Which is funny, because plot is at least theoretically the cheapest aspect (in some cases it can be done by one person working alone with no special equipment!), and therefore the one it makes the least sense to cut corners on.

But I suppose movies and tv involve a lot of editing, re-takes, doing things out of order for various pragmatic reasons, cutting things out for time or because they didn’t look good onscreen, and with all that maybe it’s not surprising that plot falls by the wayside, because plot is about the gestalt and not about any individual scene.

Plus, it’s easy enough to suspend your disbelief until it’s over–if you’re immersed, you probably won’t worry too much about what seems like minor inconsistencies or whatever, because you’re trusting that by the end it’ll all hang together.  And when you get to the end, well, you may have forgotten or at least no be longer thinking about various quibbles!  So it’s entirely possible to watch a movie, enjoy it, come out of it thinking “gosh that was great, very emotionally satisfying”, and only later go “wait, actually what happened there”… especially if you rewatch it.

that’s just it! you would think that good writing would be prized, considering it’s so cheap relative to a single visual effects shot, but in practice you would rather sacrifice it in favour of literally any other aspect of the production.

“it looked terrible and the acting was wooden and the actors unappealing but gosh that plot was fantastic, 10/10” just isn’t a common review summary

A lot of this just has to do with the structure of filmmaking by which the director is the boss (though accountable to studio funders/moneyman producers)

adjust to the other factors - actors and sets have already been paid for and film has already been shot, actors might be tied to production or promotions deals, but scripts can be rewritten easy separate from all of that, on the fly, even a new writer (this was how Joss Whedon really made his name)

In TV this is different writing has higher priority, some structural reasons relating to time pressure – you NEED to deliver a coherent time block by this deadline, every week, but the sets and actors are paid for for the season, at least the first 13/22s of it

A lot of the “Golden Age” of “Peak TV” has to do with the formation of writers rooms’ and the rise of the showrunner - the head writer who runs the whole production, has approval over casting, writing, directors - in the early ‘80s

Before TV tended to be more like standup comedy or magazines - you might have a core group of staff writers pitching ideas and guiding episodes but they solicited a lot of outside writers to submit stuff, or took pitches on spec, which is why a lot of old shows kind of play like commedia dell’arte, with the characters representing broad types with trademark quirks that any writer can pick up and run with

Then in the ‘80s you started to get more funding for staff, which let you bring on more writers and have them spend more time rewriting what outside stuff you had. That’s when shows started to get more distinct - Miami Vice was an obvious example but that was more in the way the action played to the visuals; that had something to do with writer-showrunner Michael Mann being one of the first-generation film school graduates coming out of the ‘70s, who’d been trained on the field as a tradition to innovate with. This is also how you get the densely knit comedy of early Simpsons, with money into writing

That was well-funded network shows at least, first-run syndicated shows – ones that weren’t run on a network but directly took bids from broadcast stations in each market – tended to be lower-funded genre pulp stuff. But even there there were standouts in the ‘90s, Xena, Babylon 5, even Star Trek: The Next Generation were syndicated

The Star Trek franchise of series was one of the last to take a lot of outside scripts, too, their tradition was always drawing on the wide pool of SF print writers. Anyway the syndicated angle kind of died as FOX and WB and the UPN gathered a lot of spare channels and regularized them, ran stuff like Buffy and Voyager themselves

So as the ‘90s went on you started to see more and more seasonal arcs as shows gained in their narrative capacity, then you saw the premium channels (which had more been doing anthology shows or soft porn for their original series) latch on and away we go

now that you mention cartoons, I guess they are one of the rare venues that can sacrifice aesthetic and actors for writing, although notably that tends to mean comedy rather than plot per se.

I think these explanations fail when you realize how many video games also have terrible writing. I’m not talking, like, excuse plots where they don’t care about the writing because it’s just there to justify the gameplay, either.

Exclusively looking at games with 3 in the title you have Bayonetta 3, The 3rd Birthday (aka Parasite Eve 3), Diablo 3, and Borderlands 3. (Mass Effect 3 is also on the list of badly written 3s but we know why that happened and only the ending was bad.) Each of these games has a story that is absolutely fucking God-awful from beginning to end such that you want to turn off subtitles and switch to a language you don’t understand, but you can’t, because then you don’t know what your objectives are.

And you can say “oh ho ho ho video games are not high art, the audience doesn’t care,” but the audience definitely NOTICES, from fucking minute one the vast majority who played these games was like “holy fuck this story is so bad.” More importantly, “the audience doesn’t care” would be an excuse to treat story as an afterthought, put no effort into it; but that’s not what happens!

Each of these games puts a huge amount of effort and pride into their stories! A lot of budget goes to their story cutscenes, they’re front and center, characters are always talking to you to bring up the story, you cannot get into the game without constantly having to interact with the story, and these are, just, I cannot overemphasize how inexcusably bad these stories are. There are games where they didn’t give a fuck about the story and it shows, but the worst ones are the ones who put huge effort into stories that are just so, so fucking bad.

The production schedule and constraints aren’t the same for a video game. You need story locked in a lot earlier to know what assets you need, but you also know well ahead of time what’s available and never have to deal with “oh shit this actor is unavailable at the last second.” It’s much easier to splice together and repurpose content when there is a last second change, but that is only a factor in 3rd Birthday and then only kind of (a different director came on last second to salvage a game with an inexcusably bad front and center plot the previous director was proud of and couldn’t manage to). You need more writing in terms of # of scenes, but your overall writing cost is much lower as a proportion of budget. There’s no reason not to get it right. And these all have stories that any person could have seen and said “This is completely unacceptable.”

So if terrible terrible writing being acceptable in films and TV is explained by the particulars of film and TV production, how come the same happens to video games without those production constraints?

maybe writing is just really hard 🤔

I CAN ANSWER THAT ABOUT THE VIDEO GAME WRITING.

So some of the assumptions Brazen has made here are just Wrong. For starters- in game dev, aesthetic and overarcing narrative in a video game are determined very early on. But story- everything from plot to scene-to-scene writing- tends to change heavily over the course of development.

This is because video games are developed in iterations, and the focus in these iterations is core mechanics and level design. If something about the core mechanics and level design isn’t working, the story has to change to match the new mechanics– and sometimes, that happens last-minute.

To take a pretty famous example- Banjo-Kazooie was originally intended to be an anime-style Zelda-like adventure game and was code-named Project Dream.

But Banjo went through development hell, and after changing platforms, changing genres into a 3D platformer, and changing from a 2D game to a 3D game, it came out looking like this:

Everything about the original Project Dream story had to be scrapped. And Banjo, as a collectathon platformer, has a minimal excuse plot story- but it’s still completely different from what Project Dream was going to be. The story was determined early on, but it had to change to meet the needs of the game.

Most games don’t go through this dramatic of a shift, but the principle is still there on a micro scale. Every game has to change story elements to fit the needs of the gameplay- even the ones where story is a major factor.