Important Text (Concept)

Important Text

CONCEPT

The best way to make sure even the stupidest players know that certain people, places, terms, or concepts in a game are important is to highlight those words in the text with different coloured letters, or through the use of bold, italicized, or all-caps text.

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Overview

Many video games go out of their way to highlight the names of important people, places, or things in their text. Games utilize this mechanic to help gamers understand puzzles that would be too complex to solve without help, or to hint that certain characters, locations, or items are important to the plot. This trend most likely began in the point and click adventure game genre. This could have been used to make a puzzle as obtuse and ridiculous as making a moustache out of cat fur downright solvable. This trend continued on to many other game genres that utilized puzzle solving as a game mechanic. The Legend of Zelda series is a fine example of how highlighted text can be used to help a player collect more information about the world, and the items within. Recently there have been many flagrant examples of abuse of this Important Text concept. Games such as Endless Ocean: Blue World needlessly highlight text that is actually meaningless to the overall gameplay.

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