Read all about it.
This subject is a weird one. It's one of those 'Blogs I'd didn't think I'd ever have to write' kind of situations. Let me explain. I like lore. A consequence of being such an ardent fan of high fantasy role playing games, I suppose. (I became use to reading hours worth of text in order to flesh out the story behind the peculiar shape of that pond over there.) Lore gives me the opportunity to immerse myself in the fictional world's I play in and come to believe in the people who live there. I've likely said this before but immersion is the make-or-break for fantasy, if I'm going to invest one iota of caring into your narrative you better be sure to immerse me first. This is achieved by establishing a solid main story and expanded through the use of expository lore books scattered about the place to answer those questions that you never thought to ask.
So maybe someone can explain to me why it is that people seem intent on abolishing the practise of in-game lore books altogether. Every now and then, I come across another one these baffling articles where critics tear into in-universe written works. 'It's lazy' some say 'It takes too much time to read' conclude others. For some reason there are people who seem to think the act of reading should be relegated only to the medium of books and nothing else. These are the same kinds of people who gawk at the fact that cut scenes still exist, claiming that they are the product of indolent storytellers. (I'll touch more on that subject at a later date. Can't get too worked up now.)
Let me start by making one thing abundantly clear; there is nothing wrong with the basic concept of in-game lore books. I'm not going to claim that they are all high-art or the pinnacle of story telling, but I will say that some lore books fit perfectly into their world. As for the complaint that taking the time to sit back and read some lore, 'detracts from the action', I would have to refute that maybe RPG's just aren't your game. If you are so bloodthirsty that you cannot stomach a peaceful moment of reading, perhaps DOOM might be more your cup of tea. Although 2016's DOOM does have lore entries in it as well, Egads!
I'm being a little bit unfair. I realise that some people object to being forced to sit down and read, and to be honest, I do to. I would prefer to read when I want to and stick my sword in someone's guts when I'm more in the mood for that. But the important thing to remember when it comes to lore books, (Or at least for those that are implemented properly) is that they are entirely supplementary to the core narrative. Rarely do game developers seriously expect their audience to sit down with a pen and paper and study their texts. Lore books are meant to be flavour material for the world just like world clutter and artwork. That's why these large RPG makers employ studios dedicated to managing all of this lore work, because it doesn't need to be handle by the core Dev team. So unless they've encountered a game that has literally held them hostage on the page, I find their arguments a little bit silly.
To demonstrate what I mean, let's focus on game series that is just dripping in excess lore; The Elder Scrolls. Ever since 'The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind', Bethesda have been dedicated to making the land of Tamriel seem as real as possible by fleshing out the world with lore books. These lore books have increased in number in every entry to the point where there is enough reading material in these games to fill a library. (That library would be full of 6 page long books but it would still be full.) Bethesda even had to form a lore department to make sense of it all and, crucially, to be capable of pronouncing the names of Dwarven ruins.
The Elder Scrolls' lore is undeniably expansive, but do you know what else it is? Entirely optional. The Elder Scrolls games are all open world RPG's that are developed with the core idea of player freedom. You are allowed to go practically anywhere and forge whatever story you so choose. Because of this, it is impossible to localise your lore writing efforts into crafting exposition that is relevant to the player and their situation, because they could be doing literally anything. As such, the lore team just try to flesh out as much as they can about the world around you through a variety of different lore books. You have history books, play scripts, nature books, written notes, journals, theology books and, my favourite, story books. This approach also allows the lore writers to focus in on the specific region in which that game is set, helping to establish cultural themes in the works. 'The people of Skyrim are considered brutish dullards so lets make some books that riff on that idea'. 'Dark Elves are considered irritable so lets try to capture that in this letter'. It's just another way the team at Bethesda make their world feel unique, diverse and lived in.
On the other end of the spectrum to that 'write about everything' approach is much more targeted and specific use of lore books in games like Deus Ex. The world of Deus Ex is a very complicated one, despite very much resembling our own. The transhumanist dystopia that we see presented in 2000's Deus Ex did not spring out of our world overnight, there is a lot of history explaining every step of the way. Not all of this history would make sense to include in the main character's dialogue. Imagine how clunky it would be if Joseph Manderly just said "Hey Denton, did I ever tell about the history of augmentations?" (Sheev would have to file a lawsuit.) Instead Eidos utilises little datapads that offer snippets of insight into the wider the world.
This is different from Bethesda's approach because Eidos takes advantage of their relatively linear narrative progression. As the player gets further into Deus Ex, they might start to notice the clever way in which datapads they find will elucidate matters that are about to become very relevant in the main story. Like the introductory pamphlet on UNATCO you receive briefly before you go to speak with UNATCO's director, a.k.a your boss. Or that strange datapad that brings up the topic of 'Grey Goo' before you are tasked with deciding the technological path of humanity's future, for which it would be prudent to take the 'Grey Goo' theory into account. By hooking the expository lore into the wider narrative, Eidos provides the player with the opportunity to dive into the complex issues around them with some understanding about the matters at hand. That goes a long way to making that player care about the stakes of the story.
Those were examples of games that utilised lore to great effect. But that doesn't automatically mean that all properties know exactly how to use it, just look at Destiny. Whenever anyone has a complaint about lore entries in gaming it feel inevitable for Destiny to come up. And for good reason. Destiny is set in a science-fantasy future wherein resurrected human beings known as Guardians protect the remnants of humanity from hoards of alien pirates, space wizards, and a dark entity so abstract that the writers dropped it for the sequel. Destiny is a game with narrative problems. Huge, gaping, narrative problems. Despite being originally marketed as a high-concept Halo successor, Destiny ended up as a shallow, feature light, time waster that has consequently negatively tainted the moniker of 'Looter shooter'. And the way Bungie handled the lore is a big reason for this.
The main purpose of lore in gaming is to create the illusion of substance in your fictional world, thus aiding the act of immersion. As such, the method the player uses to acquire and read that lore is a little detail that is incredibly important for the final effect. The Elder Scrolls gives you lore in the form of books and parchment, like one would expect from a medieval fantasy world. Deus Ex uses holographic datalogs, just like I expect we'll all be using in our sci-fi transhumanist future. Destiny used an app. On your real life smartphone. That means in order to take a look at the lore that you unlocked, lore that we just established exists to immerse the player, Bungie expected players to stop playing the game and bring up their smartphone app. That is literally genius levels of misguided. I'm not even mad.
Unfortunately, that isn't even the worst of it. I know that this particular part of the blog will piss-off hardcore Destiny fans but I have to be honest, the actual content of the lore is pretty weak too. Now I've already bought up how I appreciate it when exposition is conferred onto the player in way that doesn't feel clunky or ham-fisted. I like it when we learn about the world through in-game stories, history books and datalogs. But one thing that all lore needs to be, despite the format on which it is presented, is coherent. (And ideally not pretentious.) I want to have some idea about what you're telling me without feeling the need to pull out a pen and paper and start analyzing the text. Yet that's exactly how I felt whenever I looked at the lore logs on the Destiny companion app. Aimless digressions, obscure fables and stories that seem to exist for the sole purpose of playing the pronoun game. Lore like this doesn't make me care about the world anymore. Lore like this makes me want to stop playing video games.
All of this culminates up to Destiny's biggest issue. Bungie seems adamant to smother the game in lore to avoid maintaining a story. All the cleverly placed, targeted datalogs in the world isn't going help if your world isn't interesting to start with, and Destiny's world is dull. The problem isn't that the concept itself is weak, I actually think there is huge potential in an epic science-fantasy series. Star Wars managed to turn their epic science-fantasy into a ludicrously successful franchise. But they didn't do that by bringing out the extended universe books before they established a solid story with likeable characters. Destiny has no likeable characters. And if you're about to say 'What about Cayde-6?', I'll remind you that I said 'characters' not 'sarcasm recepticles'. (We've got enough of those in Britain already.) What remains is a hollow world without a heart that no one really cares about beyond 'How can I improve my DPS.' And that does not make a solid foundation for a series. Unless your 'Borderlands', in which case it absolutely does.
Lore isn't a concept that is either butchered or mastered, by-the-by, there are some games who pull it off to a merely satisfactory degree. Just look at Bioware darlings; Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I know right, "Are you about to diss the narrative prowess of one of video gaming's premier storytellers?" Yes I am, but only when it comes to lore. The original 3 Mass Effect's and the Dragon Age series are both exemplary examples of their respective thematic genres. Both boast gripping narratives and complex characters that develop in surprising and meaningful ways. The level of comradeship and rapport that you establish with your team in both franchises is the closet some us will ever get to having actual friends. And yet both games have problems when it comes to lore.
First is their presentation. Neither series makes the error of relegating lore to a companion app, (Still can't believe they did that.) but they do shuffle away lore pages into the game menus, requiring players to pause the action in order to read about the world. It is a little bit immersion shattering for the casual player. Heck, I love the games and even I sigh everytime I have to scrolls through menus and tabs to read that book I just picked up. Then comes the content. Again, not pretentious drivel like Destiny, but just bad enough. Mass Effect's lore is the better of the two, full of the technical details that lend some credibility to the technological foundations of their sci-fi world. But just read what I wrote again; The lore features 'Technical details'. This means that there are those times when you'll find yourself struggling to keep your eyes open as you read the opening sentence to the 'Biotic barrier' entry for the eighth time, somehow understanding it less with each re-read.
Then there is Dragon Age's lore logs, >Sigh<. I love Dragon Age, I really do. And there is a lot of really good, interesting lore pieces in these games. The entries about the fundamental laws of magic are essential for anyone interested in that part of the Dragon Age universe. (Even when the games themselves do proceed to break those laws. Especially the one about teleportation.) My problem isn't with these interesting entries. My problem is with the lore entries that are poetry. You read that right. Poetry. And song lyrics. Arguably the same thing, definitely as bad as each other. It is such a shame for a game that features so many exciting storytelling elements, diverse characters and believable world building, to include this kind of lore too. It's as though Tolkien came back to write a brand new epic fantasy but he insisted on inferring the worst parts of Lord of the Rings in there as well, for posterities sake.
I shouldn't have to explain why 'poetry' and 'song lyrics' make for bad addendums onto your lore, but here we are. Firstly, songs are fine for lore. Actually, songs are great, They are a fantastic way to confer the culture of the world to your audience whilst telling them a story. You learn so much from songs. How do these people sing? What kind of instruments do they use? What would these people sing about? It add a layer of mystery whilst simultaneously unfurling that enigma for you to hear. It's effect on world building is... indescribable. That is just the magic of music, I guess. Song lyrics are just words. Fancy rhyming words, but words all the same. I have no idea how the tune goes, what the rhythm is or what the tempo should be. When the player is given song lyrics they've basic just been given a confusingly parsed story, and as I've said, cohesion is important. Poems are much the same, only the morale is usually even more obscure. I'll admit I'm saying this as someone with a very muted love for poetry but I still doubt I'd like this practice even if I was a poetry aficionado. Actually, I might like it even less if I was also judging the quality of those poems. Ultimately, the lore suffers due to an inherent lack of cohesion, like I keep writing. All that said: 'Sera was never' is still a jam.
At the end of the day, there is nothing wrong with the core concept of in-game lore books. In fact, I would argue that it is one of strengths of the gaming medium that we can dive into and explore non-essential aspects of the surrounding world without derailing the plot. You couldn't go into the history surrounding the formation of S.H.I.E.L.D in the middle of 'Captain America: Winter Soilder', even if that could be helpful for understanding some of the finer details of the story. But you can take the time to read about the swordsmanship of Serkonos in Dishonored 2, because Video Games can be as long as you need them to be.
Accepting the wider fictional world of you story doesn't exactly delineate the plot, but it does go a long way to help enrich it. Immersion is a game of give and take; the audience give their trust into the world that the writers have envisioned and in return those writers give little reasons why that trust is well placed. That is all plot is, the creators side of the transaction. If lore books are a useful tool for conducting that transaction then I think that they should be championed not ridiculed. So if you're one of those people who scoff at the idea of reading in games, I would urge you to take a look at the material again and see if the narrative value those words contain outweigh the time cost of a couple minutes. You may just change your tune.
