Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dead Space 2 and the Destructive Power of Writing!

Silence has always been a potent storytelling tool in games. It permits writers to make the main character a cipher, an entry point into the world they want the player to explore. It lets them allow the player to engage their internal fiction without obstruction and become a greater participant in the narrative as a whole. But one thing I’d never realized until recently was just how destructive dialogue could be for a game, and how silence prevents writers from absolutely ruining their own fucking game.

There’s bad writing aplenty in good games. Grand Theft Auto 4, case in point, is a game with marvelous ideas that, among other things, is totally undone by its poor writing. I never felt less connected to Nico than when I was listening to him speak. Even games where player characters remain silent are occasionally injured by their writing. The Call of Duty series, for example, would be a marvelous corridor shooter without its laughably poor dialogue. FEAR is an amazing, atmospheric and scary shooter with great mechanics, except when the various cast members open their retarded word-holes. And don’t even get me started on Red Faction: Guerilla, which violates both rules.

The point is that the destructive power of poor writing is well known. But I’d never known just how destructive bad writing and design for a faceless cipher of a protagonist could be until I played Dead Space 2.

Some background: I was a Dead Space fan. Not a tremendous one, certainly, but enough of a fan that I played it, enjoyed it and tried playing it a second time through to see if I’d get anything new out of the “improved mode.” I didn’t, so I moved on to other things, but I thought it was a nice bit of homage to a set of genres, and some of the most prominent work in those genres. System Shock 2 was an amazing game, and anything that apes it is bound to be fun to play. Dead Space did that expertly.

Dead Space was also all about its faceless protagonist. It’s never entirely clear just how much of the game is real and how much is the perception of your twisted psyche, and the game never seems too concerned with that. When you’re finally allowed to rest after the events of the game conclude it’s not even clear that you’re actually attacked. And it really, really doesn’t matter even if you were. Dead Space lets you form your own responses and reach your own conclusions. While it has many problems that isn’t one of them. In fact that could be its greatest strength.

Dead Space 2 does away with that right away. You hear Isaac speaking almost immediately. Not giving us useful information or anything like that, but gibbering and weeping and generally being kind of irritating. He laboriously recounts the events of the previous game, sentence by fractured sentence. Then he wakes up and acts confused. In fact, he acts like a bit of a dumbass. He runs to crazy scientists for help immediately after “escaping” from their clutches. He only uses his jet boots at random, plot appropriate segments instead of using them all the time, which is totally what I’d do given my druthers.

But this ridiculous boiler plate video game plot fare might be forgivable if the tone and language of the writing wasn’t so piss poor. But nearly everything that Isaac says makes me want to steer him right into the nearest Necron. It’s all either bluster or weeping, which well executed would be alright. But it’s never well executed, never builds towards anything interesting or rewarding. It’s not even bad enough to be funny, it’s just poor writing that draws attention to itself. At its best, it’s generic. Far more often it’s offensively bad, everything people who don’t play video games expect of our writing and the end product is terrible.

And they had to pick Gunner Wright, also known as “who?” to voice Clarke. Gunner brings all the life and vibrancy you’d expect to the world’s least interesting, most generically tortured video game character with a dark past. He doesn’t even try to make Clarke into something more interesting or subtle, instead vascilating wildly between emotions to achieve the action-movie appropriate response for a given scene. The end result is less a performance and more a mish mash of set pieces that are quite familiar. And while this familiarity could theoretically work to the ends of the develops the reality is that it actually undermines them, laying bare the ineptitude of the writers and designers, their inability to weave elements together into a coherent product and their embarrassingly lacking capacity for intelligent thought.

Clarke’s voice and behavior even boils down to the face he makes when he gets new equipment. In Dead Space equipping a new suit was a comic beat which involved stepping into a welding chamber and emerging in new clothes, seemingly disoriented from the experience. Dead Space 2 gives Issac a beat each time he equips a new piece of gear (and there are far, far too many outfits for you to only see this happen two or three times) to saunter around like a smug asshole and tug at his clothing in an equipment-appropriate fashion. It has less of an air of celebration and more the feel of a twenty five year old asshole doing a touchdown dance in a game he won against a youth football league. It doesn’t make me feel for Clarke, it makes me want to, just as before, run him into the nearest hazard and watch his limbs tumble off.

There are plenty of problems with Dead Space 2. It’s just as derivative as the previous game, but it has none of the style or self-awareness that the original Dead Space had. It doesn’t even have the good sense to ape Aliens the way that Dead Space did. Instead it goes for cheap closet scares and occasional pallet shifts in place of actual gameplay or innovation. Mechanically it often falls apart and, even playing on the Hard difficulty setting I’ve found that I have, if anything, too many resources most of the time. My bank is already filling up fast. But giving their protagonist a voice, especially such a poor one, is the biggest issue in Dead Space 2 in my mind. It destroys what little staying power the game might’ve had and instead forces you to relate to one of the least sympathetic, least interesting characters I’ve had the displeasure of interacting with in recent memory. And I just finished playing the Kane and Lynch games back to back. More’s the pity, because all the writers of Dead Space 2 had to do to fix the problem was put down the pen.