Subtitles In Games

Something I rarely think to mention are the things I'm glad have changed in games over the years. It's easy to identify cases where increasing size of the corporations creating them has led to worse monetary practices and broader abuses of the people making them. There's an infinite well of topics to draw on for things that aren't a case of "should improve" but "must improve or the entire enterprise simply isn't worth it." I do want to highlight something though that does make me happy. Over the course of the past 10 years I have reached the point where I can't immediately identify the last game I played that did not have subtitles. As is so often the case with topics of my obsession, this was an even bigger problem in the ‘90s and ‘00s, and a peculiar onset of one at that. While I'm not one to speak for the ways games can still be improved for the hearing impaired, I do want to talk about how they used to be even worse.

From the ‘70s to mid-’90s, games typically had sound as more accompaniment than a key to gameplay or narrative. The sound capabilities of most consoles or PCs to that point were limited enough that there weren't a lot of ways to incorporate sound as a key element aside from rhythm, something rarely incorporated without a visual element in games anyway and rarely seen in games of that vintage. In the early ‘90s though, the storage space of CDs began to be leveraged to add voice acting to games. Sega CD and TurboGrafx CD games with a narrative focus would often be extensively reliant on it to bring across particularly dramatic (and unsurprisingly narratively consequential) scenes. This began a kind of depressing trend, that a player could navigate a game without hearing it for most of its runtime since less important information was typically relayed through text, but the second it came to delivering a key story beat you were likely as not going to be left watching a scene that quite possibly didn't even have the kindness to display an indication that the reason you couldn't move was because people were talking. At the time any given game was, as likely as not, streaming a pile of audio files set up to the CD "red book" standard when these scenes played out. That's a weird way of saying there may have, at that point, been something of a technical excuse for why subtitles would have been a hurdle to implement. That said, there existed possible (though suboptimal) ways to handle this technical issue. If all else failed, a script in the manual to these scenes would have probably been worthwhile.

Even in this infancy period though, the problem that would stick by the majority of the industry to some greater or lesser extent as it moved into voice acted games was clear. When voice acting became a selling point, subtitles or closed captioning became a bonus. Once the primary mode of communication changed, the other forms became something that was added in "if there was time." If you know anything about game development, there are always things left on the cutting room floor because "if there's time" features always and consistently lose to a fixed deadline rapidly approaching. Unless someone was willing to prioritize them, these games wouldn't have them. If a feature isn't treated as essential it simply won't exist. The only way to make such a feature essential at that point is to make it part of the certification process for a console and this doesn't seem to have become the case at any point. Games have gotten better at building in the assumption that subtitles are a requirement, but you'll still find publishers, Activision unsurprisingly among them, that will skip them seemingly at random. Still, at some point a combination of consumer expectations and complaints seem to have turned subtitles from the exception to the rule, for the most part.

Sadly, for years subtitles would be extremely spotty and weird, even or especially in games with plenty of text dialog. This isn't even touching on the actual quality of the subtitles. I'm not a great judge and I'm sure many games had, or still have, bad or inadequate ones. I'm talking specifically about games that wouldn't have them at all or would not have them for random portions of the game. There wasn't even anything like consistent per-publisher commitment to having them. Capcom's Viewtiful Joe doesn't have them at all, Devil May Cry has them inexplicably for bosses but not the protagonist! Onimusha has them but not on the opening FMV (a very common affliction for the time).    All three of these games came out within a two year period. There was just no commitment to the idea, and this is hardly a uniquely Capcom problem. A space that had been relatively devoid of this problem developing it in real time, without any commitment to fixing it, was kind of depressing to watch.

The issue wasn't even totally fixed once subtitle options became more common due to the falling out of favor of opening title screens. When a game lacked an opening screen, even if it had an option to enable subtitles, defaulting to subtitles off often meant the opening scene would play without subtitles. If you were particularly unlucky it wouldn't even save that you wanted subtitles on when you reset, ensuring that you couldn't even start a new game, turn them on and restart the game. This actually is part of what caused me to write this. Back in the day I actually transcribed the opening cutscene of largely forgotten PlatinumGames Wii beat-em-up Madworld for a friend so they could tell what was happening in the opening cutscene. This confluence of poor choices wasn't exactly common, but it shows a failure to contemplate the real use case subtitles are supposed to have. If you can't enable them from the start, you've already failed to give a portion of your audience the chance at starting on equal footing.

I don't mean to imply this problem is a thing of the past, as was pointed out to me while I was doing some research on whether any console manufacturer has made subtitles a requirement in their certification process. As recently as 3 years ago, Activision launched a remaster of an older title with absolutely no subtitle option. Outcry got them patched in, but in this day and age it's shameful to have literally nothing. This is leaving aside that few games have proper closed captioning. These are features that help an entire segment of the audience engage with games, and they're treated as optional bonuses. The addition of subtitles can only help a game; it is long past time that they cease to be treated as something that happens when the time or budget allows. I should be writing an essay about how the closed captioning in games is insufficient but instead I'm arguing for a bare minimum standard. Even as we approach them being a voluntary standard, the failure of any given major game to have them sticks out more, knowing that those with rights of approval could make this problem go away.