Many have noticed these days that any game that features a post disaster environment (Singularity, FEAR, BioShock), will probably feature the new collection based idea that was once flags or coins that is the audio log. So let's set up the idea with BioShock: your wandering through the water damaged, blood stained restaurant and according to the arrow I should leave. But fuck that arrow, I don't know maybe it lied to you as a child so your family missed the Disneyland turn off and you got to spend that weekend vacation in a motel instead of hugging a fourty year old virgin, I mean Mickey Mouse. Yeah anyway, you go into the kitchen where your hit with a frying pan by the mutated chef but one shotgun blast takes him down, and looking around the kitchen I find one of the leaders of the city's audio log in the pantry.
So you listen to it and you learn this entire guy's life or maybe some exposition. Now the fact I collected this audio log and now have a more informed brain causes problems in the story. Like the fact what the hell is Dr.Important's secret facts about genetic testing doing in a restaurant's pantry, is he a geneticist/pastry chef? Second of course where's the paper. Seriosuly look in any office and you'll find an entire Brazillain acre in there. Is Andrew Ryan a member of Greenpeace and has banned paper? But seriously it's kind of weird that the citizens chose the early form of vlogging over their own safety.
Also game design fucks up how to play audio logs: Doom 3 puts it in a menu so you have go through the frustrating spreadsheet nightmare to here some tell me not to turn off my fucking flashlight. Singularity did it in gameplay but then forces you to stay next to it and not wander away so that bores me. BioShock (again ok System Shock too) did it right by letting you listen to a lecture on Ayn Rand philosophy while putting some deer slugs into a splicer's face.
Also BioShock & Dead Space used it's audio logs as exposition which makes it an easy way of better understand the setting and unmuddle the story. Not though like Alan Wake in which it spoils what is about to happen in five seconds. What these audio logs shouldn't do is tell side stories. These can fuck up the main story by making it more confusing. They might also ask questions like we're taking sound bites of a horror movie: "what's going on" is a question that musted of been asked a couple of billion times.
Maybe we shouldn'y have audio logs at all instead use viusals instead of lectures. You know like again BioShock does with having quotes on the wall that have been positioned so the player will see them upon entering a new area. Or none at all as not knowing everything is the basis of fan fiction. Again as an example the origin of the zombie apocalypse in Left 4 Dead is unknown and the game shows that the past is not important only the survival of a small group of people is truly important.
Audio logs can be incredibly annoying things because if your like me collectathons are rarely fun, unless you play Monster Hunter or MMO's. So instead of developers just recording every bit of a generic AI's boring afternoon playing with himself we use them as a means of providing deeper and more interesting stories and setting's. Or we may as well axe the whole concept like we did with the points system.
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