Is the “attention war” worth fighting? You’ve no doubt heard by now that analysts like famed slideshow maker investor Matthew Ball are arguing that consumers’ attention spans are becoming increasingly fragmented, and that the siren song of “prediction markets,” social video platforms, and generative AI chatbots are dragging players away from games.
I’m something of a conscientious objector on this subject. You can’t out-exploit exploitative platforms. But at the 2026 GDC Festival of Gaming, writers Alexa Ray Correia and Adam Dolin made a case I could get behind—that games like Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 show that you can keep players’ attention with the tools you already have. Among those tools are game writing and narrative design.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Here is a writer, praising other writers, telling you to rely on writing. That’s the hook. The thing meant to grab your attention. But we all know if this were a matter of winning over players with the right words, we wouldn’t have this so-called attention war in the first place.
In their crowded session (a remarkable feat for a Friday talk at GDC), Correia and Dolin tag-teamed the problem from two separate angles, both presenting case studies and discussing how to get your colleagues interested in taking ambitious and engaging risks.
Dolin took the technician’s approach, encouraging developers to “design systems that encourage engagement and not consumption.”
Correia came out swinging for the stories themselves. It’s easy to argue that complicated or opinionated stories could drive players away, especially if they violently disagree with what’s in your game. And if you’re fighting for every sale, why would you risk alienating anyone?
“The answer is not to write less,” she said when addressing this concern. “It’s to write smarter.”
How you tell your story matters
“Data-driven” organizations want numbers to back up arguments. So to make his point, Dolin pointed to the Steam achievements for Sabotage Studios’ The Messenger. The Messenger is a side-scrolling metroidvania that’s action-first, story-second. Sabotage loves to infuse its games with a sense of personality, but this is a game players pick up on mastery and exploration. The witty writing and time travel shenanigans are well-crafted icing on top of a combat-infused cake.
According to SteamDB, 29 percent of The Messenger players have earned the achievement called “The Fake Ending Was Better.” It’s the one you get when you finish the game.
But 41 percent of players have earned an achievement called “Fine, I Won’t Open It.” To get this achievement, players need to stop the action, sit down, and let the game lecture them on the nature of happiness.
As you can see in the scene above, players only find this scene by approaching a cabinet in the shop of the game’s sole merchant. When they first interact with it, the merchant tells them to back off.
But the interaction prompt remains. Players may wonder—what happens if they keep pushing it?
The shopkeeper keeps warning them to back away, eventually saying if they don’t, he’ll make them sit through his boring story. And they won’t be able to skip it. Two more warnings later, he pops off—not with anger or something inane, but with a monologue on the nature of happiness.
“More people got the achievement for discovering that lecture than they did in finishing the game!” Dolin exclaimed, gesturing wildly to the convention center screen. This wasn’t just about the quality of the writing though. It was about the minute details of the interaction. The animation of the button prompt, the scrolling of the text, the decision to only trigger this after many warnings—those all played a role in making the lecture feel unexpected and delightful.
“The lesson is not to write shorter,” he said. The lesson is that the way you present your text is a design decision.”
If you need other examples of well-presented writing, you might consider the “Active Time Lore” system from Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XVI or the notification-inspired user interface of Disco Elysium (both reused excellently in Christoffer Bodegård’s Esoteric Ebb). Suspicious Developments’ Tactical Breach Wizards is also a case study in intentional text animation.
It’s also worth considering how this logic applies outside of narrative design. There are means across many disciplines to more deeply engage the player and not always default to the average in the hopes of attracting the widest audience. In art, audio, level design, systems design, UX—so many best practices are meant to be inviting, but to truly engage is a whole other matter.
Now, onto the words themselves.
Players want complex stories
We’ve heard it all before. “Keep politics out of games.” “Stories should appeal to the widest audience possible.” “Our work doesn’t have any social commentary.”
By now we all know that in public, these lines are rolled out for games that touch on any social issues or even sometimes just include characters who aren’t from marginalized backgrounds. We hear it sometimes in game studios too—but Correia pointed out that’s not necessarily because of bigotry or a dislike for social commentary. Simply put, there are people in game studios whose number one concern is commercial safety, because they know they need to sell as many copies as possible to keep the company alive.
“Somebody who values safety and stability is not morally inferior to somebody who values risk,” she said. “The reason that this matters…is because that your values tend to reveal themselves when something is at stake and under pressure.”
Correia made this point while discussing the need to understand not only your personal, moral, and creative values, but those of the people on your team and higher up in the company. If you don’t do that before tackling the topic of complex and potentially divisive storytelling, you might play a role in driving conflict even if all parties involved are acting in good faith.
Once you’ve done that, and assessed whether there’s an openness to potentially divisive narratives, then you can bring in the data. Dolin once again stepped in with the useful case studies: one analyzing the impact of media on political attitudes, and the other studying how games promote empathy and understanding of unfamiliar people.
The first study makes the case that even if people find content they encounter divisive, they don’t necessarily retreat from it. The study tracked 37,000 participants (a mix of conservatives and liberals) and assessed their attitudes about those with opposing views in politics after encountering media promoting those views.
That media did little to change anyone’s mind. But that wasn’t Dolin’s point. “It turned down the temperature,” he explained, saying that participants expressed decreased hostility towards people with other political views. “Exposure to opposing viewpoints decreases hostility. People can handle complexity. It’s just that the major platforms where people get their news…are designed to prevent us from encountering alternative viewpoints.”
Image via Quantic Dream
The second study tested players after playing a segment of Detroit: Become Human, where the player character Kara must protect a young girl from domestic violence. People who played through the scene, rather than just watching it, increased their “sense of embodiment” of Kara, which increased empathy towards Kara, which increased their cognitive empathy toward real-world victims. “It reduced implicit bias, and men and women were affected equally,” he said.
Safe stories cannot provoke either response. “Risky” stories can, said Correia. “It challenges you, it provokes introspection, and it might also subvert what you normally expect from a gaming genre.”
It’s worth thinking about how in the game industry, we more readily expect this logic when it comes to complexity or difficulty in gameplay. Many breakout hit games from 2025—from teams large and small—were massively successful because they challenged players, provoked introspection, and subverted what they expected from the genre.
Take risks and keep players’ attention
There are always reasons to guard against unnecessary risk. But it is the year 2026. If this “attention war” is supposedly as dire as it sounds—if players are turning away from games because they find other platforms more engaging—then engagement is the tool you will go to war with.
I stand by my principle that if you try to win player interest by trying to outpace the unhealthy habits other platforms offer, you will lose. But Correia and Dolin changed my own mind a little with their argument. The game industry advances when developers and their colleagues choose to face the unexpected.
“These tactics are meant to keep your players engaged and encourage them to engage more deeply with your material,” Correia said. “Your audience is capable of nuance. Trust yourself, trust your writing…and trust that the person on the receiving end of your work will be fully engaged.”
Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa Festivals.
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