Internal monologue is essentially an exposition dump

[polywog]

Leave some things to the imagination. The worst thing you can do as a writer, is to treat your fans like they are stupid.

If you imagined it, chances are they will too, you don't have to go in-depth explaining everything little detail... be vague.

You want the reader to be absorbed, and they can't do that if all your backstory, doesn't jive with who they are as a person.

Wait until page 1200 to let them know that they were african this whole time... if you told them at the start they might not have continued up until this point, due to racism, ect. bot now, 1200 pages in they are invested in the story, and having a big black cock is a bonus. you can't easily relate to the character, if you know too much too soon.

save the monologue for your youtube channel

 

[Winterfire]

Leave some things to the imagination. The worst thing you can do as a writer, is to treat your fans like they are stupid.

If you imagined it, chances are they will too, you don't have to go in-depth explaining everything little detail... be vague.

You want the reader to be absorbed, and they can't do that if all your backstory, doesn't jive with who they are as a person.

Wait until page 1200 to let them know that they were african this whole time... if you told them at the start they might not have continued up until this point, due to racism, ect. bot now, 1200 pages in they are invested in the story, and having a big black cock is a bonus. you can't easily relate to the character, if you know too much too soon.

save the monologue for your youtube channel

Too much text, no image, I am not invested in your comment

 

[Deleted member 229118]

Then you don't have any way to hold interest and motivate. Take Ace Attorney as an example, if the main character does not believe in their client getting a fair trial, why the fuck am I working so hard on this? Wright's convictions are admirable, they endear you to him and move you forward to want to save your client from an unjust circumstance. Plus you'd lose a lot of comedy without Phoenix's reactions, they're pure gold.

Never played that game.
But interest and motivation shoud be player driven not character driven.
For example.
I the player shoud be motivated to enslave woman into being my fuck toys.
My character motivation means nothing.
If my character is motivated but i the player am not then i will simply go play a better game.
One that motivateds me.

 

[more lesbian foot massage]

it's also such a wasted opportunity, missing a scene by writing a bad 'synopsis' of it and making your MC monologue it in his head. if anything in the exposition is worth saying, and it usually isn't, make a little scene with the characters playing it out. doesn't have to be long either. in fact, please make it as short as possible. it'll be much better. and if the scene turns out boring then you didn't have to say it in the first place. cut it.

long is always bad in writing. unless you want the character to read like a boring cunt, then make him use as many words as possible. long words. writerly words.

This is also true for many "ordinary" video games these days. Developers often think of themselves as the authors of bestselling novels for their video game and tend to overdo it and overestimate their own abilities and limitations while doing so. They also often don't understand that the storytelling of a book is different from that of a video game, a film or even a visual novel. Sometimes I think they don't know the strengths and weaknesses of the different mediums. Like many AAA games overuse cutscenes because it's an easy way for exposition or "character development" outside of the actual storytelling capabilities of a game - similar to the authors of visual novels who make excessive use of the narrator. Or inner monologues that are also really just a narrator in the guise of the MC's thoughts.

 

[more lesbian foot massage]

While I agree that too much of internal monologue is detrimental to the storytelling, for me it is still necessary. I prefer showing character's thoughts over narrator's text, since it doesn't break the immesrion (or at least not as much).

Also I'm not a huge fan of revealing the synopsis at the beginning of the game. Something like "Hi, I'm MC and I'm living with my family. Here's my mother, who..." and so on. In the VN I'm currently developing I'm trying to dodge the situations where MC just repeats the known story in his thoughts or where the story that he already knows is explained to him in conversations with other characters. You can rephrase it in a way that actually looks like what you yourself would be thinking or talking about. It should all come natural, through the dialogues and related thoughts. For example, it's better to write "I miss Ann. Has it been a year already?" and show MC looking at a photo of a girl than "My friend Ann moved away a year ago, I miss her".
Still, I have moments where MC has to show what's on his mind in an internal monologue style. It's short and mostly lightweight.

Leave some things to the imagination. The worst thing you can do as a writer, is to treat your fans like they are stupid.

If you imagined it, chances are they will too, you don't have to go in-depth explaining everything little detail... be vague.

You want the reader to be absorbed, and they can't do that if all your backstory, doesn't jive with who they are as a person.

Wait until page 1200 to let them know that they were african this whole time... if you told them at the start they might not have continued up until this point, due to racism, ect. bot now, 1200 pages in they are invested in the story, and having a big black cock is a bonus. you can't easily relate to the character, if you know too much too soon.

save the monologue for your youtube channel

A bit weird example but aside from that I can only agree. Too many and long winded expositions kill the imagination and immersion.

 

[ChaosOpen]

This thread fails to address the crux of the argument, mainly that the content of the internal monologue is the key factor. For example, showing a picture of a beautiful woman and then the character thinks "man, she is pretty" is treating the audience like an idiot. However, showing that same beautiful woman and then the character thinks "We used to be close, but once puberty set in the normal separation girls and boys experience seem to be magnified and we might as well be complete strangers these days." This actually tells the audience something about the character that you couldn't get across in normal dialogue in a natural way.

 

[woody554]

"We used to be close, but once puberty set in the normal separation girls and boys experience seem to be magnified and we might as well be complete strangers these days."

about that... yeah I'd rather take "she's pretty". nobody would go on this weird exposition in their head. they'd go something like: "I've missed her. what happened to us?" which is essentially the same thing but not exposition.

 

[anne O'nymous]

This thread fails to address the crux of the argument, mainly that the content of the internal monologue is the key factor.

I agree with this, but you clearly don't understand what it mean.
Character thoughts should only be used when there's really no other way to provide the information. It's that, and not the effective interest of the information, that is the real key factor.

For example, showing a picture of a beautiful woman and then the character thinks "man, she is pretty" is treating the audience like an idiot.

While I agree that the information by itself can be relatively useless, showing the character thoughts is the only way to provide it. Yet, when I say that the information is relatively useless, the important word is "relatively".
Depending on the photo itself, it can give some important hint regarding the MC. If it's a 40yo woman, he's more attracted by mature women. If it's a motherly figure, there's chance that he's submissive, or at least docile. If it's an alt girl, he probably like them "weird", or at least with a free spirit. If it's a sportive, there's chance that he like them independent. And so on.

However, showing that same beautiful woman and then the character thinks "We used to be close, but once puberty set in the normal separation girls and boys experience seem to be magnified and we might as well be complete strangers these days." This actually tells the audience something about the character that you couldn't get across in normal dialogue in a natural way.

How is it more useful to know about a character that we will probably never see, nor hear about, precisely because they "might as well be complete strangers" ? At most it give us information regarding what the character liked in the past. But since it was before his puberty, it's now totally irrelevant.

But the main problem is that there's absolutely no need to rely on the character thoughts to provide this information. At most it's laziness, at worse a lack of imagination. There's so many way to express the express this without having to rely on thoughts. In fact, unlike for the "she's pretty" example, this can even be done without writing a single word.
You can do it passively, relying on a series of photography. Whatever if they are in a family album, or in display in his bedroom, they were take through the character youth, and until he hit puberty, the girl is always on the photo. This while the photos themselves express how close they felt at this time. If was happy times, reason why the photos are still here ; now that they drifted apart, they are the only way he have to remember those good times.
Or you can do it more actively, through a series of short flashbacks. The kind of flashback we would have in such situation. Firstly the moment when the photo was taken, then few major moments in their relationship, that slowly switch, showing the distance growing between them.
In both case you'll tell exactly the same thing to the player, without boring him with a totally useless internal narration. In fact, you'll even tell more, because you'll not rely on a single moment, therefore you'll over to the player an overview of this character youth.

 

[Belle]

I think this thread misses the real problem. This isn't a question of what you should do or not, it's a question of how well you do it. The problem described in the OP isn't even unique to games; it's something every aspiring author, be it of books, movies, TV shows, or games, struggles with. It's why most writers have to deal with editors.

A good writer will, at least after the first draft of the story, cut it down to the minimum needed to convey the story effectively and emotionally. Writing that doesn't push the story directly forward or offer genuine insight into a situation is dropped. Often, a novel will have entire chapters cut away during the editing process because those chapters were better off gone.

The advice I would give is not "don't monologue." Monologues can be perfectly fine. Heck, I use them myself, and I even do the occasional exposition dump when I feel like the player might need it to solve a puzzle (particularly if they've taken a break from the game). My advice would be to do whatever your story needs to be fully told, but no more than that.

So, let's say you have a scene where the MC meets a woman with huge breasts. The player can see, from the visuals, that the woman is well-endowed in the breast department, so there is no need for the writing to double down on it. Let the text focus on other things. However, if the MC paying attention to those breasts is important to the plot, the text should mention those breasts, even if the player can already see them perfectly well. But don't do this randomly. The MC noticing the breasts because they make him want to have sex with their owner is not a valid story reason to describe them in the text. We already know that shit, so lay it off. Writing that the MC notices the breasts because we want this action to have a plot-related consequence is a perfectly valid reason to write about it, however. Maybe the woman sees the MC staring at her breasts and this annoys her, sending their relationship off to a rocky start. That's interesting, but more importantly, not mentioning the MC staring at her breasts in the text will make her reaction come off as random and nonsensical.

Be economical with your writing. Write what needs to be written, and then stop. You're not trying to fill a word quota here.