The Ancient Secrets of Writing Item Descriptions

23 Nov, 2023

Fallen London has a lot of items and we are constantly adding new ones. As such, we write a lot of item descriptions. I’d like to think we’ve gotten pretty good at it!

Item descriptions are, to my mind, an underrated vector of video game storytelling. Inventory interaction is so often a major part, if not the heart, of a game’s economy or affordances. You guns in Destiny, your crafting materials in Minecraft, your medium-sized dry goods in an adventure game like Grim Fandango.

I’m often advocating for embracing the particularities and preoccupations of the medium. Video games are often very concerned with stuff in a way that other media rarely are. A movie might feature a macguffin or two, or a few hero props that are prominent in the story. A video game might feature dozens of things that are important to the player at various times.

To this end, I think video game items should have descriptions. One of the biggest narrative misses in Cyberpunk 2077 is its lack of item descriptions. That game is so, so very concerned with guns! And yet, none of the guns have descriptions.

So, here are my thoughts on how to write good item descriptions. They’re probably biased towards my own circumstances, so let me point them out:

• I write for a game where text is the reward; text is welcomed and beloved and players enjoy seeing it.
• It’s a fantasy game with an expansive setting that’s meant to be evoked through the writing.
• We put out a lot of items and we need to write a lot of item descriptions.

On that last point: by a very rough estimate,¹ over the course of 2023 we’ll have added about 700 new qualities to Fallen London. Some qualities represent physical items; some represent stories or circumstances and so are closer in nature to what another game might call a quest or a task or an attribute. But all of them have a description.

Perspective

One of the great things about item descriptions is that they often don’t have an enforced perspective. In some games they do – every item in a typical point-and-click adventure game is described by the protagonist, according to LucasArts tradition. But there’s no specific expectation that they should fit any particular format or alignment, so in many games an item description can be anything.

This is the approach we use in Fallen London, in fact. Most item descriptions are written in the voice of the game’s narrator, but not always. Some item descriptions are direct quotes of in-universe documents. Some item descriptions are written in something other than the narratorial voice, like the classic description for the item ‘Bottle of Strangling Willow Absinthe’:

Get it off! GET IT OFF!

Or the description for the item ‘Shared Case File’, which is brought into existence when one player sends a letter to train another in the investigative arts:

“And that’s when I realised there was something odd about the number of antimacassars left in the parlour…”

This is genuinely really powerful. These little pieces of interstitial text, which are somewhat divorced from any surrounding narrative context, can travel around in the setting and world of the game and look at different aspects of the narrative from different lengths and produce different effects.

This is also invaluable just from a process point of view. We have to write a lot of these descriptions. Often they’re easy enough to write; sometimes they’re not. In those cases, shifting perspective or format can unblock writing.

Explaining versus Situating

Is a description for a given item explaining what that item is, or is it merely situating an item in the game world?

In many cases, an item description has to do some lifting in defining or expositing what a setting-specific concept is. Consider our description for the item ‘Pair of Lenguals’:

Polythreme’s finest: gloves that can taste! And speak! And salivate!

This short description doesn’t get into what Polythreme is or why it produces gloves that are also tongues, but it does serve to explain what ‘lenguals’ are: disgusting gloves that are also tongues.

Contrast that to a description of something that’s mundane and familiar to the player, but which is written to place that mundane and familiar object in the context of Neathy weirdness. This is the description for the item ‘Surface-Silk Scrap’:

None of your sorrow-spider squeezings. This came out of a real Surface worm.

That is to say, the salient information here isn’t what silk is; we can assume that the player knows what silk is. What the description is trying to convey is that conventional silk from a real mulberry-bush-eating silkworm is slightly unusual or rare relative to the spider silk made by Neathy sorrow-spiders.

This ‘situating’ frame is very valuable in settings that mix the grounded and the fantastical. Pathologic 2 has many beautiful item descriptions that place a lot of mundane items – needles, hazelnuts, rags, bullets – in the context of that game’s surreal environment.

As an exercise, consider all these different descriptions for a simple metal fork:

Whether for picking at your plate of slowly congealing roast or sending a strong signal to a challenging relative, nothing beats a good fork.

Transjovian Supply Corporation Catalogue Item CUTL-00001: Standard size fork, stamped aluminum construction. Billions of these things exist. Most have never been raised in anger.

This one doesn’t have any water spots on it, thank God. The sous would know.

Describing versus evoking

Another aspect to consider is whether your descriptions need to be, well, descriptions. Often the space is better used to evoke a feeling or an image, rather than literally try to describe the object in front of the player.

In Fallen London, of course, many items are feelings or images. But we often prefer to let the context of how you get an item, or events surrounding it, do the heavy lifting of providing plot-wise narrative context; while the description of the item itself serves to evoke its emotional valence.

See, for example, the description for the item ‘Birth-Name of a New Power’, which describes the mood of the moment it stands in for, more so than what it is:

Urchins shout in the rooftops. Light shines in the west.

Or the exceptionally effective description for the item ‘Memory of Discordance’, an item that represents knowledge that was excised from reality by the powers that be:²

Forbidden.

Microscopes

Probably the most important technique in description writing is honing in on the most salient aspect of the thing being described. Space is limited; even in a game like Fallen London, where we are allowed to be indulgent with writing, we do want to lean on the side of brevity. Consider the description for a ‘Pair of Iron Manacles’:

Heavy as a wretched memory.

By the categories we’ve set up so far, I’d say we’re not really situating; that we’re describing just a little bit, and that we’re also evoking. But think of all the things this description is uninterested in: the manacles’ manufacture, their origin, their intended purpose, the way they work. It focuses in on what matters most, which is the feeling of wearing them, and the emotional valence of that object in its context. Another good example that distills an item down to exactly one great joke is the ‘Crate of Incorruptible Biscuits’:

They never go off. Arguably they were never on.

Telescopes

Of course, you can also zoom outwards to the broader setting. A lot of Fallen London lore originates as throwing things at the wall in throwaway bits of text and figuring out what they are later. Eg, ‘Drop of Prisoner’s Honey’:

The most delightful secret of the Neath: the honey of lamplighter bees fed exclusively on the Exile’s Rose.

This description is notable because it doesn’t get into the salient things about honey that matter to the player at the point where they first encounter it – what it is and what it does. Rather, the description sets up a bunch of setting detail that will only be resolved much later. You don’t have to treat this as a place to hang lore; you can just be expansive about what an item signifies. Eg, ‘A Vast Network of Connections Wherever the Bazaar’s Influence can be Found’:

Wherever you go, someone there owes you something. Tax on silks. A share in a railway venture. A ritual gift consisting of two masks.

This is, again, the magic of perspective. We don’t need to fully set up and construct the scene with the ritual gift and the two masks. We can just conjure it up. That’s really, really powerful.

Emotional Valence

Finally, let me talk a little about one of the key tasks of descriptive text, which is to situate an item in the game’s flow, economy, and play experience. Items in games are components of the story, and as such they have emotional tints to them. An item might be a burden that you have to carry, or a reward that you get for doing something challenging, or a transient resource. And while I don’t think item descriptions should be tied down by trying to imply the exact mechanical category that an item falls into, it does make sense to think about it.

For example, a lot of the time when we describe an item that’s a major reward we will write a longer description that in itself builds up the player character a bit. For example, the item ‘Memory of a Much Greater Self’, which is the final capstone of a very long questline:

If you follow the threads of your own destiny far enough, you will find ever-stranger knots. Eventually, you may find a knot that you tied yourself.

Similarly, if an item is rare or hard to get, it then commands a more forceful description. For example, the ‘Limpid Soul’:

Nothing escapes the bottom of a well, not even history. Souls like this one have been scoured clean of everything, even their past; wells don’t ‘eject’ them so much as bring them into existence.

A tight-ropey example here are the Burden items (debuffs, essentially) that you could get during this years’ Estival event. They’re called ‘A Stalwart Commitment to Helping’ and ‘A Fierce Commitment to London’s Defense’. They lower the players’ stats, but represent that this is happening because the player is exhausted by giving aid during an ongoing crisis.

You refuse to turn away when help is needed. But so much is needed.

You won’t run away from a fight when one is needed. You run towards, instead.

So, these descriptions get across that these are negative items that you don’t want to have; but they are also building up the player character a little.

In conclusion

This isn’t really a single coherent methodology; I don’t think you can devise a unified way of writing this type of text, at least not at the rate that we write it. But I hope this collection of strategies and best practices is helpful.

Watchful +7; Bizarre +1; Mithridacy +2; Reduces Nightmares build-up.

#Fallen London #cohost #on writing