Starting your game with text on-screen
I've been "game tasting" recently, which is what my husband and I call it when you play various games from your Steam backlog for at least 15 minutes each. If you aren't feeling a profound call to keep playing the game for hours and hours, you simply quit and uninstall it. If you're liking it, you leave it installed. No pressure. It's a great way to sample the stuff you forgot you even had.
For some reason, the majority of games I've played this way over the last two days began with a quote, or a huge bank of text on screen. I am not going to transcribe them all because some of them have simply too much text for me to bother.
(I want to make it clear that all of these games open with the text you see here onscreen, before any gameplay or any interactive material of any kind.)
Here's some screenshots:
Swordship - Digital Kingdom
Those expelled from the cities struggled to survive in sun-scorched wastelands.
Below their feet, the megacities survive on trade, through a constant flow of containers loaded with goods.
Rogue denizens have risen against the cities. At the command of lightning-fast ships, skilled pilots steal the precious cargo and deliver the contents to the banished.
Video here:
Gross - hangry owl games
Creeper World III: Arc Eternal - Knuckle Cracker
The arc of the moral universe is long, but bends toward justice.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
20th Century, 1st C. E.
-- EARTH --
Mortol (UFO 50) - Mossmouth
AMONG THE ANCIENT RUINS, OUTSIDE OUR DEAR CAPITAL...
...A GREAT EVIL HAS REAWAKENED!
WILL YOU LAY DOWN YOUR LIVES TO DEFEND MORTOLIA?
TO SERVE THE CAUSE, YOU MUST MASTER 3 RITUALS.
THE RITUAL OF ARROW
TO DO PRESS X
THE RITUAL OF BOMB
HOLD ↑ + X
THE RITUAL OF STONE
HOLD ↓ + X
I don't know if I have any wise observations for you off any of this, but it was definitely weird and fun to see so many games doing the same thing, one after the other, in so many different ways. There were even a couple I left off here because they weren't distinct enough.
I love that putting text at the start of something reveals how you think about your art and what kind of impact you think it has. Quotes, in particular, tend to demonstrate that the creator believes their art has a connection to culture, intellectual pursuits, the human experience, or history. I think the funniest one was Creeper World III - I was howling laughing as each line of that slowly faded in, one after the other. EARTH!! I don't think I am going to finish that game, but I was definitely curious how on earth battling The Creeper would connect to the teachings of MLK...
I don't think I personally would put blocks of text at the start of a videogame. In particular, I don't think I'd personally ever put a quote at the start of a game. I don't even like putting quotes at the start of prose. I found the practice frustrating as a kid... I think my first exposure to it was in Watership Down, where the quotes at the beginning of every single chapter were completely confusing to me and felt completely irrelevant. I was so poisoned against chapter quotes by Watership Down that I found them frustrating even in Dune, which I read a few years later - and in Dune they're plot-relevant! That's enough to make me dislike the practice just on principle. But I gotta admit that some people know how to do it well...