Point of View No. 2 - The Developer
There's a misconception among people who don't make videogames that the job is a ton of fun, and just a matter of sitting around playing games all day. Those who do make videogames will tell you there are bits of fun surrounded by seas - yea, oceans - of tedium and frustration. The sheer volume of tiny details involved in making one of these immersive, interactive entertainment experiences is mind-boggling. And every one of those details can be tweaked and balanced into infinity.
If you're going to be successful in this business, you need to build up - or be born with - a huge tolerance for repetition. This is a good thing. It's what gives us the marvels of modern technological entertainment we all enjoy today.
It also means videogame developers have a love for the journey. They find fulfillment in tackling problems in a new way. They get excited about inventing a new combat system or pushing the limits of animation. They don't get excited about easy things - except in the "Yay! I just have to spend a couple hours writing all the barks for the game and then I get to go home for the day!" sort of excitement.
It's not that developers are intentionally ignoring easy things like implementing barks. They just don't capture the imagination the way inventing a whole new dialogue system would. It's like facing just another skeleton in a dungeon versus fighting the big boss demon at the end of the tunnel. One gets your blood pumping. The other is a checkbox to check off.
And have I mentioned the insane deadlines? The sheer volume of written material required to produce an RPG is shocking, and the fact that it has to be written and rewritten constantly to reflect the emerging realities of the game - well, it's almost a superhuman feat.
So this explains why barks don't get much time or attention from game developers. Even my fellow game writers seem to have no respect for the humble bark. They will spend hours debating the exact phrasing of a big pay-off story moment in a cut scene the player will see once, maybe twice if the game has enough replay value. Yet these same writers spend only five seconds thinking about the lines - the barks - the players will hear thousands of times in one play-through.
It makes sense from the developer's standpoint - you can't fumble the ball when you're standing on the goal line - but the focus isn't on the big-picture player experience. And the players can tell. They're just so beaten down by it they can't even express their misery.
