do that. Words do that. They have momentum and rhythm — but nobody talks about this stuff.”

Ingold lamented that the good video game out there is hard for players to find. (He said he struggled to remember examples even when he enjoyed them, and then mentioned The Last Express, an adventure game that was released in 1997.) A game’s popularity often depends not on quality, Ingold said, but on the whims of the biggest Twitch streamers or the algorithm that drives Steam, the main distribution platform for computer games. Independent studios struggle to break through. Many close.

“It’s like every month Steam just spins a spinner, and the winner comes out, boom,” Ingold said.

“Suddenly everyone’s playing Palworld,” he continued, referring to the Pokémon-like survival game that was briefly one of the most popular in the world. “And you don’t know why, they don’t know why, nobody knows why. A whole bunch of studios say, ‘Quick, we need to copy Palworld,’ but by then it’s too late because the spinner has spun again.”

After co-founding the studio Inkle in Cambridge, England, in 2011, Ingold worked in a building in his back garden that was so cold in winter that he had to wear gloves when he typed. He kept a spreadsheet that calculated how many months the studio could survive.

Now Inkle’s library generates enough money to allow Ingold to make only the games that interest him. He has won three Writers’ Guild of Great Britain awards for video game writing, for 80 Days, inspired by the Jules Verne novel; Overboard!; and Over the Alps.

Ingold’s favorite writer is Gene Wolfe, whose sentences he calls “crisp, clear and powerful” despite often nonsensical plots and deep misogyny. But Ingold shares more of a spirit with one of Wolfe’s contemporaries, Ursula K. Le Guin.

“She was really out to prove that science fiction could be literature at a time when most sci-fi was kind of rubbish,” he said. “And it feels a lot like what we’re doing in games.”

Sam Barlow, who wrote the narrative games Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality, called Ingold’s writing succinct, rich and evocative.

“There’s an extreme literary bent,” Barlow said. “There’s a real respect for the player’s intelligence in a way that’s extremely rewarding.”

Barlow said that while most choice-based games offer smoke and mirrors, Ingold builds worlds that react to how players express themselves: “What he’s doing is so much more ambitious.”

Ingold’s writing process has been influenced by his academic past. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge and taught it at a school in North London for five years before his first job in games, at a subsidiary of Sony, where he met the Inkle co-founder Joseph Humfrey.

Ingold defines his own writing as “top down, bottom up,” with similarities to a math proof. At the top is a sense of what he is trying to achieve — funny dialogue, or the development of a relationship — and at the bottom are the words and phrases that get him there. Like a proof, he said, “these two things come together and meet in the middle in a messy way, and then you solve the problem of them meeting.”

Finding the top-down purpose of a story sounds somewhat mystical, with Ingold saying his job was to find the “truth” existing in disparate ideas that were “glued together.”

In Heaven’s Vault, those ideas include a translation mechanic, robots and a setting inspired by “Citadels of Mystery,” a book he found in the Jesus College library. The game became about the experience of somebody from a poor background being in a university environment, as well as how knowledge helps construct and enforce social inequality.

With Pendragon, an Arthurian turn-based strategy game, Ingold struggled to understand why he was writing it until Brexit came along. “I was like, ‘Oh, right, now I know,’” he said. “It’s because somebody has taken away what I think Britishness is and is turning it into something much, much worse. And I was angry about that.”

Ingold said he did not care if his messages were missed because their underlying truths should still make the games more satisfying. But he does appear to worry that the narrative complexity of Inkle’s games can muddy the moment-to-moment storytelling.

In Heaven’s Vault, players can explore locations in any sequence. Ingold needed to ensure that no matter the order, the relationship between Aliya and her robot companion Six evolves in real time. The branching system is so complex that even Ingold does not know what Aliya will say next. It is a clever solution, Ingold said, but he feared that it came across as forced.

“I feel like a lot of the stuff that I write isn’t really polished or smooth,” he said, adding, “It’s just hopefully interesting and fascinating.”

Ingold wrote 80 Days with Meghna Jayanth, who called him a systems designer with a writer’s soul. “There’s a dissatisfaction that drives his ambitions,” she said.

Jayanth said that while she was constantly trying to be nice to the player, Ingold would set up traps and challenges. “He taught me about the value of lying in games,” she said. “I think he’s a little bit of a sadist as a designer.”

In recent years, Inkle has released A Highland Song, about a teenager’s journey in the Scottish Highlands, and teamed up with Google for The Forever Labyrinth, a browser-based game featuring historical artworks.

Next up is Miss Mulligatawney’s School for Promising Girls, which Ingold said will get a pithier name before it is released this year. Its genesis was a conversation Ingold had with his aunt about her 1940s school days, and about one of her teachers in particular.

“It got me thinking about how stories portray teenagers and young people from the past — they’re always polarized,” he says. “Victims and innocents, dogmatic tub-thumpers, working-class gold. But real young people have always been messy.”

Ingold described the game as a “baffling” clockwork machine: 11 characters moving around a tight space with their own detailed routines, knowledge and assumptions.

He had tried different narrative approaches for years before cracking the code by separating what the characters believed to be true from what was actually real. Their assumptions may change based on how the player interacts with the story, knocking the diorama off course.

Although the industry is favoring experiences like Fortnite that can be played and monetized forever, Ingold said he had no grand plan to revolutionize games.

“The only way that you can make a change is just by making stuff,” he said, adding, “If it happens to bubble up and get noticed, then maybe it will change the way people feel.”