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The Perils Of Badly-Handled In-Game Text
[12.26.11]
 In the 12th annual installment of Ernest Adams' Bad Game Designer: No Twinkie column, the consultant looks at a host of mistakes developers make -- and a surprising number of them center on how games handle text.
Adams has been writing these columns every year since 1998, and one of the reader-submitted topics included criticism of the use of "Rapid Non-Stop Text."
Shairi Turner wrote, "I have a problem with dialogue moving too quickly. We don't all read at the same speed. While I may have found pressing X or clicking to be tedious in the past, I miss it when it's gone." This is a basic accessibility failure. (Most games have terrible accessibility.)
According to Adams, "You need two buttons: Advance to Next Page (which should happen instantly, not in a slow scroll or worse yet, a letter-by-letter display -- TeleTypes were old news by 1985, okay?) and Jump to End, which should take the player to the next point at which she has to take action or make a decision."
Uninterruptible text and unreadable subtitles both make the list, too, as well as entries about player alignment and strategy game design, among others. The feature is live now on Gamasutra.
By Staff
May 24, 2012 04:32:47 PM PST
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