It's A Mythtery

I've been playing the chart-conquering Xbox game Fable (the excellent official site is here). It looks good, the controls are well thought out, the voice acting is of a surprisingly good quality, the score is excellent and the whole thing seems to flow along quite nicely, thank you very much. So why do I get an urge to spit blood almost every time I switch it on? The answer, of course, is the woeful quality of the script. Why is it that so many game developers are willing to spend thousands on getting that lens-flare (yawn) effect just right but seem to think that chucking a few peanuts at the office monkey is more than adequate to obtain a decent script?

Fable promised much (a lot of which it admittedly failed to deliver - see Molyneux Apologises For Missing Features In Fable) but there is absolutely no hope of a player "creating their own story" when they're faced with a series of cut-scenes built on fantasy cliches so old they went out with Amadis of Gaul and such glorious verbal infelicities as someone's hopes and dreams being "crushed to ashes" (I ask you, I mean "burnt to ashes" yes, "crushed to dust" yes, but "crushed to ashes"??).

Gamers constantly bemoan the fact that their "nascent art form" is not taken seriously, unlike film or television. Surely one of the major factors behind this is that in film and TV, the scriptwriter's art is taken seriously. As long as those behind games are content to create a sandbox and then bung on a script afterwards (you know who you are Peter Molyneux) or to try and work out their fantasies of cinematic genius while boring us to death with long and convoluted cut-scenes (yes, I mean you Hideo Kojima) or are content to serve up a tossed salad of cliche dressed with kindergarten prose (just about everybody), serious critics will be right to sneer and walk away.

[NB the most obvious honourable exclusion from all this would have to be Ico - the perfect distillation of love-story, coming-of-age tale and Gormenghast - pity no-one bought it, really]