04.04.07

Bored at Work: Thoughts on Interactive Dialogue

Posted in Game design, Games at 09:33 by Jonas

(Heheh, if I had my own column somewhere, I’d totally call it Bored at Work.)

How do you reckon interactive dialogues can be split into different types, different methods? If at all. Interactive dialogue is of great interest to me, because dialogue in general is useful in telling a story, is a very fundamental part of the way humans interact, and is really rather difficult to pull off in an interactive way.

I guess the first step on the way to categorize methods of dialogue in games is to think of various games that have done it in different ways. I’m not very interested in discussing linear dialogue, because it can only really be pulled off in two ways: A specific exchange of words that can be interrupted and a specific exchange of words that cannot be interrupted. Sure, linear dialogue that can be interrupted is sort of, nearly, almost interactive, but only in the same way your television is interactive because you can change channels. Sure you can watch something else, but you don’t really have a lot of control over what they send, do you? In other words, I’m not interested in Half-Life (wherein no dialogue ever includes protagonist speech, which is interesting) or Max Payne (which has some lovely dialogue and even lovelier monologue), I’m interested in conversation trees and the likes.

One way to do it is how ION Storm Austin did it in Deus Ex: Most of the time, the dialogue will be linear; your avatar has a name, a face, and a personality, and the writers have decided what he says. You are presented with choices only when there is actually something for you to change: When your choice of dialogue somehow affects the story, the gameplay, or a character’s opinion of you. Typically, you’ll get a choice when an NPC offers to sell you something, or when you must choose between bribing or intimidating somebody, etc.

More interestingly, Deus Ex is one of the few games where the dialogue is dictated by the way you play your game. If you kill a lot of people, somebody will object to that, and your character will react accordingly. If you manage to avoid Walton Simons at the end of the Ocean Lab mission, he will show up again in Area51 and comment on the fact. Each of these pieces of dialogue is linear, but it changes according to what you do. Thus Deus Ex has two types of interactive dialogue: Dialogue choices that only appear when they are really significant and dialogue that changes without asking you, depending on how you play the game.

A somewhat different approach is well exemplified by Bioware in all of their games so far, for example Neverwinter Nights (NWN): Bioware’s declared goal is that the player should never have less than 2 dialogue options at any given time¹, because they believe linear dialogue does not make the player feel empowered and heroic. Thus the dialogue is paused every time the player’s character is prompted to speak, which is often. It’s interesting to note that frequently, different dialogue options will lead to the same response from the person you’re talking to, making it more a question of style and personality than actually affecting the dialogue. There will usually be a range of dialogue options spanning the scale of alignment options provided for the player (in NWN, that means good, evil, chaotic, lawful, neutral, and sometimes even combinations of the five; in other games, such as Knights of the Old Republic, it may simply mean good or evil). This is made economically feasible by the fact that Bioware uses no voice acting for their protagonists, which would already be next to impossible to pull off considering the amount of character customization options usually available to the player.

Like Deus Ex, however, the choice is not always up to the player. Certain factors can affect which options are available, most often how the player chose to customize his character. NWN contains perhaps the most impressive example of this, in that every single dialogue choice in the game will be replaced with a single, significantly less intelligent line if the player has created a character with an “Intelligence” score below 10. This was done even more impressively in the older Black Isle game Fallout, where not only can the player speak nothing but gibberish if the intelligence of his or her character is too low, but the player’s character simultaneously gains the ability to understand and communicate with NPC’s who are equally unintelligent(!).

In many games that use this model for interactive dialogue, the dialogue system becomes a minigame in and of itself. The dialogue editor for Neverwinter Nights 2 by Obsidian Entertainment is a beast of a tool which provides control over animation, dialogue-triggered scripted events, text formatting, turning nodes into convenient links to elsewhere in the dialogue tree, determining exactly when a given dialogue option should appear, etc. In such games, which can be seen as the direct descendent of the not-quite-defunct adventure genre, a large part of the player’s time will be spent talking to people, and there are very often rewards for players who explore the dialogue trees extensively.

A similar yet significantly different approach to interactive dialogue can be seen in Introversion’s Uplink. Here, the player - playing a hacker - may contact his or her clients to discuss a given job before accepting it. The player is presented with several options for what to say, but the options never change from client to client, and the possible responses are quite limited as well. For example, asking why the job pays as much as it does (an option which is available regardless of how much or how little money the job actually pays), could yield the answers “No reason, it’s the standard pay”, “We really don’t like the target”, or “The target may have friends”. None of these responses give you any actual information, and usually a certain response is tied to a certain type of mission, regardless of who you’re working for and what you’re hacking into. I believe a similar, but more complex system was employed in Space Rangers 2, but unfortunately I haven’t spent enough time on that game to say for sure (I only played the demo).

Needless to say, I’m not very impressed with the interactivity of the Uplink method. The game does, however, have a wide range of other things going for it, and was never really about storytelling or character interaction to begin with. The ability to contact your client is mostly there so you can ask for more money if your reputation is good enough.

Another simple but efficient method was used in Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy by Quantic Dreams. The basis for Fahrenheit’s dialogue system is the idea that in a real conversation, you do not have the luxury to consider your replies indefinitely, so there should be some sort of time limit. Fahrenheit also adopts the philosophy from Deus Ex that the player should only get a choice when it will actually change something. The player is prompted with 2-4 cues that summarize the general meaning of the available responses, such as “Yes”/”No”, or “Friendly”/”Threatening”, and must then choose one before the timer ends, at which point a random reply is chosen. A similar system is apparently implemented in the upcoming Mass Effect by Bioware, and it will be very interesting to see how that works out. On a side note, the dialogue system in Fahrenheit is very well integrated in the overall gameplay, as the interface for choosing your reponses is exactly the same as the interface for eg. opening a door or turning on a computer.

The last method I wish to describe is the one used in Bethesda Softworks’ Oblivion. Like in Fahrenheit, Oblivion does not usually show you what your character says, it merely presents you with a list of “topics” that you may inquire about. For example, clicking on “Rumours” will prompt the NPC to part with some random, often inconsequential piece of trivia. It is implied that your character uses full sentences to communicate, such as “Have you heard any interesting rumours lately?”, but this is not actually displayed; you might say the exact wording of your character’s lines is left to your own imagination. Occasionally, the game deviates from this pattern, especially during the Dark Brotherhood quest line, when you are sometimes given full sentences to choose from². In general, however, dialogue options represent overall topics that you can prompt NPC’s to monologue about. This leaves the roleplaying mostly out of the game, to your own devices. If you merely wish to hack up some demons and complete some quests, there is nothing to delay you in this endeavour. If you wish to formulate a personality and a moral code for your character, you are free to do so, but the game is not capable of responding accordingly.

In an academic paper, it would not be my place to evaluate these different methods of implementing interactive dialogue. However, this is a blog, and I will not hesitate to say that I prefer the methods deployed in Deus Ex and Bioware’s games. As I have written dialogue for modifications of both Deus Ex and Neverwinter Nights, I have gradually become more and more fond of the Deus Ex approach, where dialogue is used more frequently to provide feedback on your actions than to provide you with options in and of themselves, but I still very much enjoy playing traditional Bioware- / Black Isle- / Obsidian-style games where creating a character and letting his or her personality shape your experience of the game is at least half the fun.

Killing innocents is all well and good, but nothing drives the point home like taunting their friends and relatives with your evil deeds afterwards. I have never been able to play Knights of the Old Republic with an evil character because my conscience suffers too much from the pain you can wreak in that game, but that is just a testament to the skills of Bioware’s writers.

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¹ As per the closing thoughts on the Bioware Writing Contest, which I dismally failed to produce an entry for because my self-confidence is apparently not as overwhelming as I beleived.

² Personal favourite: I have been sent to kill the proprietor of a country-side tavern. As I enter, he is alone at the bar, the sole guest an Imperial Legion soldier enjoying a drink at a nearby table. I approach my target and he asks me what I want. Having killed his mother as the first part of the quest, I pick the dialogue choice “Your mother bled like a pig.” Nothing like really getting in character. The innkeeper is outraged, draws his sword and attacks. The soldier is alarmed and jumps to the defense of the poor patron (that’d be me, the assassin), striking down the attacker. Having thus killed my target without even drawing my blade, I leave the scene with a smug smile on my face.

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