In Defense of Lore

To some, I think “lore” has become a dirty word. It implies a certain hyper-facination with the space over the player or even a form of superficiality. The unloading of lore can come off as an attempt to imbue an experience with meaning that is perceived as unnecessary or as self indulgent. These are valid criticisms of how lore can be handled in games. That said, I don’t think that “lore” itself is the problem. The desire to give a history, implicit or explicit to a space, is not a design sin. Rather the sin lay in presentation and how the presence of lore may or may not intrude upon the player.

Let us begin by discussing a highly negative expression of lore: the audio log. On a face value, the goal of an audio log is not necessarily insipid. It wishes to impart information about the space or about characters in an expedient fashion. The fundamental issue issue comes on one of two fronts as I can see it. In the first case, a game might front load all of their history into these recordings. Hence the previously mentioned notion of self indulgence. When they become the primary means of communicating the value of a space to a player, they become an impediment. Of course, implicit history is always baked into the design of any space but that can only be a surface level affair. Think on Arkham Asylum or (of course) BioShock. Both games have spaces replete with visual design that implies a history but a great deal of the world is truly explained through audio logs. It reduces the history of a space to little more than a trinket that masquerades as something “important”.

The other major issue of this approach is that is can be oddly intrusive because of how unnatural the execution is. It’s one thing to find a recorded holo-message on a desk in Deus Ex: Invisible War or to follow the Keller family recordings found around Fallout 3. These things make a type of sense for the world and are self contained. They are supplements to a world. They add. But Voxophones (BioShock Infinite) or Audiographs (Dishonored) force themselves into the game world unnaturally. Worse, they actually take up space. They fragment play and shove lore at the player.

So, what is one option? Well, Titan Souls actually has an example of one option. Keeping it to a minimum. Imply your lore and say little. Consider these exchanges. The dialog changes depending on when you encounter this titan. The first is without meeting one of the end bosses, the second time is after.

There’s just enough for me to fill in some blanks. People travel to this land to find Truth. The protagonist paid some kind of price for their weapon. We’re fighting a second god that placed guardians. Other titans are forged from strong souls. It tells us some information but it also allows us to think of what else may have occurred in the game world. For instance, we encounter a knight called Elhanan as a boss and we can now intimate that he once quested here but failed, his strong soul turning him into a titan. Beyond that, even smaller touches contextualize that encounter. Some titans have ancient, unknowable text introduce them when you start the battle. Elhanan’s name shows up in English. This is a being that our protagonist can identify and the game communicates this through the subtitles. This is a fairly elegant way of expressing lore which doesn’t really intrude upon the player.

I’ve talked about the dangers of comparison before but this is also the realm of Fumito Ueda. In fact, his canon contains even less direct explication. This is also the realm of Myst and Riven, which manage even more obfuscation. In those games, the world implies everything. This type of narrative minimalism for offloading lore can work in many ways. It encourages phrenic engagement with the text and allows players to personalize the narrative to a certain extent. It’s a freer type of expression for the player and, I think, a very effective way of drawing player attention through lore. It can have disadvantages. Too little expression can lead to the player feeling generally listless and your world feeling dead. It can drive people away if you don’t carefully place your lore nuggets at crucial crossroads. Like breadcrumbs, bits of lore should lead players through an intellectual forest. Without these, you leave the player lost in a world that lacks any real purpose.

One potential means for delivering lore also rests in segmenting it off from the main story. Non essential facts and world building can remain in the game in explicit detail but can be sought out. The codec conversations of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance are a fair example. That game side steps a lot of the excessive exposition the series is know for by placing a host of amazing world building and character driven conversations in an optional ether that the player can access as they like.

Metroid Prime offers the player a chance to scan items in the world to give them more information but this is seldom a required form of interaction. The incredibly lore heavy Elder Scrolls series relegates most of the intense lore to books found around the world, leaving main and even the side plotlines relatively easy for the lay person to understand. The lore is there; the player just has the option to engage or not. Like anything, this also has drawbacks. Building up a complex world means nothing if the player doesn’t engage. Compartmentalizing lore may allow for streamlined experiences but also can isolate lore too much. Consider, for instance, the over-reliance of item flavor text in the Dark Souls series.

Perhaps the best way around this comes in dialog trees. Within dialog, a player is very rarely required to move off the critical path line and if they do, the branches often converge back in. I don’t have to spend time talking to Yves Tale-Chaser in Planescape Torment or even really sit down and talk with Morte about the Rule of Threes but the options are there and flow easily. In that game, the reliance of questions makes sense. The Nameless One is an amnesiac. Yet, this generally holds for many RPGs or dialog heavy games. Allowing the player to ask as much as they want is a damn good way of getting lore out there without it feeling too forced.

But this is all just the various ways to deliver lore. Why do so in the first place? Well, mostly because context is key. Players are not reliant on lore for motivation; plop them in a game world and they’re going to do stuff regardless of who stole the amulet from the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. Yet, cohesively defined worlds lead to coherent space in which occurs meaningful play. I say “meaningful” very deliberately. The play is meaningful because the player ascribes importance to the space and to their actor’s behaviors due to the presence of lore. Lore provides signs to player upon which they project meaning that motivate interactions.

Even Chess has an implied lore to it, set up through the understanding of the various symbols communicated by the pieces. It’s simple lore but it exists: one side wants to fight the other. That’s it. But because chess is basically an abstracted form of war, all it takes is an adjustment to the images of a piece to change context. Bishops weren’t even called bishops in Shatranj. What we general know as bishops are a mutated form of alfil, a two/two leaper piece representing an elephant. But because we have bishops, Chess carries inherent cultural history and connotations that form a type of lore. “This war is religious.”

Down at the base level, all play is abstraction. Lore takes a finer brush to the canvass and paints a clearer picture of the space. It enhances the text holistically. All working pieces benefit from it and the increased coherency it brings. Spaces become extant, conflicts have stakes, and the abstractions become, well….less abstract. They become something more evocative. The issue is not with lore itself but with how we bring that lore to the player.

Applied rightly and for the sake of enhancing play via building a strong framework for the world, lore isn’t unwanted self indulgence. It becomes something essential and strengthening. A properly applied pinch of sugar baked into the flour that creates delicious results.