Ken Levine has spent much of his career trying to redefine video game narratives. Most famously with the iconic twists …
In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, the acclaimed developer also discusses his next game, ‘Judas’, generative AI and why it “wasn’t easy to step away from BioShock”
Brackets in a quote denote a change to what was actually said. In a perfect world, with quality journalism, they’re used to summarize or make the quote flow better in the piece without changing the intent or meaning of the quote
In this case, they very well could’ve changed “won’t be” to “will be”
I don’t expect that to be the case here, but it’s possible.
Also, using an ellipsis inside brackets like this: “[…]” Is an intentional omission by the author of the piece.
We generally don’t notice, but normal speech is basically a broken mess for anyone, with ahs and uhms, and sentences that keep enveloping other sentences, and you never get back to the point you were making in the first place. It’s a basic part of a journalist’s job to filter the word soup that you end up with from a face-to-face interview - in an honest way, that truthfully reflects the points and opinions that were stated, of course. Usually, we have no problem understanding each others’ jumbled verbal messes, when we’re right there, and have context, tone, body language, etc., to make up for when the words are lacking - but those things obviously don’t translate to written interviews.
In all likelihood, what Ken Levine “really” said was probably something along the lines of:
In the future, it will be - you know, what we really want to do, and now we have the technology, and because, BioShock really showed that there’s an real desire among gamers for immersive experiences like this, so we’re actually now fully able to to really realise that full, ahead-of-its-time vision we had with the original BioShock, it’s about agency, player agency, that’s really what it’s about, you know, it’s player driven - that’s where we want to go. Because that’s what makes our medium unique.
Usually, the brackets include a part of the sentence that wasn’t said but the interviewer believes the speaker meant or was implied.
In cases like this, maybe the speaker was speaking quickly (and, so, didn’t say the words during the interview) or were dropping implied parts is the sentence (like we all sometimes do when speaking casually; like if I say, “Quick thinking,” to someone. It’s implied that I was saying, “[That was] quick thinking”).
This also gets used often if the interviewee is talking about someone they know personally but we don’t so they’re usually just using the first name (e.g. “Yeah; me and [General] Howard [Zimmerman] go way back”).
I always struggle to know when to use the square brackets. The straightforward answer is to just quote directly where possible. But especially in interviews, someone’s answer may be jumbly, so the most honourable thing to do may be to use square brackets to make it easier for the reader to understand the speaker’s point, but you’re not being misleading.
For example, maybe this interviewee said something like “in the future, it — we might come to see that game development, and games overall, will end up turning out to be player-driven”, which could be straightforwardly shortened to what we see in the screenshot: “in the future, it [will be] player driven”. Square brackets, in the hands of a skilled journalist, can be used to manipulate a narrative through selectively quoting people, but they can also represent a speaker’s point far more authentically and cogently than the literal words.
There’s also just grammatical stuff that looks better in text. “In the future, it’s player driven” would conversationally flow perfectly well, but as written text the tense of “it’s” doesn’t line up with the statement being about the future. Hence the present tense being corrected to future tense.
One I’ve had to do super often is injecting a name back in a sentence. Why say
Mary said the following about Jane: “She went to the store today.”
when I could say
Mary said, “[Jane] went to the store today.”
I mean, I could just paraphrase Mary and do away with the quotation marks and brackets entirely, but when I am trying to prove something (primarily that I’m not talking out of my ass) I like quotes because you can easily just take it as direct evidence, an exact citation of what the other person said that you can use as evidence yourself, instead of a paraphrase by some random person whose reasoning and motives you do not trust.
Of course, that doesn’t get into how people can manipulate quotes and take them out of context, or even just straight up write something in quotation marks that was never said, but…
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Quick Question : What does it mean when they write like this?
Brackets in a quote denote a change to what was actually said. In a perfect world, with quality journalism, they’re used to summarize or make the quote flow better in the piece without changing the intent or meaning of the quote
In this case, they very well could’ve changed “won’t be” to “will be”
I don’t expect that to be the case here, but it’s possible.
Also, using an ellipsis inside brackets like this: “[…]” Is an intentional omission by the author of the piece.
They’re editing the quote to add information they think is relevant. Ken Levine didn’t say “will be”.
Exceot this quote makes no sense without these 2 words. Did Ken just accidentally words?
Or they replaced words. It’s possible he said “It’s” but since it’s not currently true, they changed it to [will be] but I’m just speculating.
We generally don’t notice, but normal speech is basically a broken mess for anyone, with ahs and uhms, and sentences that keep enveloping other sentences, and you never get back to the point you were making in the first place. It’s a basic part of a journalist’s job to filter the word soup that you end up with from a face-to-face interview - in an honest way, that truthfully reflects the points and opinions that were stated, of course. Usually, we have no problem understanding each others’ jumbled verbal messes, when we’re right there, and have context, tone, body language, etc., to make up for when the words are lacking - but those things obviously don’t translate to written interviews.
In all likelihood, what Ken Levine “really” said was probably something along the lines of:
Usually, the brackets include a part of the sentence that wasn’t said but the interviewer believes the speaker meant or was implied.
In cases like this, maybe the speaker was speaking quickly (and, so, didn’t say the words during the interview) or were dropping implied parts is the sentence (like we all sometimes do when speaking casually; like if I say, “Quick thinking,” to someone. It’s implied that I was saying, “[That was] quick thinking”).
This also gets used often if the interviewee is talking about someone they know personally but we don’t so they’re usually just using the first name (e.g. “Yeah; me and [General] Howard [Zimmerman] go way back”).
Your explanation is good and thorough.
I always struggle to know when to use the square brackets. The straightforward answer is to just quote directly where possible. But especially in interviews, someone’s answer may be jumbly, so the most honourable thing to do may be to use square brackets to make it easier for the reader to understand the speaker’s point, but you’re not being misleading.
For example, maybe this interviewee said something like “in the future, it — we might come to see that game development, and games overall, will end up turning out to be player-driven”, which could be straightforwardly shortened to what we see in the screenshot: “in the future, it [will be] player driven”. Square brackets, in the hands of a skilled journalist, can be used to manipulate a narrative through selectively quoting people, but they can also represent a speaker’s point far more authentically and cogently than the literal words.
"in the future, it will be player-driven
There’s also just grammatical stuff that looks better in text. “In the future, it’s player driven” would conversationally flow perfectly well, but as written text the tense of “it’s” doesn’t line up with the statement being about the future. Hence the present tense being corrected to future tense.
One I’ve had to do super often is injecting a name back in a sentence. Why say
when I could say
I mean, I could just paraphrase Mary and do away with the quotation marks and brackets entirely, but when I am trying to prove something (primarily that I’m not talking out of my ass) I like quotes because you can easily just take it as direct evidence, an exact citation of what the other person said that you can use as evidence yourself, instead of a paraphrase by some random person whose reasoning and motives you do not trust.
Of course, that doesn’t get into how people can manipulate quotes and take them out of context, or even just straight up write something in quotation marks that was never said, but…