It's almost a shame this is all targeted at Dagger. He's just going to disappear into real life and we'll never get the conclusion this saga deserves.
Let's constructively criticize Dagger's crap game, as long as it's to his liking.
- Thread starter Serious Mozzarella
- Start date
It's almost a shame this is all targeted at Dagger. He's just going to disappear into real life and we'll never get the conclusion this saga deserves.
Uncle Phatso
Mid-Card Championship Winner
Bullshit, Dagger and disappear into real life? J you are smoking some good shit.
All this criticism is bullshit until the covers are brought in. Post them.
Tiger Chaos Theory
You ain't drawin' shit!
I just like to point out I'm not aiming anything at anyone. I haven't played Dagger's game, nor do I have any immediate plans to do so. I am not piling up on him so much as I am making fun of the effects of his anger.
ScreaminNormanSmiley
formerly ScreaminNormanSmiley
I helped design the ET game. I have every right to insult him.
DirtyJosé
Best angle of all: retirement
My first RPG Maker game was about three guys trying to get some weed in a fantasy setting. Riveting, I know. I was 15, fuck you.
DirtyJosé;3470557 said:
Hand it over to Blizz. He might think its about bears ruling the world.
Tiger Chaos Theory
You ain't drawin' shit!
DirtyJosé;3470557 said:
I stole idea that and turned it into a mainstream success. Just thought you should know.
DirtyJosé
Best angle of all: retirement
Actually, I don't think they ever got high outside of the intro cutscenes. They just couldn't catch a break.
You cunt!
ScreaminNormanSmiley
formerly ScreaminNormanSmiley
You won when you decided to be above the influence, got a job, and became a productive member of society.
But that sounds so long and difficult.
ScreaminNormanSmiley
formerly ScreaminNormanSmiley
It also has 26 playable characters.
Damn society gets me every time.
Well now I'm sold!
Let me tell you a little bit about myself.
I've been an avid videogamer since my Primary School years. Sonic the Hedgehog and Kirby were my first two characters I loved. I had all sorts of make-believe adventures in the schoolyard, invented new Sonic characters and having all sorts of blue speedy adventures. As I grew up I still enjoyed platformers but grew a new appreciation for games with story. Nowadays I mostly play games with a good balance of brilliant story and changing gameplay (Heavy Rain, for example, is one of my favorite games of all time), but I also absolutely adore visual novels (such as the gripping and haunting 999, which was just about nothing but story). On the other hand, I still love Kirby, Sonic, Mario, and other pick-up-and-play games. I grew up a gamer. I was a gamer. I am a gamer.
I have been making videogames since the sixth grade, during which I created a Pac-Man clone for my Science Fair project using Game Maker. I've been through several engines - Game Maker being the most prominent, though I bounce around for experimentation. I've made, or attempted to make, point-and-clicks, RPGs, text adventures, platformers, even Phoenix Wright cases. I've even taken a few programming classes in order to try and get a better understanding of how this all works. As a videogame lover and someone who is considered quite creative, I wanted to try and get my hands dirty designing something of my own. Very few of my projects ever reached anything close to completion, but I came out of each project with a better understanding of the under-the-hood work that a designer has to tinker with to get everything just so. so before you start grumbling at me, just realize - I have made a game before. I've made several, in fact.
One of these games was made with the QUEST engine. I don't want to say its name, because just thinking about it embarrasses me and makes me want to curl up inside myself and bash my eighth-grade self very hard with a brick. I'm Googling it right now just for you, and it's bringing up some long-forgotten memories that I wish could stay forgotten. But alas, there is a lesson to be learned here.
The QUEST engine is an Interactive Fiction designer. IF is a more formal name for text adventure, a genre that I still rather enjoy today. Infocom's H2G2 game is brilliantly fun, even if it is harder than hell and unintuitive at times. Anyway, I thought I'd give designing IF a try. I had my hands on the demo version of QUEST, which was severely limited in its capabilities. One could only make six rooms and I believe twenty objects, if that. But this wasn't going to stop me from achieving my dream, oh no! I was going to make a text adventure, dammit, and I was going to unleash it to the world!
So here I am in eighth grade - A dumb kid with a dumb sense of humor and a vision of grandeur. This game was going to be interesting, funny, minimalistic, simple, fun! All at the same time! You'd play as a girl, and she'd need to get to school, and...uh....that's it, really. And so I worked on this game, oh how I worked on it. I'm talking maybe three whole hours of work, work, work! I was so proud when it was done!
Now, when you're in eighth grade, quality control isn't exactly your biggest priority. And this I suppose was my downfall. I submitted it to the great wide internet and promptly forgot about it until a year later. My goal was complete, after all. Why would I need to go back and look at reviews or feedback?
Fast forward to said year later. I am a dumb kid with a dumb sense of humor, but this time, I am a high schooler. I decide on a whim to replay the game. Being the designer, it doesn't seem so bad. Maybe a bit spartan, but I forgave myself because I knew exactly what to do, all the easter eggs, and how to get to the goal. Plus, it was made with a trial version. Still curious, I Google search this game, just to see if there are any reviews of it on the internet.
There are.
Two reviews, in fact.
And they tore the whole thing to shreds.
My ninth-grade heart was crushed as the reviewers verbally destroy my rooms, my goal, the entire game. They laughed at the embarrassingly poor room descriptions ("You are standing in a living room."), the fact that I hadn't bothered quality testing at all, and that the goal to get to school could be achieved while completely naked, with nothing but the matches from the dining room table. I thought I had created a basic but fun world, but what I really had done was create the bare minimum to class it as a game while loading it with in-jokes and humor only I would find amusing or even understand. They ridiculed the fact that I put the player character as an object in each room, not bothering to make her invisible in the list of objects to be examined. During a certain part involving a state change, the game crashes spectacularly if you try and look at yourself, due to there being a flaw where I created two objects with the same name and the game is confused which to manipulate.
I tried to make a text adventure while only understanding the bare minimum about the genre, with flawed tools and no plan going in. How could it have been anything but a disaster?
Now as I said before I was crushed. But on the other hand, as I read these reviews, I had my friend Ben next to me and he thought the reviews were hilarious. I could sort of see the funny side of things, but I still wasn't ready to accept the fact that I could have made something so bad.
Later that night I replayed the game, trying to explore every facet of the code and of the "finished" product. The bugs in the game were astounding. The concept was dull. The writing was awful which is the kiss of death in an Interactive Fiction, and I could not believe I thought this was anywhere near good enough to submit to the internet. What was I thinking?!
This, Dagger, was a learning experience. I learned from my mistakes and learned that sometimes you need a harsh dose of reality to bring you back to Earth. I started seeking criticism on my works and testing/experimenting with anything I wrote, created, etc. And lo and behold, when I took feedback into account, my artwork or writing or whatever I was doing at the time improved. It may have hurt at first, but it was for my own good. Once I stopped believing that everything I created was gold, I could start truly creating gold.
So that's enough about me. Let's move on to your game.
Dagger, the only reason I stuck with your game for as long as I did was because I wanted to see just how bad it could get. I wanted to walk through a door and find myself on the complete wrong side of the room than what was logical. I wanted more one-block houses that turned into massive rooms on the inside. I wanted more ridiculous, cheesy, unrealistic dialogue, combined with some of the worst character names this side of pro wrestling. I wanted more battles with bosses that lasted one turn. I wanted more...until it became an absolute chore to get through and I had Lee play it for me.
you're going to ask if I made it out of the first town. Well, technically, if you start out as Dagger then yes, I did. I just started a game as Dagger today in fact in order to show my friend what I was talking about when I mentioned Division Blade to him.
Dagger: This is a serious question. You say you're some kind of RPG master, who's played tons in his lifetime. Are you lying? Because you seem to have missed out on the basic rules of geometry, style, and pacing that every RPG follows. Your towns are a haphazard mess, with sparse decoration and no logical sense. If you have a large city, it should look like a large city, not a forest with little tower-huts inside of it. You need a grid, parallel lines, roads, meadows, butterflies - little touches that make cities come alive.
Instead you give us flat, boring, bland environments with few details or really anything interesting at all. The whole first three or four hours of the game is going from place to place, city part to city part, trying to find the one thing to interact with so we can get another one-hit boss battle and another boring block of dialogue. Oh, and your cutscene triggers are rubbish anyway. You shouldn't have to manually trigger a cutscene when you should be in the middle of a cutscene by walking back towards the girl blocking the exit and talking to her. That part should play automatically. but since you obviously skipped every tutorial the engine provides (or maybe you tried the tutorial and made the town in Dagger's opening before getting fed up and making Large Boring Brick Town) you wouldn't know how to do that.
To top it all off, nothing in this imaginary world of yours makes sense! Even imaginary worlds need to follow their own clearly defined set of rules. Yours looks to be a definite primitive fantasy setting, so why are there electronics shops and videogames? No one seems to be using any electronics! I'm all for mixing fantasy and modern technology but not when it's handled so horribly in brain-breaking ways. As my friend Alex said: "It's like he had all these ideas but didn't bother organizing them, instead choosing to throw them on a computer screen and hope.".
Your "romantic" dialogue sounds like it comes from the non-naked parts of a porno flick. Your characters are wooden and you attempt to inject a bit of fourth wall humor at the absolute worst possible times in the worst possible ways. For example, on your ship, you mention a Crow's Nest. We enter the crow's nest and immediately the dialogue lampshades the fact that it looks like a plank floating in the water. Just awful! Don't draw attention to things like that!
Look, I could go on and on about this but I need to wrap this up because it's three in the goddamn morning.
As said before, shortly after playing your game, Mozz and I tried to mess around with RPG Maker and make something of our own. I read up on tutorials and we hammered toether a basic story that is still being rewritten and changed. It took me a month to make our first town, and that's because of all the testing and exploring of it I did, adding little details like butterflies, bushes, a shop, paths. Maybe in a later post I'll post some screenshots of what I did.
I've watched the opening cutscene to our game a million times now, because I wanted it to be perfect. It still isn't and the dialogue needs some serious rewriting. But there's one thing in particular I want to talk about. And it is this:
I made this intro cutscene from scratch based on a rough idea we had for the story. The only thing in the video I didn't make were the sound effects, the masked man's sprite and his mugshot. The comic took me a day to create. The programming for the cutscene took three. The fine tuning took one or two. The background of the clock tower took half a day, which was spent conceptualizing, creating, and installing the animation script. So all in all this whole intro when all was tweaked (and this wasn't even the final version) took a little over a week to do, and that doesn't include the several weeks of fine tuning I did whenever we worked on the thing.
And you know what the kicker is?
That whole intro, all that work, won't even be in the final build of the game.
It just doesn't fit. We rewrote the story and its concept. We didn't want it to be so dark, and the whole masked man mystery was erased entirely. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices, and it had to go.
That's the thing, Dagger - Quality control. you can't just shove everything into a videogame's first draft and hope it works. It takes more than just quantity. A good videogame is more than its length or the amount of meaningless characters you can play as. I'd much rather play a fantastic three hour game than an awful ninety hour one. Don't focus on adding more artificial gameplay or boring-as-shit walking around parts. focus on making the good parts great. Focus on cutting what needs to be cut and making sure you have a game that won't bore people to tears. Length can be fine if you story can only be told in ninety hours, but there are very few videogames that can lay claim to that. In fact, there are maybe only one or two that can truly lay claim to this.
There's so much more I could write on this subject but I doubt you'll read this post. Maybe I'll make shorter ones in the future. I just had quite a lot to say on this subject since it's been bubbling in my head since July. Sorry this post is the size of goddamn War & Peace.
I've been an avid videogamer since my Primary School years. Sonic the Hedgehog and Kirby were my first two characters I loved. I had all sorts of make-believe adventures in the schoolyard, invented new Sonic characters and having all sorts of blue speedy adventures. As I grew up I still enjoyed platformers but grew a new appreciation for games with story. Nowadays I mostly play games with a good balance of brilliant story and changing gameplay (Heavy Rain, for example, is one of my favorite games of all time), but I also absolutely adore visual novels (such as the gripping and haunting 999, which was just about nothing but story). On the other hand, I still love Kirby, Sonic, Mario, and other pick-up-and-play games. I grew up a gamer. I was a gamer. I am a gamer.
I have been making videogames since the sixth grade, during which I created a Pac-Man clone for my Science Fair project using Game Maker. I've been through several engines - Game Maker being the most prominent, though I bounce around for experimentation. I've made, or attempted to make, point-and-clicks, RPGs, text adventures, platformers, even Phoenix Wright cases. I've even taken a few programming classes in order to try and get a better understanding of how this all works. As a videogame lover and someone who is considered quite creative, I wanted to try and get my hands dirty designing something of my own. Very few of my projects ever reached anything close to completion, but I came out of each project with a better understanding of the under-the-hood work that a designer has to tinker with to get everything just so. so before you start grumbling at me, just realize - I have made a game before. I've made several, in fact.
One of these games was made with the QUEST engine. I don't want to say its name, because just thinking about it embarrasses me and makes me want to curl up inside myself and bash my eighth-grade self very hard with a brick. I'm Googling it right now just for you, and it's bringing up some long-forgotten memories that I wish could stay forgotten. But alas, there is a lesson to be learned here.
The QUEST engine is an Interactive Fiction designer. IF is a more formal name for text adventure, a genre that I still rather enjoy today. Infocom's H2G2 game is brilliantly fun, even if it is harder than hell and unintuitive at times. Anyway, I thought I'd give designing IF a try. I had my hands on the demo version of QUEST, which was severely limited in its capabilities. One could only make six rooms and I believe twenty objects, if that. But this wasn't going to stop me from achieving my dream, oh no! I was going to make a text adventure, dammit, and I was going to unleash it to the world!
So here I am in eighth grade - A dumb kid with a dumb sense of humor and a vision of grandeur. This game was going to be interesting, funny, minimalistic, simple, fun! All at the same time! You'd play as a girl, and she'd need to get to school, and...uh....that's it, really. And so I worked on this game, oh how I worked on it. I'm talking maybe three whole hours of work, work, work! I was so proud when it was done!
Now, when you're in eighth grade, quality control isn't exactly your biggest priority. And this I suppose was my downfall. I submitted it to the great wide internet and promptly forgot about it until a year later. My goal was complete, after all. Why would I need to go back and look at reviews or feedback?
Fast forward to said year later. I am a dumb kid with a dumb sense of humor, but this time, I am a high schooler. I decide on a whim to replay the game. Being the designer, it doesn't seem so bad. Maybe a bit spartan, but I forgave myself because I knew exactly what to do, all the easter eggs, and how to get to the goal. Plus, it was made with a trial version. Still curious, I Google search this game, just to see if there are any reviews of it on the internet.
There are.
Two reviews, in fact.
And they tore the whole thing to shreds.
My ninth-grade heart was crushed as the reviewers verbally destroy my rooms, my goal, the entire game. They laughed at the embarrassingly poor room descriptions ("You are standing in a living room."), the fact that I hadn't bothered quality testing at all, and that the goal to get to school could be achieved while completely naked, with nothing but the matches from the dining room table. I thought I had created a basic but fun world, but what I really had done was create the bare minimum to class it as a game while loading it with in-jokes and humor only I would find amusing or even understand. They ridiculed the fact that I put the player character as an object in each room, not bothering to make her invisible in the list of objects to be examined. During a certain part involving a state change, the game crashes spectacularly if you try and look at yourself, due to there being a flaw where I created two objects with the same name and the game is confused which to manipulate.
I tried to make a text adventure while only understanding the bare minimum about the genre, with flawed tools and no plan going in. How could it have been anything but a disaster?
Now as I said before I was crushed. But on the other hand, as I read these reviews, I had my friend Ben next to me and he thought the reviews were hilarious. I could sort of see the funny side of things, but I still wasn't ready to accept the fact that I could have made something so bad.
Later that night I replayed the game, trying to explore every facet of the code and of the "finished" product. The bugs in the game were astounding. The concept was dull. The writing was awful which is the kiss of death in an Interactive Fiction, and I could not believe I thought this was anywhere near good enough to submit to the internet. What was I thinking?!
This, Dagger, was a learning experience. I learned from my mistakes and learned that sometimes you need a harsh dose of reality to bring you back to Earth. I started seeking criticism on my works and testing/experimenting with anything I wrote, created, etc. And lo and behold, when I took feedback into account, my artwork or writing or whatever I was doing at the time improved. It may have hurt at first, but it was for my own good. Once I stopped believing that everything I created was gold, I could start truly creating gold.
So that's enough about me. Let's move on to your game.
Dagger, the only reason I stuck with your game for as long as I did was because I wanted to see just how bad it could get. I wanted to walk through a door and find myself on the complete wrong side of the room than what was logical. I wanted more one-block houses that turned into massive rooms on the inside. I wanted more ridiculous, cheesy, unrealistic dialogue, combined with some of the worst character names this side of pro wrestling. I wanted more battles with bosses that lasted one turn. I wanted more...until it became an absolute chore to get through and I had Lee play it for me.
you're going to ask if I made it out of the first town. Well, technically, if you start out as Dagger then yes, I did. I just started a game as Dagger today in fact in order to show my friend what I was talking about when I mentioned Division Blade to him.
Dagger: This is a serious question. You say you're some kind of RPG master, who's played tons in his lifetime. Are you lying? Because you seem to have missed out on the basic rules of geometry, style, and pacing that every RPG follows. Your towns are a haphazard mess, with sparse decoration and no logical sense. If you have a large city, it should look like a large city, not a forest with little tower-huts inside of it. You need a grid, parallel lines, roads, meadows, butterflies - little touches that make cities come alive.
Instead you give us flat, boring, bland environments with few details or really anything interesting at all. The whole first three or four hours of the game is going from place to place, city part to city part, trying to find the one thing to interact with so we can get another one-hit boss battle and another boring block of dialogue. Oh, and your cutscene triggers are rubbish anyway. You shouldn't have to manually trigger a cutscene when you should be in the middle of a cutscene by walking back towards the girl blocking the exit and talking to her. That part should play automatically. but since you obviously skipped every tutorial the engine provides (or maybe you tried the tutorial and made the town in Dagger's opening before getting fed up and making Large Boring Brick Town) you wouldn't know how to do that.
To top it all off, nothing in this imaginary world of yours makes sense! Even imaginary worlds need to follow their own clearly defined set of rules. Yours looks to be a definite primitive fantasy setting, so why are there electronics shops and videogames? No one seems to be using any electronics! I'm all for mixing fantasy and modern technology but not when it's handled so horribly in brain-breaking ways. As my friend Alex said: "It's like he had all these ideas but didn't bother organizing them, instead choosing to throw them on a computer screen and hope.".
Your "romantic" dialogue sounds like it comes from the non-naked parts of a porno flick. Your characters are wooden and you attempt to inject a bit of fourth wall humor at the absolute worst possible times in the worst possible ways. For example, on your ship, you mention a Crow's Nest. We enter the crow's nest and immediately the dialogue lampshades the fact that it looks like a plank floating in the water. Just awful! Don't draw attention to things like that!
Look, I could go on and on about this but I need to wrap this up because it's three in the goddamn morning.
As said before, shortly after playing your game, Mozz and I tried to mess around with RPG Maker and make something of our own. I read up on tutorials and we hammered toether a basic story that is still being rewritten and changed. It took me a month to make our first town, and that's because of all the testing and exploring of it I did, adding little details like butterflies, bushes, a shop, paths. Maybe in a later post I'll post some screenshots of what I did.
I've watched the opening cutscene to our game a million times now, because I wanted it to be perfect. It still isn't and the dialogue needs some serious rewriting. But there's one thing in particular I want to talk about. And it is this:
I made this intro cutscene from scratch based on a rough idea we had for the story. The only thing in the video I didn't make were the sound effects, the masked man's sprite and his mugshot. The comic took me a day to create. The programming for the cutscene took three. The fine tuning took one or two. The background of the clock tower took half a day, which was spent conceptualizing, creating, and installing the animation script. So all in all this whole intro when all was tweaked (and this wasn't even the final version) took a little over a week to do, and that doesn't include the several weeks of fine tuning I did whenever we worked on the thing.
And you know what the kicker is?
That whole intro, all that work, won't even be in the final build of the game.
It just doesn't fit. We rewrote the story and its concept. We didn't want it to be so dark, and the whole masked man mystery was erased entirely. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices, and it had to go.
That's the thing, Dagger - Quality control. you can't just shove everything into a videogame's first draft and hope it works. It takes more than just quantity. A good videogame is more than its length or the amount of meaningless characters you can play as. I'd much rather play a fantastic three hour game than an awful ninety hour one. Don't focus on adding more artificial gameplay or boring-as-shit walking around parts. focus on making the good parts great. Focus on cutting what needs to be cut and making sure you have a game that won't bore people to tears. Length can be fine if you story can only be told in ninety hours, but there are very few videogames that can lay claim to that. In fact, there are maybe only one or two that can truly lay claim to this.
There's so much more I could write on this subject but I doubt you'll read this post. Maybe I'll make shorter ones in the future. I just had quite a lot to say on this subject since it's been bubbling in my head since July. Sorry this post is the size of goddamn War & Peace.
Serious Mozzarella
Special Victims Unit
Wanna see an intro that took us 3 hours that, even with shitty placeholder dialogue and shitty placeholder music, all looks better than Dagger's entire game?
Gameplay starts at :35
Gameplay starts at :35
Uncle Phatso
Mid-Card Championship Winner
Balls were broken in that post Doc, I diserve rep for reading that brick wall of text I just stumbled into.
Uncle Phatso
Mid-Card Championship Winner
Not quite on the level of Will's word forts, but much more entertaining to read.
Yeah, what Doc said seems pretty good. If that's not helpful criticism, I don't know what is.
As a writer, I know how hard it can be to let go of certain parts of a story that you're really attached to. For me it might be a particular scene or even just a joke, but if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. Everything in every story HAS TO move the narrative forward. If it doesn't, then there's no point in it being there, and it must go. With 90 hours of story telling, I have to believe there must be a ton of stuff worth cutting out.
As a writer, I know how hard it can be to let go of certain parts of a story that you're really attached to. For me it might be a particular scene or even just a joke, but if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. Everything in every story HAS TO move the narrative forward. If it doesn't, then there's no point in it being there, and it must go. With 90 hours of story telling, I have to believe there must be a ton of stuff worth cutting out.
I agree with everything else you've said, but I've always felt that the above is one of the worst pieces of literary advice ever handed out. It's not quite as bas as 'write what you know', but then in my view neither is genocide. I gave lectures on the creative writing process for a while, and one of the first things I tried to convey to people what not to obey the above rule, which they have all had drilled into their heads by Stephen King's 'On Writing'. I am not generally in favour of banning books, but for that one I might make an exception.
If everything in a story (of any form, be it novel, film, game or other) is devoted to advancing the narrative then what you end up with is a bloated plot that is unlikely to convince a reader/viewer/listener to care about it. Plot is ultimately derivative, and whether you believe Gozzi that there are thirty-six, Tobias that there are twenty or Aristotle that there are only three, it is commonly accepted that narrative is finite, and since it is finite it is ultimately derivative, and because it is ultimately derivative it is seldom engaging.
I struggle to put my finger upon a single text that I enjoy for the story alone. Outside of modernist work narrative is the critical trunk around which most fiction is built, but a trunk that is not adorned with branches and leaves is pretty fucking boring to look at. This is not to say that plot cannot be entertaining, but a plot can ultimately only be as entertaining as the environment in which is transpires. This is why 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe' and 'Twelve Angry Men' are works of deep and moving artistic genius, but me simply recounting the plots of those plays is something that nobody cound possibly be persuaded to care about.
What engages a reader is precisely those elements of a text that do not advance the narrative. Characterization, description, imagery, summarization and exposition ( maybe not so much). Do you have any idea how long Midnight's Children would be if you cut out every paragraph that could justifiably be considered to be purple? You'd be axing a majority of the book, and turning one of the seminal works on magic realism into an extremely average story about post partition India.
Yann Martel's Life of Pie doesn't bother trying to advance the narrative at all until one third of the way into the book. The opening chapters are almost all anecdotes about the practice of zoo keeping. This is the same for a great deal of quality fiction, which to a greater or lesser extent prioritises world building and character development ahead of pushing forward the plot. If the reader has not been drawn to care about the characters and their world then the plot is not going to hold their attention. It's why nobody reads those incredibly dense spy novels despite them having narratives that make the Booker Prize short list look simplistic.
And then of course there is the fact that writing for its own sake is an essential part of any text. The era of realist fiction ended a few hundred years ago. We've had Virginia Wolfe and her fellows teach us about modernism, and we've transcended quite some distance from that in the past forty years. It is now widely recognised that an extract from a text can exist entirely for its own sake. Ian McEwen can spend six pages talking about strangers by the side of the road, and the reader will lap up every irrelevance detail for no other reason than because it's masterfully written. Hell, a lot of modernist material issues a gigantic 'fuck you' to the concept of advancing a narrative at all, and whilst it's not to my taste one cannot reject its success as a means of expression.
Obviously things become somewhat more complicated when dealing with film and television where a far more stringent time constraint is imposed and the writer's hand is forced to contain a set amount of narrative in a set timespan. There's also the fact that, since one is dealing with a visual medium, almost everything can justifiably be presented as narrative in it's own way. Even there however it is recognised that not everything need advance the plot. Find me a film that doesn't contain at least half a dozen scenes that could be shaved without a single person in the audience noticing and I'll consider you to have done very well for yourself.
The beauty of unlimited mediums such as novels, or in this case video games, is that they don't have and kind of real time constraint placed upon them. The creator has almost total freedom to present the characters, world and story however they feel best, and as such there is absolutely no need for every word to be advancing the narrative. Hell, I'd even go so far as to say with a video game (which usually live or die based on immersion, which is closely tied to world building) advancing the narrative is even less important. There's a good reason for the hundreds of utterly pointless NPC's who litter each and every JRPG ever produced.
So yeah... those ten worlds you typed... they're wrong.
Hulk Hogan's Brother
Stop asking me what I'm gonna do!!!
OK yeah, so everyone on this site either makes cool games or writes bestsellers. Man, that makes me feel so insignificant.
Good Golly It's Ollie
Magical Girl
Don't worry Rattlesnake. You can join me in the "unemployed actors" line if you want.
By the way, is EVERYONE here a Troper? Rock on.
