Wolfenstein Essay part 2: The prevalence of gut-punch storytelling in games (Patreon)

(This video is going to require me to spoil a lot of big twists, because when it comes to it what I’m talking about is big twists, and different examples of them, so like… pay attention to spoiler warnings.)

Warnings: Discussion of Nazis, of fascism, of genocide, spoilers for The Hateful 8, Uncharted 4, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, Bioshock, Fallout 4, Rime, and Metroid… kind of? Samus is a woman. It’s not really a surprise at this point.

Back in 1999 when M Night Shyamalan invented the twist, he was heralded as an artistic genius, immediately given a nobel prize and then put on a rocket and fired into the sun. Okay so none of that happened, but that was a good example of a short story with a big twist, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today. I want to talk about how we communicate information in stories and why. I’d like to talk about big twists, and writing good stories in video games - I’d like to talk about what I call gut-punch storytelling.

Video games as a medium are no strangers to twists. In fact if you google “video game twist” on google chrome with the internet off then it’s revealed that the little dinosaur is actually a woman! Gut-punch storytelling, however, is more than just having a twist. It’s my name for a style of storytelling where the story is consciously constructed around the twist.

I’m pointing out this style of narrative because I think there’s a lot of it going on in games, and because in a different medium this might be a bit of a problem. In much of media, a big twist is usually accompanied by a shift in tone.

Movie critics at the moment quite like to pick out when films are bad at handling tone. Tonal mess is a fairly popular insult in film criticism right now - basically because terms in film criticism become fashionable at one time or another and recently it’s been tone.

Video games, as opposed to books, movies, radio, tv, comics or anything else, are defined by the fact that they react to your decisions, and you react to that by relating more to the medium. You care more about the main character in a game than the main character in a movie because your objectives are aligned. Even if you actually disagree with the main character of a game ethically or morally or just don’t like them, the game will not progress if you don’t want to further their attempts.

Therefore, when you play a game and a big twist happens, revealing information to you and your character, or killing off a character you care about, or dashing your hopes and dreams in some way, it affects you a lot more than it might in a similarly constructed movie. It also can change the tone of the scene, or the story, enormously.
In Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, it is revealed quite far into the film that half of the characters have been conspiring against the others, and that furthermore another character has been hidden under the floor the entire time. It is really hard to regain a relaxed or peaceful tone when you watch the earlier scenes a second time, knowing that information.

For a gaming example, look at Uncharted 4. There is a flashback subplot in the game where you, as teenage Nathan Drake, break into a house with your brother looking for your mother’s white leather bound journal. In the last of these scenes you reach the study of the woman whose house you’re burgling and there are boxes all over the place, in which you find a series of other white leather bound journals from different explorers, and then, when you finally find your mother’s journal, the lady whose house you’re burgling comes out of shadows with a gun from the ONE CORNER of the room that you didn’t look in! That keeps me up at night. How did they know I wouldn’t look in that corner. How did you know Neil Druckmann? How? I need answers!
Gut-punch storytelling, as I’m calling it, can result in odd tonality in games depending on how well the big twist is handled. A media creator can make the tone change, or stay the same if they want to. If they want slow tension to build to the point where the big reveal happens, they can. If they want you to be having a fun carefree time up until the twist suddenly happens out of the blue, they can. It isn’t wrong to have the tone remain the same, and it isn’t wrong to have the tone change, either can happen with the revealing of information, but it is pretty bad to not care about what happens to the tone.

I want to look at how we tell stories in games, how lots of games build up their stories around a big gut-punch twist, and why. Why the story has to pull the carpet out from under the audience, instead of just… y’know… stuff happening. Like in a regular story, stuff happens. In lots of game stories, the whole world gets flipped upside down.

The reasons for using gut-punch storytelling are as follows: a big twist to deliver a message, make you reflect on a character or a feeling; a way of getting people to care about and talk about the game; a way of making people engage with the story where they might otherwise be apathetic; a big twist instead of a long story, so the plot of your game is easy to remember while playing the game. I think some of these are good reasons to use this kind of storytelling, and I think some of them are not good, but I think that one series uses this kind of storytelling masterfully, and that’s MachineGames’ Wolfenstein.
In short, I think that Wolfenstein handles tone perfectly. I think that the tone flips back and forth really fast between comedy, tragedy, action, adventure, tragedy, comedy, action(…) and it’s always what the creators of the game wanted it to be.

Section 2: Twist (and shout)

I think we’ve discussed enough theory, so let’s dive into some examples. As a first call, let’s look at one of the biggest twists in video game history, from one of the darkest, grittiest games, confronting important political theory at its core. That’s right, Pokemon Yellow. In the original generation of pokemon games, the player character has a childhood rival called GARY, or to give him his proper name, ASSBUTT. You and ASSBUTT have been rivals longer than anyone can remember, and you’re setting off on your journey together, which is why you repeatedly face off and battle each other on your way to fight the Elite 4. But at last, when you defeat the elite 4, after travelling all over the country training your pokemon, you find out that ASSBUTT got there first, defeated the Elite 4 already and has become the champ. This devastating twist is even foreshadowed earlier in the game with the Nugget 5, a gauntlet of trainers on Nugget Bridge with a secret 6th trainer at the end, who works for Team Rocket and wants to recruit you to do evil - although that’s ridiculous, no organisation actively sets out being evil as their intention. This twist sends the clear message to the kids playing that caring about animals is dumb and pointless and if you don’t care about them like ASSBUTT then you’d reach your goals faster than idiots who do. 

Okay… it’s possible this game was a bad choice. Most people agree there’s no huge twist in the pokemon games (because the truth is too much for them to handle) so let’s look at something a bit lighter. Let’s talk about Bioshock.

Games like Bioshock use twists to communicate a message to the audience, and because of that, they need to build up the whole story around the twist. Notably in Bioshock 1 this is considered a weakness, because according to most players, after the reveal that Atlas has been controlling your character all along, the game enormously loses momentum. The twist in Bioshock is also placed in the scene in which you kill the primary antagonist of the game, Andrew Ryan, so it’s pretty natural that the story would run out of steam after that. A huge portion of the players are saying yup, killed the fucker, now what? And another huge portion are saying okay I get the message, now what? With some overlap obviously.

Bioshock Infinite doesn’t suffer from the same problem, partly because it has two big twists, and although the first is in a similar place narratively to killing Andrew Ryan in the first game, the second is riiiight at the end. Also, it doesn’t have a stupid political meaning like in the first game. Or does it? I can’t tell, none of the games journalists I read seem to think there was a political philosophy to Bioshock Infinite. If only someone would do a video about it. They could call it “Bioshock Infinite and the political philosophy of reincarnation” and they could use awful audio equipment and forget to boost the volume of their voice relative to the background music. It would be great.

The reason a big twist is so useful for communicating a message is that you can give your audience an assumption, and let the first part of the narrative rely on that assumption. You can then have a big twist and contradict yourself - reveal new information, change the assumption - and then in the last part of the game, explore what the world is like after that twist. By doing this you let the player explore the implications of the message.

Lots of other games have engaged in deliberate moves to grab the audience’s attention in a way that will get people telling their friends to play the game. Twists as a marketing strategy.

Going all the way back to 1986, when Metroid revealed right at the end that Samus was a woman, how do I put this... that wasn’t a feminist move. Like, if you finished the game faster then Samus is wearing less clothing. It’s like, the opposite of empowering… it’s… there’s no good word for this. It’s Bikini Samus. 

They also referred to Samus as “he” in the games accompanying literature, so it isn’t a good narrative twist that is foreshadowed and built up organically, it’s there to get attention. The developers were trying to create a twist ending that would get people talking about their game, and incidentally happened upon something that would make people question their assumptions about gender and whether a man should be the “normal” human.

Since then games have been absolutely full to bursting with twists. Not necessarily good twists mind you - sometimes the twist is just the main character has feelings. Shocking stuff. But it works! People talk about games with big twists! I didn’t even know Call of Duty had a plot until they did the twist where the player character gets nuked, because my friends who played it never mentioned it.

Twists also actually solved a natural problem with storytelling in games. Namely, the dramatic difference between cutscenes and gameplay. Coming out of a level into a long cutscene can be disorienting and feel jarring, and can make you lose interest in the plot, especially if you’ve been stuck on that level for three fucking days. It was a hard problem to solve, and there were lots of non-ideal solutions possible. I mean another solution developers put in to solve this problem was skippable cutscenes.

The problem in my opinion is that over time narratives in games started to depend on twists. The bigger the twist, the more people would talk about it and come away feeling like there was something really smart or deep in the game, and the less likely they were to just skip the plot. If there’s a twist, the plot is nice and simple and easy to remember, and even better, if there’s a subtext to the game - a message - it’s easy to communicate in one big twist.

Big twists in games are also a successful way of getting a player engaged, when they might be… a little… apathetic? Just maybe? Like maybe they might be a bunch of edgelord teenagers who care most of all about how little they seem to care about everything else? Like maybe not caring isn’t actually cool, but somehow this huge portion of the audience don’t seem to realise that…? Who knows.

It’s that edgy-teen vibe that ridicules emotional sincerity that, I think, drives creators away from feeling comfortable showing that their characters have feelings and care about things. It’s pretty rare for a game to just be emotionally sincere the whole way through, rather than couching its emotionality in comedy or action or something else more distancing. It’s not that common for movies or other media to be all that emotionally open either in fairness, but it’s a lot more common, and I think that might have something to do with the character of the average gamer. 

At the very least, it has something to do with who the games’ creators think the average gamer is. If you’re making a game and you really want to make sure your audience connect with it, but you suspect that your audience might be a little socially… stunted… then you need a way of making the emotion of the game really jump out and grab them. You need something to suddenly pull the rug out from under the player, and the main character, and shove the fact that the main character has feelings right in the audience’s collective face. You need a gut-punch.

So you’ll set up a character in opening scenes and have them appeal to the audience by being cool, powerful, funny, brave etc. Some set of qualities that make the player want to be this character and therefore relate to them. Then, after some amount of plot, something really bad happens to this character, totally out-of-the-blue, and the audience has to care. In some games this is pretty explicit because the game focuses really clearly on characters’ feelings in reaction to the plot development, to elicit an empathic reaction from the audience. In those games, the twist is essentially that the character has feelings.

This especially needs doing in many cases because the things that game creators do to make relatable characters start with making them likeable characters - cool characters. That often starts with something that builds a relationship while seemingly being distancing, such as humour. If you can laugh at a character in a running joke you become more attached to them, even without knowing anything about them. Like, how much do we really know about Bugs Bunny?

I think the problem is, that if you’re hoping to appeal to an audience you don’t think cares at all, you’re not going to write very good stories. I think this approach underestimates people, and rather that using these big sudden twists on top of an interesting story, to make something really excellent, they’re being used kind of cynically, to get attention, to get people talking about the game, to minimise the story. I think that’s kinda sad.

Section 3: Let’s Get Sad

I want to clarify that big twists, gut punches, aren’t mutually exclusive to emotional sincerity - just because a game uses a big sudden plot development to engage the audience, it doesn’t mean it can’t also connect to the audience in a simple and vulnerable way. I also want to say that the tone of a game doesn’t really have to shift around a big twist. This is basically the section where I shit all over everything I’ve said so far. Wow, this essay is really shaping up to be full of twists.

So let’s talk about Rime. In Rime, you play as a son looking for his father on an island. As you journey deeper into the island, solving puzzles and exploring, you uncover the truth about the son losing his father at sea, and the whole world gets darker and sadder. At one point you are pursued by an aggressive creature who thinks that a ball you need to use for your puzzle is its lost egg. The game, and the world of the game, gets unbearably grim and sad to the point where any average person is probably wanting to get the fuck off this ride now, finally playing the full flashback showing the father going over the side of the boat. Then, as you complete the final puzzle, navigating a black rain-soaked landscape full of twists and turns and sad figures who offer no comfort at all, the game flips everything upside down. It isn’t the father who was lost at sea, it was the son.

The whole game has taken place in the father’s head, as he first imagined his son surviving and washing up on an island, and then slowly sank into his grief and his guilt, wishing that it was him who had died instead. Trying to imagine his son searching for him on this island he pictures a monster who has lost a child. He can only see this parent who has failed to save its child as a monster, because that’s how he sees himself. As he imagines his son reaching the center of the puzzles he sinks furthest into his grief and can’t live in this fantasy any more, which is when we at last see the father. You then conclude the game by making the father walk to his son’s room, and let go of a piece of his son’s cape which flies away on the breeze. (and then you lie on the floor weeping and shaking uncontrollably for as long as your need)

So now we’re seeing why I called this section “Let’s get sad”.

Rime is emotionally sincere the whole time; it is a creeping, slow building sadness. The twist at the end though, although a devastating gut-punch, it is not relied upon. It is not a trick of any kind, nor is it used to engage apathetic players. If you don’t care by that point in the game nothing could really make you.

Rime is such an effective piece of media that I end up embarrassed, enraged and frustrated by it, defensive of it, and at the same time in awe of it. I’m enraged and frustrated because in the discussion around the game I see people listing how to get all the achievements and I’m immediately defensive and I feel right away like I have some place to tell them they’re enjoying the game wrong. They shouldn’t be looking for achievements it’s not about that. And then I remember that the developer had to put those collectibles in, in order for them to be there and then I’m mad at them.

I end up embarrassed, because, well if I see my friend and they’re like woah hey why do you look so sad what’s wrong? I have to say yeah I just finished this story and it was so sad and I’ve just felt awful ever since and they’ll say oh yeah I read books that upset me sometimes too. Then I’ll have to tell them it wasn’t a book, and they’ll ask if it was a movie and I’ll shake my head and they’ll desperately suggest it was a TV show, and I’ll shake my head and then they’ll just leave me to my Playstation induced depression.

So what’s this section for?

Well, I really wanted to look at Rime as an example of a game that has a big twist on top of an already engaging story. I’m aware that if the twist just didn’t happen it would be a totally different story, so I’m not saying that it’s pointless or unnecessary. I’m saying that it isn’t relied upon. The failure case for the big twist in Rime is that you’ve played a sensitive, beautiful, fun game, and then at the end you didn’t really connect very much with the ending. You still will have loved 90% of the game. You still might come back to play it over and over. The failure case for something like Bioshock is that you miss the entire point of the game. Wouldn’t it be really shit if people played something like Bioshock and missed the entire point of the game.

If games are built up around one big twist, they run the risk of that twist being a bit off for people - or worse, predictable. And if they didn’t bother to build something solid and good other than that twist, they run the risk of the game just being… bad.

Section 4: Bad Example

We need to look at a bad example. That bad example is Fallout 4. The Fallout 4 disliker has logged on guys, so brace yourselves. The twist in Fallout 4 is dumb. They cryo-freeze you, you wake up, they steal your baby, your go back to cryo-sleep, and when you wake up you’re supposed to believe no time has passed? Nah. Nope. Your baby is an adult. Oh check it out, there’s your son and there’s this old man… I wonder what’s going on? I wonder if the old man is your son and the boy is a fake robot. Shocked. Truly, truly shocking stuff.

The synthetic humans storyline is pretty old-hat in sci fi. Are we real, is reality real, are strangers real, does it matter? Is my friend real, is my mum real, is that girl I peed on in a swimming pool once real? If she isn’t real is my embarrassment real? All these topics have been covered before or better in things like The Matrix, Westworld and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Almost all of those… topics… anyway…

It’s even a topic covered by academic philosophy. French philosopher Jean Bored...drill…’ard formulated ideas popularised in the 80s about our reality and the implications of living in a simulation - ideas about subjective and inter-subjective reality, meaning in short that if we all agree something is true and act like it is true and there are no measurable differences on our level due to its falsehood that could be considered, in a sense, true.

It’s not wrong to explore ideas that have been explored before of course, you just really need to have something to add to the discussion, and you have to have a story that is engaging on a superficial level, so that your discussion is worth participating in.

Anyway, where Fallout 4 really falls down is that the main drive of not only the main story but one of the biggest optional stories is a big twist and in both cases a twist that you can see coming. Shaun, your son, is all grown up. Paladin Danse is a robot. If you can see these twists coming, they aren’t entertaining, and when they aren’t entertaining, you realise they don’t really add much else to the discussion. 

Like, Paladin Danse has pre-programmed ethics, I get that, it’s hypocritical for Arthur Maxson, a big racist btw, to say that about him because he kind of does too. I suppose the ridiculously limited dialogue trees were some kind of fucking satire to get that point across too were they? I can tell Maxson I think he’s awful and I disagree with everything he’s doing and in response he makes me a fucking Knight and gives me a suit of power armour. Fuck off.

What I’m calling Gut-Punch storytelling isn’t inherently bad. Surprising twists, especially used for a reason, aren’t a bad thing, they’re just a thing you can do as a storyteller. I don’t want to just talk about this trend of storytelling in games in a derogatory way, but I think there’s a valid comparison to be made here with jump scares. A jump scare isn’t a bad thing. The tone of a scene can be quiet and tense and the audience can be aware that a conflict is coming, and at the end of the scene there can be a conflict, but how the storyteller chooses to get there is important.

It’s okay if the scene suddenly erupts into the conflict, in other words it’s okay if the monster pops out and it’s scary. It’s just not okay if the reason the monster pops out is to be scary. In the same way, it’s okay if you can’t see what happens next, and there’s a huge twist or reveal, it’s just not okay if it’s there only to surprise you.

Plenty of games use a big twist to deliver a message, to make you stop and think, to make you consider a character, and that’s okay. Good writing isn’t about knowing something the audience doesn’t know and then springing it on them. If a character is written well, then you can see a few different ways that the plot might go - you can see it coming - and you want to know how it will go. A character will react to something and it might make you sad or happy or angry that they didn’t do what they should have but ultimately accepting that that’s who they are.
Going back to Uncharted 4, there’s a great moment where Sam, the main character’s brother, decides to turn back and go after the treasure, which is a dumbass thing to do and I’m still so mad at him, but with everything they’ve shown up to that point about the character, it makes total sense.

I think gut-punch storytelling should be put up on the shelf with the jump scare and the deus-ex-machina. They aren’t inherently bad things in stories, they’re just used by lazy people. 

Well, after all that negativity, let’s talk about why Wolfenstein is the best.

Section 5: Why Wolfenstein is the best

Rime needed to take a simple but incredibly powerful emotion and convey it to the audience, but Wolfenstein needed to communicate some incredibly complex issues. I don’t know how apparent this is, but Nazis are actually an incredibly complicated thing to talk about. I mean I’m not producing two videos in one huge essay about them for nothing. For MachineGames as a media creator, and for me as an analyser and commentator of media, the relationship between Nazis, their representation, and society is a behemoth; a monster; an absurdly huge and impossibly complex beast.

I’d really recommend watching Lindsay Ellis’ video about Mel Brooks and how he satirises the Nazis, because I think it starts to paint the picture pretty well. I’ll try to sum it up quickly and poorly here: Mel Brooks has two things that make his satire effective, and they are intent and comedy. He has good reason to want to take the Nazis down a peg, and he keeps them ridiculous the whole time.

The thing about Nazis is that they can really be two things, scary or ridiculous, and it isn’t hard to make them either of those things. Racism or race realism or white nationalism or whatever you dress racism up as, is dumb as hell, idiotic, pathetic and absurd, but also, the real life implications of it for lots of people are terrifying, and often, life threatening. Unfortunately, making Nazis scary doesn’t generally dissuade people from wanting to be Nazis. Fundamentally, scary and cool are far from mutually exclusive. I mean going all the way back to the earliest films many people watch, bad guys just have qualities that we aspire to that we can’t necessarily get from our heroes: sassy as heck, devious, witty, or just. plain. fabulous.

I think this is a shortcoming of Wolfenstein, and it kind of always has been. The Nazis in Wolfenstein have always been the bad guys, they’ve always been evil, they’ve never been intended as sympathetic characters, but they’ve also always been written at times in American history when Nazism felt comfortably far away, and nobody really had to think about whether these games might accidentally leave some players thinking man, you know who are cool in this game? Nazis.

In the 1943 Disney cartoon Der Fuehrer’s Face, Donald Duck is a munitions factory worker in Nazi Germany. Yeah that’s what I said. He is awoken by a marching band declaring the glory of Hitler, he eats an awful breakfast while being forced to read Mein Kampf, and then he is escorted to his job at the factory where he has to screw caps onto shells as fast as they come down the line. Big shells and little shells and messy piles of shells come along and the factory starts adding pictures of Hitler to the line which of course Donald has to heil as well. Eventually Donald is told he will be forced to work overtime and he goes crazy, his reality dissolving into a psychedelic landscape of shells and swastikas, until finally he wakes up from his nightmare, revealing he is actually an American citizen. Phew, what a relief to be an American citizen and not a Nazi.

This is war propaganda. It was released in 1943, it features a catchy little tune by the same name that was also a hit record at the time, which talks explicitly about how Hitler lies, and works his people like slaves and demands constant absurd loyalty. This is effective anti-Nazi satire, because there isn’t a moment where the nazis aren’t portrayed in not only a negative light, but a ridiculous one. They aren’t efficient, they’re officious; they aren’t powerful, they just hold their people prisoner; they aren’t villainous and mighty, they’re pretty lame and pathetic.

I mean, not to say there aren’t parts that haven’t, uh, aged well. At the end when Donald Duck wakes up from his nightmare he sees a shadow on the wall that looks like a saluting figure and starts to heil it only to realise it’s the shadow cast by his golden statuette of the Statue of Liberty. I definitely appreciate what they were going for here, but looking back on this, holy balls is that the most sinister goddamn imagery. The movie is literally pointing out, that the shadow cast by The Statue of fucking Liberty looks like a Nazi salute.

Anyway, why am I talking about that one cartoon where Donald Duck is a Nazi?

Well, Der Fuehrer’s Face, just like Mel Brooks’ representations of Nazis, doesn’t really give them a moment to breathe. There isn’t a second for you to say you gotta admit, they’re still pretty [adjective], because they aren’t [adjective]. They aren’t any adjectives. They’re just dumb and lame, and that’s great.

Intent is a huge part of what Wolfenstein does better than other games. The two aspects of intent are making Nazis look bad and engaging the audience. More than others, these games needed to engage their audience, because when Wolfenstein I was released in 2014, killing Nazis was a cliche, and when Wolfenstein II was released in 2017, some gamers felt oddly… defensive… about Nazis… if you’re watching this and you haven’t seen the other half of this essay, I’m not repeating myself, you can go hear about it there.

So when they show characters you care about getting killed, they want you to hate the Nazis. They want you to care about and properly comprehend of the mortality of the good guys. When you go into the Da’at Yichud vault and get cool gadgets or meet Shoshanna the half cat/monkey, you are drawn in temporarily with playfulness, with levity, but then when you get captured by the Nazis or they storm the resistance base and people are dying, you care. It’s that same gut-punch story mechanism, building up characters with action, and jokes, and then cutting into them with something tragic, except on a miniature scale, and constantly, so that you remain engaged throughout the game.

And so when they show Hitler - the only real historical person shown in the games so far, except maybe the Nazi Beatles - they make him pathetic. He’s decrepit and senile, but also clearly unstable. He cries and pisses on the floor and throws up and doesn’t know where he is, but he also spins on a dime and shoots people, and that’s so that you can get a good measure of what real Nazism is.

So you can tie your ideas of real, actual Nazis to this guy. So that when you see this, you don’t think of this - you think of this, and this, and this. But also, so that you know that any idiot with a gun can ruin everything. So you know the Nazis aren’t special, magical, or mythological, they’re just people, but so you also know that it’s important to stop them.

When Blazkowicz gets beheaded by Engel, in first person perspective, it’s really fucked up. Like it’s super shocking, and messes with you. It’s bigger than Ned Stark in Game of Thrones - oh right spoilers by the way - because you’ve been playing as this character for two games now. It really makes you feel the mortality of the character and feel the loss. Not just loss as in grief, but loss as in losing. You’ve lost. Only the Wolfenstein franchise, but especially only the MachineGames Wolfenstein, could get away with cheesy enough bullshit to get back on track after this. They catch his head with a drone and attach it onto a nazi clone body. It’s great. It’s so dumb. Only they could possibly do it, and they do it just right.

When Blazkowicz infiltrates the concentration camp in the first game, it’s awful, and shocking and only Wolfenstein could do that, because in real life, there’s no way out of a situation like that. Anything else that tried to get out of that situation would probably end up making it kind of crass, and a bit offensive.

That’s why Wolfenstein does the best job of this gut-punch storytelling - it has to. Wolfenstein - that is to say the people behind it - knows that it needs to engage people and get the message across. It also knows to have real, relatable characters and make sure they all fit in and occupy their own space narratively. It also knows to keep a rich and interesting story at its core, not just one big twist.

Section 6: Conclusion

Writing is hard. Writing is honestly hard work and when you’ve written yourself into a tricky place it’s twice as hard. I get that. Sometimes I have no idea how to finish a video, or connect two sections together, or fit my political hot takes into an essay. I stare at a blank page for ages and I want to just have a mobster burst in and shoot me, or I suddenly get a call, pull on my Spiderman mask and rush off to save the day, or just literally end the video mid-sentence. None of those would be satisfying endings, but what I’m really afraid of is never finishing the thing I’m writing, or just writing something really boring.

Sometimes I have to delete loads of stuff I’ve already written, sometimes it takes ages to figure out what to say next that makes sense, and is relevant, and keeps people interested. Ultimately though, I know I just have to write my essay, bit by bit, and try to make every bit of it good. I can’t just try to make one part of it really interesting, and I shouldn’t anyway because that’d be putting all my eggs in one basket.

If you’re making something, and you have a good reason to put in a big twist, go ahead. Just make sure you make the rest of the text worth engaging with. Establish it within the story and make sure it makes sense, and for Bikini Samus’ sake don’t just lie to your audience to make it work. If you want to have 200 big twists, fucking more power to you, you just have to be prepared to handle them, and control the tone of the thing you’re making. Wolfenstein can go to dark places that other things can’t because it gives itself license to be cheesy bullshit, but also because it couples that cheese with emotional sincerity.

Gut-punch storytelling might be something video games are more prepared to do than other media, and I think we need to be aware of the difference between using a big twist cynically to grab attention and writing a story that just does something very dramatic. We need to know the difference between people who have confidence in us as an audience and people who don’t.