Aah nice

To be honest... I don't really accept them in the way you talk about. I much prefer cut-scenes and in-game exposition. In Thief 2 I got far more out of leaning up against a door and listening to someone's conversation than I did when finding their parchment upon a table. Don't get me wrong; I don't mind reading materials found in-game, but I don't like information presented out of the context in which I'm playing. Briefings and the like seem a cop-out in the games that I play. Quest logs are a bit of an exception though as I consider that to be a memory aid more than anything else.

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Original post by Wavinator But this rule doesn't apply to journaling and reporting. We're perfectly comfortable reading a report and then fulfiling mission / quest objectives; getting messages about things that are happening concurrently that we can't see; and journaling of events that supposedly happened while we were off doing our thing. I think there's an underlying reason why this is still acceptable, even in our media saturated world.

We've been conditioned into listening to stories and believing in them since dawn of mankind. When old guy is telling your tribe about adventures of Eric-not-so-Swift, or when you're reading about travels of Frodo Baggins, you're used to living through your vision of these events. Reading reports and whatnot in game clicks right into that reading-envisioning routine.

On the other hand as tendency to read seems to decline in favour of tv and such visual media, it's quite possible there's going to be increasing motion for being provided with visuals rather than text in games...

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Original post by Madster Now for me, the voiceover isn't as important as the animated briefing, which will alow me to quickly grasp what I'm supposed to do. They should be short too. I want to play, not to be briefed, so hurry up.

Which is why I prefer written briefings. I can scan them quickly for the gameplay relevant bits much more quickly than any voiceover/animation. At the very least, I can usually read faster than the voiceover speaks, so it's quicker even if I do want the whole thing.

Animations, voiceovers, voiced dialogs, etc. all bog me down. I'm initially impressed, but eventually they just get in the way.

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Original post by Kylotan To be honest... I don't really accept them in the way you talk about. I much prefer cut-scenes and in-game exposition. In Thief 2 I got far more out of leaning up against a door and listening to someone's conversation than I did when finding their parchment upon a table.

Okay, I think I have it now. It's a matter of immersion. I'll stick with Kylotan's example for this one, because I agree with it, sort of.

Listening at door > reading a paper >>> pop-up from the designer that says, "Your character learned about event x".

All three of these things are your character doing stuff. She hears the chit-chat, or she reads the paper, or she learns about the event. The difference is how it's presented to you. In the first instance, you share the experience with her. In the second, you see the fruits of the discovery, and in the third you are merely informed of the discovery. The closer you are to the character, the better you feel.

But that's not a briefing. That's a discovery. What if you lean against that door and hear "Hey, the arsenal at WhiteTree was attacked earlier today. Nobody got hurt, but some gear went missing,"? I would rather hear that when my character learns of it than be walking down a hallway and have a cutscene jump up and interrupt my game to show me some ninjas diving through a window forty miles away. In fact, I'd rather finish the mission, get back to base, and have a cutscene of somebody telling me about it. A briefing keeps me in-character, while actually showing all the events in the world gives me a third-person limited omniscience. That's not what I want.

So, immersion. I'll read a big block of text if you can convince me that it's a FAX from HQ to my character's office, and I'll like it.

I think most quest-heavy games need a journal/log, even if there are also video or sound sequences about what's going on. In the thief example, it's cool to hear them actually talking, but I would also want that info to be copied into my journal, since otherwise I'll have forgetten about it by next week. I also think that in our society, most of us, especially gamers, are very used to reading text on a screen in real life to get info about what's going on with the world, so it doesn't seem particularly jarring to do the same thing in a game. Briefings and text messages and such provide a great way of showing that your world is alive when your character's not there without needing to fill the game with non-interactive cutscenes. Even if a game had the budget to do tons of cutscenes to show what was going on while your character wasn't around, the game world would still be more lifelike and well-rounded with some text news in there as well.

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Original post by Wavinator Why do players accept briefings, after action reports, and mission / quest logs?[...]

Personally, I don't. I ignore them if at all possible (and it always is since such games are linear), and generally avoid the types of games that have such screens. Serious Sam is pretty much the only exception in that I play it but still ignore the briefings.

There are twists on the Theif example, what if i were listening to two people who are plotting something? Badguy #1 says: "I've left your instructions in your locker, be sure to get the job done.", I could then trod off to his locker, pick/break it open and read the message with the instructions on it.

I think it partly has to do overall with the qualities of the written word. Its possitively retro, and dispite some people thinking writing on paper would become obsolete, were using it more than ever. Putting things in text is a far more efficient way of conveying condensed information and experiences than through cutscenes. Most forms of video and Television are scripted using text (such as teleprompters, movie/sitcom scripts, programming script, this forum XD).

It doesn't take much to create and organize information on text, and when people read it they understand quite quickly, some people even converting the information into a visual/audio experience in their minds. In most instances, things started with text and have over time moved off to a more visual experience, which is an easily consumed and more pleasing form of presentation (the pretty colors!) because its actuallized, not dictated.

Some good examples of good ingame texts would be Ultima Underworld 1 & 2, System Shock 1 & 2, Morrowind.

One of my favorite breifings so far has been in Starcraft. They tell you the misson details before you actually begin, you are not distracted by other factors such as changing cameras, explosions, just the dialog. I was a little upset that warcraft3 didnt have briefings.

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Original post by Aiursrage2k One of my favorite breifings so far has been in Starcraft.

Ditto. The animated faces were cool too.