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2025-09-03 10:09:00
www.pcgamer.com
I think we’ve got a new contender for The Most Specific UI Option award 2025, which I must emphasise, is an entirely real award that I definitely did not make up alongside my Most Specific Bug Fix 2025 award. Quartet, a lovely little turn-based RPG by a four-person team, lets you toggle the Oxford comma off and on again.
In case you don’t know what that is, the Oxford comma is a grammar rule that says you should, generally speaking, put a comma before the last item in a list. This helps clear up misunderstandings. For example: “I’d like to thank my parents, my brother, and God” is a very different sentence to “I’d like to thank my parents, my brother and God”.
After seeing this option do the rounds, I had to know—well, why. So I popped the developers of Quartet an email, and director Patrick Holleman was nice enough to get back to me:
“There are four core team members making Quartet. In seven years of production, we only had one planned, real-time meeting. All four of us have never been in one real-world location at the same time. In fact, we’ve never met Pete (our lead programmer) in person. We live too far apart and our very small budget didn’t include money for travel.
“Because of that, the creative process sometimes played out in idiosyncratic ways. (That doesn’t mean it was haphazard or chaotic. We had an extremely detailed, 70-page GDD before production even began, and we stuck to it like glue.) But, along the way, new ideas popped up.”
New ideas, Holleman says, like optional punctuation toggles. “It was Pete’s idea. He just dropped a message on Discord that he was planning on implementing it. I’m fairly sure that, at the time, the rest of us just sort of blinked at the suggestion. It’s not that it was a problem; we were just more concerned with fixing big bugs or making the next piece of content. (JRPGs require so much bespoke content.)
“For his part, Pete tells me that he wanted a comma in a line of dialogue and I said it didn’t need one. Then he added the setting when nobody was looking.”
Pete—as someone who swears by the Oxford comma, I salute your hyper-specific desire for properly clean communication. As for how the toggle works, Holleman tells me “we put the custom markdown tag ‘oxfordComma /’ in the script, wherever an Oxford comma could go. Then, when displaying the text in game, we check the player’s settings and either replace this tag with the comma or leave it out based on their preference.”
Being an RPG, Quartet has quite a bit of dialogue—turns out, though, the Oxford comma only comes up a grand total of 15 times. “Pete ended up doing a text search for all sentences with a comma and a conjunction and, after reviewing maybe 500 matches, only about 15 spots in the script actually used them. It hardly has any effect on gameplay, but people care—even more than we imagined!”
So there you have it. To all developers, writers, and narrative designers out there: If someone says you shouldn’t use Oxford commas in your dialogue, text boxes, or lore-dumps, you now have a way to get your revenge, justice, and satisfaction. Oh, and if you like your RPGs, you should probably check Quartet out on Steam—options aside, it’s a well put-together game with a pitch-perfect classic vibe.
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