Culture Clash

(January 2008)

Talking with Transistors

The dialogue problem

I happen to be acquainted with a curmudgeonly gentleman who hates dialogue-intensive games.

“I hate dialogue-intensive games,” he said. “I don't want to roleplay with a circuit board.”

Personally, I prefer to see it not as roleplaying with a circuit board, but as choose-your-own-adventuring my way through someone else's carefully crafted, conversation-centric narrative. While novels tend to be descriptive, games and movies are supposed to show or say rather than tell . Movies, being passive, rarely come under fire for “showing” or “talking” too much; it's the very core of moviedom. Games, though, are experiential things, and the experience is player-driven. This makes the situation thornier: when you don't know where the audience will be looking or what they'll be listening to at any given time, it's hard to say or show much of substance. Games that try often fail spectacularly. Preposterous blowhards like Halo 3 try desperately to show stuff, but the player misses huge bouts of exposition due to sloppy construction and layout (you ain't Valve, Bungie, but keep tryin'); meanwhile, exposition through talking is problematic. On one hand, developers the world over are struggling to create games containing characters and storylines about which we care. On the other, some people just don't like excessive dialogue – either because it's often silly or because they dislike communicating with circuit boards.

Dialogue is just a slice of games; a small slice, really. Level design is more important, stability is more important, so is structure and control and a million other little parts that form the whole. Games are not made but crafted. As Valve has with shooters, BioWare has made great strides in the art of crafting RPGs; Bethesda too. In games like theirs, the role of dialogue takes great prominence, which can lead to staggering complexities during development, and to the inevitable conclusion of some players that their products are too wordy. But words are the heart of those games.

Consider the profoundly chat-intensive Mass Effect. It's got a chowderheaded AI, Mongoloid interface and did-you-test-it-at-all technical problems. But BioWare's operatic grab bag is a great game largely because of its verbose, if dolefully clichéd, conversational fiction. The radial dialogue system is not innovative for allowing you to choose tone rather than response (Under a Killing Moon did that 14 years ago, and probably others did earlier), but for allowing you to manage a seamless, pauseless conversation path. Aside from being occasionally deceptive or outright misleading, the dialogue in Mass Effect falls victim to the classic BioWare dialogue shortcoming, the quirk BioWare has been ridiculed for, for years, to the point that I think they're doing it on purpose just to defy their tormentors. Specifically, the tone-based system has fewer shades of gray than a chess board:

1. “It is my honor to rescue Timmy from the well.”
2. “Pay me for rescuing Timmy from the well.”
3. “I will fill the well with Drano and dissolve Timmy. Then I will murder you and eat your spleen.”

The point being, obviously, that even games from one of the industry's shining luminaries of dialogue still are far from competing with Chekhov.

Part of it is that we are still roleplaying with circuit boards, and technology means it's going to be that way for a while. When the day arrives that we're actually roleplaying with the game AI, and not a pre-scripted database of reactions… well, that day we can just do away with other people altogether and it'll be great. But right now – and despite the never-lived-up-to claims of some developers, including a couple mentioned here – game AI advancements seem irritatingly focused not on character and world reaction to player behavior, but on combat skills, so it's going to be a while before The Elder Scrolls MCMLXXV responds in a genuinely dynamic way to our remarks and activities.

Motion controls, voice recognition and reputation systems are all moving game worlds in a direction where we're not playing, we are participating; where we are not in the game, but of the game. It is the difference between roleplaying with humans and doing so with a circuit board – human conversation dynamically changes based on thousands of subtle cues computers simply cannot track. As the technology and software evolve, we'll naturally see ever-more organic dialogue opportunities in games, provided developers take them.

I believe it was one of the scribes of Gears of War who said that game dialogue isn't just about crafting powerful exchanges, it's about recognizing that the player might have to endure them repeatedly before “getting through.” We love the snappy repartee that flows out of writers such as Joss Whedon, Brian K. Vaughan and Aaron Sorkin… in the moment. But in a game, dialogue tends to interrupt the action before or after a challenging sequence. So if you blow it, you get to watch it again. And again. And, often, again. Since many developers can't be bothered to include really freaking obvious features like the ability to skip cutscenes, re-watch ones you've already seen, or (God forbid) pause or save during them, by the fourteenth time, that really awesome emotional scene is an annoying drag.

I'm not terribly interested in discussing whether or not game dialogue is good or bad; that's gotten ample coverage. There are talented writers working in games, and 2007 was a great year when it comes to showing how much improvement there's been. As developers and gamers, think not about whether dialogue in games is good or bad – or even whether it's going north or south. Instead, consider its importance and role in the medium of the videogame. Some games have no need for dialogue at all; others depend on it utterly. There is clearly no hard and fast rule on the matter, but as development evolves toward ever more impactful games, developers themselves must ponder carefully what they are trying to do with their words, then craft them to accomplish their goals with the greatest possible weight.