A while back I mentioned that I had been playing through Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and some aspects of it gave me opportunities to reflect on larger aspects of game design. I got distracted with playing through and then writing on Tears of the Kingdom, but I wanted to revisit another component of Jedi: Survivor that I had found frustrating. The problems I ran into were by no means unique to Jedi: Survivor. And they aren’t necessarily “problems.” But they did cause some degree of frustration.
I’ve done a fair number of essays on storytelling, and one way that stories in numerous mediums struggle is through “lore.” Lore is simply background information that is not immediately necessary for the understanding of a plot, but which can help flesh out the narrative’s world, the characters, their motivations, and so on. Lore is important because it helps us see the bigger picture. This is true even if we never have to engage with it.
For things like books, lore is usually woven into the narrative itself – a paragraph or page or chapter is spent describing a past event that happened to help explain why the main character behaves the way they do, for example. Visual media will often resort to flashbacks, but it is also possible within larger franchises to see a kind of lore book on offer – information about all the details you might miss written down in a gigantic encyclopedia.
Video games tend to opt for a sort of combination of the two. Lore is usually provided through a kind of encyclopedia, but that encyclopedia is built up as the player interacts with the game. You might observe a particular piece of the game’s environment, which then adds an entry to a journal or codex that you can then check out (usually helpfully accompanied by a brief pop-up letting you know what the entry was and that you can press a button to go to that entry right now, if you so choose).
There is something nice about this system. It means you get to choose how much of that lore you engage with. You never need it, so you could just ignore it completely and be fine. Or you could read every single entry you come across to absorb as much information about the game as possible.
But what I find frustrating is how little use these in-game lorebooks seem to have. If they were taken out entirely, how many people would really notice or care? Not to say that no one would care, but there rarely seems to be a focus on reading these things. And in part I think that’s because these lorebooks are seen as distractions.
So I wanted to talk about the idea of lore in video games from a mechanical perspective. What are ways in which players could be encouraged to see lore as not merely an interruption from normal play, but a component of that play?
The Dreaded Reading…
It is a common trope both inside and outside of the gaming community that gamers hate reading. This is actually untrue in its strict sense. People who play video games often do quite a bit of reading, depending on the kinds of games they play. Whether those same gamers engage in reading outside of video games is a separate question.
Sometimes this idea can be brought up as a criticism of the gaming community, sometimes it can be brought up by gamers themselves as a joke, and sometimes it can be used by gamers as a way of voicing a frustration with the game they’re playing. I want to focus on that last bit here.
It’s not common, but when a player is confronted with a significant amount of text, you may hear the complaint that they didn’t want to read a book – they wanted to play a game. They crave interaction, not information.
But where the complaint takes the framing that reading is the problem, it mistakes the true cause. Because that person probably does plenty of reading in their everyday life. They just don’t think about it. It is only in these select contexts where they think about reading as reading that they find themselves opposed to it.
And it is this jumping-off point that I want to use as a basis for talking about lore and lorebooks in games. Because the issue with lore ends up being that it is reading merely for its own sake. It is text divorced from the rest of the game, and as such highlights the idea that the player is reading and not playing.
One way that games can get around the idea of reading as reading is through familiarity. If a player understands what an item is and does, they can minimize the amount of reading they need to do to catch up. This is a sword – you put it in your hand and swing it, and then things die. This is a helmet – you put it on your head and you take less damage. The only things that matter are numbers, and maybe special effects. The text then reinforces the gameplay, and we don’t think about it as reading.
But there’s also the other end of that spectrum: the unfamiliar. If a game uses objects that have no connection to real world objects, then the player is likely to be curious and want to figure out what that new item is and what it does. In this way, item descriptions will be invaluable. And since the player is learning something that could be important for gameplay purposes, they won’t process it as reading, but as a component of the game.
The FromSoft games take this latter approach by handing you a variety of objects that are strange. The purpose is to try and get you used to reading item descriptions, which can help you get unstuck from certain situations. Found a key, but don’t know what door it goes to? Good chance that the item description contains the answer.
It is in these same descriptions that FromSoft then puts its lorebook. Little details about the world are put before the actual description, so that you can also learn little bits about the game’s environment as you read about what objects do. It’s a mixture of storytelling and information communication.
Of course, there are going to be two drawbacks. The first is that you’re only encouraged to read these descriptions when you need information. The various weapons and armor in the game can’t offer this same utility – they’re still weapons and armor, and you know what to do with those.
The second is that there’s not actually a reason to engage with the lore. Since the descriptions are set up to tell you what the items do at the end, you can easily skip over the story bits and just get to what you want.
These two factors add up to the fact that you can still just ignore the lore. Who cares? Just swing your sword, kill enemies, get experience, level up, and repeat until you win. Which isn’t a bad way to engage with the game. But it does mean a significant chunk is being ignored.
There’s simply no reason that this has to be the case, though. Again, when players are confronted with reading as a task that enhances their gameplay, they are much less likely to reject it. It becomes part of the fun. The trick is figuring out how to make it not feel like a chore.
The Integration of Lore
The most obvious examples of how more environmental storytelling can be blended into the gameplay is through puzzle games. Your exploratory puzzle games which emphasize exploring a world and trying to discern how strange contraptions work (think Myst) will tend to find some way to combine the two…though not always. And even then, we are usually talking about pretty minimal integration. A single note contains a puzzle clue, or you are pointed to a book that contains a solution.
But could less puzzle-y games accomplish the same thing? There’s no reason to think that they couldn’t.
Again, the most obvious implementation is a puzzle. You need to perform some task, but it’s not clear what you’re supposed to do. But if you’ve been engaging with the lore – however the game sets it up – then you will be able to figure out what to do. This could be as obvious as spelling out the solution as long as the player looks it up, or it could be more subtle, or require combining clues from multiple entries.
Of course, for this to work, two things need to be true. Firstly, the player needs to be clued in to the value of engaging with the lore. It would be pointless to go through the effort if the player is just going to ignore it all anyway because they’re used to ignoring it. And just as importantly, if the player is used to ignoring the lore, then when they actually encounter these obstacles they will be stuck in a way that is frustrating rather than fun. Secondly, the integration needs to be common – it should not simply be a rare reward, but the case that most new entries will provide information that the player will want to pay attention to. The game should help teach the player how to play, and part of that is getting them into habits. The habit of checking and reading new lore entries would be necessary.
But we can extend these ideas even further. For example, understanding the lore could become part of the story that is told. Did you run around and learn about a new area and collect a lot of lore entries and read them? Then perhaps that will impact the dialogue choices you can make with characters. And importantly, not just choices that add a bit of flavor, but which provide some kind of significant impact, which perhaps change quest lines or create new options.
And in the ideal form, this process might be extended to the main story itself. Some bits of the lore might suggest a different path to take in the narrative, or warn about something that’s about to happen. Things which you could pass by, but by interacting and exploring and reading you gain knowledge that can be utilized. Did you sneak into an enemy base and collect a letter which contains information on the enemy’s battle plans? Then maybe rather than just sticking that into a collectible pouch for the player to look at, the player could make use of that letter in some way.
The point of this would be to encourage players to not just explore, but to engage with a system that is incredibly easy to ignore. It rewards players who are curious and want to know more.
Although by suggesting this, there is a tightrope that needs to be walked. Because in rewarding one style of play, the potential outcome is to effectively punish other styles. Did you not explore as much? Did you not read the lorebook? Then you get bad quest endings. You get unsatisfactory endings. You lose out on tons of bonus items. You are playing wrong.
Which means figuring out how to implement such a system that integrates the lore without making it so necessary that everyone must engage with it – that engagement becomes the dominant strategy. The point is to reward curiosity, without necessarily demanding it.
That said, it is probably better to veer too close to getting players to engage with more elements of the game and risk accidentally punishing players that don’t, rather than continuing to have this strange miniature book that is tacked on to the game.
Concluding Remarks
I have become increasingly frustrated with the focus on lore over time because it feels so ubiquitous. The Soulslike genre, in particular, places such a heavy emphasis on lore without giving players much reason to engage with it beyond the potential appeal of deciphering and analyzing. Plenty of players enjoy this, and it is great in creating a communal project. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the use of lore in this way.
But it does raise a big question: why should I care? If a game is insisting on telling so much of its story through these bits of text that I don’t need to engage with, then why should I? The more I am confronted with this question, the more I find myself not bothering. It’s not that analysis is boring – it is definitely enjoyable in many respects. But it is also work. And why go through all that effort of reading everything and cross-checking different entries and pulling together pieces of information and assembling it all into a cohesive structure…for nothing? Far easier to just let someone else handle that.
Abstracting Games 