Post #1066912

Campbell Walker (aka Struthless) from Australia made a beautiful video well grounded in media theory about replacing phone addiction with zine addiction last week, which is not what this is about. He mentions a 43-year-old book on communication as technology, Orality and literacy by Walter Ong, and I got incredibly excited about it because it describes oral and text-based communication technologies, and what are the pros and cons of each, and while Walker uses these beautifully to frame problems society has because of social media, I recognised the passing of mainstream narrative video games from primarily a text-based thing to an oral one (and hey there is not a large gap between the latter happening and GamerGate starting, even though Sierra had ladies designing games like well over twenty years before any of that nonsense! Wow!) Even some of my favourite designers like to talk about it like gospel that games shouldn't have a lot of text. And I have to say, the only video game in recent memory that I see trending every month on tumblr is Disco Elysium, and there's a huge reason for it. It's because the way oral storytelling is used in games is often an extended, descriptive UI element, and games that have so-called buttloads of text that might have a (sometimes optional, sometimes added later) oral element use text in an artistic way where text is more than a boring manual that no one wants to read. This hasn't been exactly a fair characterisation of text and its possibilities, now has it. Anyhow, I'm just so excited now, because Ong's theories make a huge case for why a game with so-called buttloads of text can be actually pretty great not just to make, but also experience, I have to squeeze this inside my reading list and soon. #Writing #VideoGames #OralityAndLiteracy https://archive.org/details/oralityliteracyt00ongw/page/n9/mode/2up