One of Richard’s primary obsessions is the narrative side of the game medium, particularly the writing. That’s another thing we have in common. Now he’s started a new blog, Narrative Flood, which is “a light-hearted look at the world of story and writing in games”. I’ve been following it for a few days, and it’s really quite good so far, so I recommend that you check it out and perhaps add it to your RSS list.

Enjoy.

The thoughts herein spun off of a discussion I had with my friend Mads a few days ago, which resulted from this blog post of his: Why Writing and Programming are Fundamentally Different. I’ve added his blog to my links out there in the right side.

It made me think about what I’ve learned about branching dialogue during my work on TNM. As I’ve spent 7 years rewiring my brain to a more nonlinear form of creativity than other media call for, my sense of how to pull off good branching conversations has improved significantly, and it seems that the most important thing is to think less like a writer and more like a programmer – in that respect I agree with Mads’s thoughts.

But there’s something else – a trick to preserving the tightness of the dialogue. The more linear a conversation is, the easier it is to make the dialogue snap and spark the way a good screenwriter can. Writing, as anybody who’s taken a writing course will know, is not about producing realistic conversation, but about producing interesting conversation.

Real conversation is often idle, aimless, disconnected, and full of pauses and misunderstandings. In a screenplay, unless you’re deliberately aiming for realism over traditional mainstream writing, everything needs to be in there for a reason. If you include a pause, it must be pregnant with meaning. Misunderstandings must lead to something, they must affect the direction of the dialogue rather than just being a brief diversion before the conversation gets back on track.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s easier to write realistic branching dialogue than interesting branching dialogue. Dialogue put together by a computer or by a player’s half-informed, tentative clicking more easily comes to resemble the aimless, slightly off-center, disconnected flow of an everyday conversation than the tightly paced and deliberate dialogue of a drama. To stay in control of the conversation and make sure it will eventually lead somewhere, a game writer has to drastically limit the nonlinearity of his dialogue.

Two good examples of different ways to limit dialogue branching without making it completely linear are Deus Ex and Neverwinter Nights. The former has largely linear conversations that only branch at important junctions, whereas the latter never gives the player less than 2 choices per line, but different choices often lead to the same response. The problem with DX’s approach is that the player feels far less in control of the conversation and the character of the avatar. The problem with NWN’s approach is that players often feel cheated upon replaying the game and realizing that by far most of their choices make no difference. Deus Ex’s choices feel far more important because when your choice wouldn’t matter, you’re not given one.

Whichever method you choose, however, the challenge you face as a writer is to make sure every branch of dialogue is equally interesting. Ideally this should go for all aspects of your game – if you give the player a choice, every option should have interesting consequences. This is why people complain about Bioshock’s wrench being overpowered – these are people who feel compelled to pick the optimal route through the game, and if that means they have to stick to the really boring wrench combat, they do so, and they have a miserable time as a result.

Often, as a writer, I feel that I have several ideas for how a conversation could proceed at particular junctions. As a screenwriter or a book author or similar, part of your job is to choose the option that you think is most interesting or will take the dialogue in the direction you want it to go, not to mention the direction that best fits your characters. When writing branching dialogue, you have the option of leaving that choice to the player – you just have to make sure every choice leads to something interesting.

As an example, here’s one of my favourite examples of branching dialogue from TNM. This is not a big spoiler, and depending on how you play and the choices you make in the game, you may not even encounter this conversation on your first couple of times through the story, but if you want to stay completely spoiler free with regards to TNM, best skip this blockquote box. Our player character Trestkon’s lines are bold.

• That was a bad move Trestkon.
• Oh I’m sorry, how inconsiderate of me. I should’ve left you some painkillers for that new headache of yours.
• Heh, nice. So what did you hope to achieve by sparing my life?

• Option 1: I needed a challenge. Killing you would’ve been too easy.
• I’ll give you a challenge. When you least expect it.
• I think you’ll find it quite difficult to catch me off my guard, assassin.
• Good thing I’m up for a challenge too.

• Option 2: A clean conscience. And I thought you’d prefer being alive.
• Morals? That should prove a decent enough weakness to exploit the next time we meet.
• I have weaknesses enough, but I won’t let anyone exploit them.
• You just keep watching your back, “Agent”.

• Option 3: I proved a point. Gave you and Kylie something to think about for a while.
• I’ll mostly be thinking about our next fight. You upstaged me today, but the only result of your arrogance is that I get a rematch.
• I’m looking forward to it.
• Only because you don’t know what I’m planning.

Each of these three short branches is a perfectly fine piece of dialogue that I’d have been happy to write into a linear script. I think they work just fine on their own, with a good amount of friction between the characters – they’re all nice, snappy exchanges between two quick-witted people. If I were writing a linear script, I would have to choose one option based on Trestkon’s character – is he an arrogant, self-confident person? Is he a empathic saint who never takes a life if there’s any way to avoid it? Or is he a psychologically savvy person who manipulates his enemies?

In a film or a book, I would have to make that choice, but in a game, it’s best left to the player. As long as I have good ideas for how to take the dialogue in interesting directions either way, putting the choice in the player’s hands will make the player feel a stronger ownership of the avatar.

I feel that the trick to making this work is to make sure every option maintains the conflict. The above is a conversation between two enemies who quite recently had a fight which one of them lost. If one of the options completely defuses that conflict, leading instead to reconciliation and mutual understanding, the drama is drained out of the situation – not to mention the rest of the game is changed significantly (not that we’d hesitate to carry through with that, but in this particular case the game would be poorer for it).

The player’s choice above doesn’t really change the outcome of the conversation – in all 3 cases, the relationship between the two characters will be even worse than it was before the conversation. But the player has had a chance to pick his own character’s motivations, and I think that’s worth writing and recording the 8 extra lines.

A final thought: The conversation I chose as an example ends after each of the three branches, but the way I see it, there’s nothing wrong with “merging” the branches again after they’ve played out. If more information needed to be imparted during that conversation, each of the branches could easily jump to the same line and the conversation could then carry on from there – as long as the conversation changes noticeably for a few lines, I believe the player will feel that the choice was worthwhile and that it was properly recognized by the game.

I’ve been sick all weekend, which provided a solid excuse to stay in-doors and play Fable 2 pretty much non-stop. I should go to bed now because I feel genuinely terrible, but I’m compelled to write about this game because it’s probably been my best game experience this year. I must tell you about it while it’s still fresh in my memory, and while there will be small spoilers, I will tell you nothing I didn’t know myself before playing the game, so I’m certain it won’t ruin the experience for you.

Fable 2 has reminded me that I actually really liked Fable 1. Somehow, my esteem for the game had suffered greatly over time, as I forgot surprisingly quickly what made it such a good game. Getting started on the sequel, I began to recall that Fable 1 was actually one of my favourite games soon after I’d finished it. And then Fable 2 proceeded to exceed my fondest memory of its predecessor.

There are three things Fable 2 does unbelievably, blindingly well. It drives home its emotional highlights like few other games, it allows you to change the game world in impressive and very visible ways, and it establishes a truly compelling and unique world full of contradictions and charm.

There are other things Fable 2 does less well. Character interaction outside the main storyline is all iconic and very generalized, meaning the human relationships you can form with any non-hostile NPC in the game are superficial and uninteresting compared to the relationship you form with your dog. The combat system can feel rather repetitive (some would say “button-mashing”), though it becomes more nuanced as you get more options later on. And the game has more but less significant weaknesses. But none of this matters.

Fable 2 nearly made me cry on several occasions. For a game with such a childish and naïve aesthetic, it’s surprisingly fond of showing you devastating things and putting you in tragic situations. Just like the first game, the moral scale Fable 2 is based around is very black and white, but Fable 2 frequently manages to play against your expectations, setting up an antagonist with reasonably believable motivations, putting a genuine (and infuriating) bad guy on your side towards the end, and always insisting that true heroism requires sacrifice.

The greatest of these sacrifices is 10 years of your life spent on a single quest of integral importance to the main storyline. This tremendous ellipsis is handled elegantly and conveys an adequate sense of desperation and despair, but it also serves a very important purpose to the storyline: It allows the consequences of your preceding choices to really impact the world.

You return to towns completely changed by your actions, temples having risen to power or crumbled into insignificance due to your decisions, bandit camps replaced by idyllic forest cottages, farms grown prosperous after you defeated the bandits plaguing them. And yet in spite of these big changes, the game still remembers the little things you’ve done, which chests you’ve opened and treasures you’ve retrieved from the bottom of a lake.

And it’s a world you want to change and impact because it has atmosphere, it has story, and it has heart and wit. It’s a quirky world full of humour ranging from the elegantly self-referential to the unashamedly tasteless, and yet it’s a dangerous world of ancient terrors and untold tragedy. Some of the true tragedies of Fable 2 are delivered like a jack-hammer to the face while others are left as subtle marks upon the world for you to find and puzzle out for yourself.

It’s also a world with many secrets to discover, hidden treasures and ancient relics left for you by heroes long gone. The old demon doors that occupied each region of Fable 1′s world make a reappearance, and in the surreal landscapes that they guard, I sense that Lionhead’s level designers have found a chance to genuinely shine – in some instances I was even reminded of Psychonauts’s dreamscapes, straight out of a Dalí painting.

There are two more things I want to mention before I go to bed. One is the dog, the other is the real estate. The dog is nearly indescribable. It may not be the revolutionary new gameplay element that Molyneux made it out to be in early presentations, but it’s probably one of the best NPC’s I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting in a game. Due to the simple fact that dogs are far easier to accurately simulate than human beings, this dog actually acts like what it’s supposed to be, rather than a transparent imitation. And the blind devotion that dogs are known to show towards their owners certainly plays a part in endearing you to your faithful companion.

But while the dog channels your empathy and anchors you in the world, the real estate features give you ownership of that world – literally. Very nearly every building in the game can be bought, from the lowliest gypsy caravan to the grandest mansion or Castle Fairfax itself. You can start by buying some stalls in the marketplace, and soon you’ll have enough gold to buy a smithy or an inn or buy up homes and rent them out.

You can raise or lower the rent above or below the default, which impacts not only your profits but the way the citizens regard you as well. High prices in your shops will make people like you less. And even more impressively, purchasing certain unique properties will unlock side missions that grant significant rewards. Even after the main story is completed, the collection of real estate, hidden rewards, and achievements compel me to explore, collect, and purchase everything.

And once I have everything, it’s time to try an evil playthrough. Knowing myself, and realizing how good Fable 2 is at showing you the consequences of your actions, I may not make it. I suck at being evil, and this game does not make it any easier.

As part of an ongoing discussion with Shane about the quality of Mass Effect‘s dialogue, he gave me what is probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received: That TNM’s dialogue is better because it flows more naturally. I don’t think I’d agree with that, but it did get me thinking about the different ways to use interactive dialogue in games.

Bioware’s games always put quite a lot of agency in their dialogue, meaning a lot of the choices you make in Bioware RPGs are made through dialogue options. In Mass Effect, this usually manifests itself in the form of coloured options that are unlocked if your Intimidate or Charm talents meet the requirements. Sometimes you can go so far as to execute an NPC by selecting the dialogue option that makes Shepard shoot him in the face, and often you will use the dialogue to make important decisions concerning the direction of the storyline.

Conversely, in Deus Ex (and by extension TNM) the dialogue has far less agency but far more reactivity. The dialogue options are pretty limited, usually used to let you buy items from NPCs or ask about optional subjects that are irrelevant or incidental to the plot. Instead, the options that affect the plot are placed in the gameplay, and the dialogue automatically changes to reflect these choices. For example, probably the most important choice in Deus Ex until the endgame is whether or not to save your brother, and this decision is made by either fleeing out the window like a coward or staying in his room to fight like a man. For the rest of the game, the dialogue will occasionally change to reflect whether or not Paul is still alive.

The enormous advantage of Deus Ex’s ethos is that the dialogue is a lot less detached from the gameplay. Sometimes, the dialogue in Mass Effect and other Bioware games has a tendency to feel like another game tacked onto the actual game. It has a hint of the same detachment from the gameplay that cutscenes suffer from. To counter this, Bioware often makes your dialogue choices influence the gameplay by eg. making enemies hostile or spawning or removing them depending on your choices. Arguably, however, actions should speak louder than words, and in Deus Ex they do.

A disadvantage to Deus Ex’s method is that it’s generally completely impossible to interpret the player’s intentions with sufficient nuance to inform the dialogue. The example I usually employ is the Battery Park Station hostage situation in Deus Ex: If you mess up the mission and get the hostages killed, JC will act completely brash and unconcerned about it when questioned by his brother, even if the player is feeling a bit remorseful or ashamed about the whole thing. The game can easily tell that you failed to save the hostages, but it has no idea why. If you make the game monitor the situation closely enough, you can make a more educated guess (if the player directly shot at the terrorists’ explosives or even threw a grenade down there to clean the station out, it’s a safe bet he didn’t mean to save the hostages, for example), but this can get very complicated very fast.

Deus Ex is pretty uncompromisingly reactive in its use of dialogue, but Bioware’s games often let the dialogue change a bit depending on the player’s gameplay choices. As with most aspects of game design, I think the best solution is a compromise. In TNM, we’ve maintained the Deus Ex ethos, but mixed in some dialogue options for nuance. I’m sure it can be taken even further though, and given the chance, I’ll be experimenting with that in the future.

I beg to differ. In my opinion, writers are good for at least two other things: Story and dialogue. Here, it’s important to discern between story and plot: Plot is what specifically happens on the screen or on the pages throughout a book, film, show, or game. Story is all of that plus anything else that’s mentioned, referenced, or subtly hinted at. The new Star Wars trilogy was already part of the story for the original trilogy before they were used as plots for films in their own right.

I agree that it’s often best to leave the plot to the designers. Good designers have a strong concept of what sort of plots work well in a game and how to turn them into gameplay. A good game plot needs to be created together with the gameplay, not before the gameplay and certainly not after the gameplay.

I think story is a different matter though – creating a world full of potential for gripping plots is an important part of much writing (especially science fiction and fantasy, in my experience), and though I base this on no personal experience, hiring a writer to flesh out your setting before you set about designing your game ought to give you the same advantages as working with a licensed IP, but without many of the disadvantages. You have a clear set of limitations and guidelines to build your plot and your gameplay on, but if you run up on a snag, you don’t have to ask for permission to change anything in your story.

More importantly, I think many modern games demonstrate an urgent need for professionally written dialogue. Some designers are brilliant at dialogue, of course, just as many designers are great at story and setting, but many many designers are apparently rubbish at writing convincing exchanges. I think I write reasonable dialogue for a designer, but there’s no way I can compete with a person like Smike who’s dedicated his whole carreer (not to say his whole life) to becoming a great screenwriter. The games with the best dialogue seem to generally be written by people who are primarily writers and designers second or not at all. This is true for Deus Ex, it’s true for Half-Life and Portal, it’s true for Grand Theft Auto 4, and it’s true for Bioware’s entire portfolio.

Not all games need writers of course. Crysis certainly seemed to do alright though its plot and its characters was all terribly cliché, and the same is true for so many action games. Nor am I saying a great writer who is also a great designer wouldn’t be a fantastic boon to a development team. I’m just saying maybe the reason so many modern games have whince-inducing dialogue is that the industry isn’t quite as good at discerning between different writing jobs as it could be. You probably shouldn’t hire a famous novelist to write the plot for your game, unless they’ve also proven themselves to have a strong understanding of game design, but I bet such a writer could do a terrific job of fleshing out your setting or tweaking your somewhat utilitarian dialogue.

Even though I love to write, I’d certainly look around for a professional screenwriter to polish my dialogue before I’d send it out to be recorded if I were designing a proper game. You just can’t compete with years of dedication to a single discipline.

There is, however, one area in which I am always at a disadvantage and may always remain so: Idiolects. This is a frighteningly important part of writing, especially in English, which is a language distributed across several nations. A person’s idiolect describes so much about them, things we may or may not consciously pick up on, but which at least a native speaker will almost always understand at a subconscious level. From the way a person speaks (inflection, choice of words, and other factors), we infer their area of origin, their level of education, their social standing, and often even their ethnicity, among many other things. This is indescribably difficult to manage when you’re writing in anything other than your first language.

Yesterday, I experienced a good example. Working with voice actors is always a humbling experience for me because it provides constant reminders of the weaknesses of my English skills – for one, approximately 98% of my use of the language is in writing, and this shows. Oh brother, does it show! It’s also supremely enlightening, however, because I always learn new nuances of the language. Lawrence and I had met up on Skype with one of our best and most professional voice actors, Jeremiah, to overhear and direct his recording of one of our absolutely biggest characters: Scara B. King, Big Bad Evil Guy™. Scara has well over 300 lines, and the script we sent Jeremiah took up 39 pages. Yet, since Jeremiah is a top-professional fellow and we were able to direct his efforts in real-time, we somehow managed to record all these lines in 3½ hours to everybody’s general amazement.

At some point, Jeremiah came across a rather annoyed line saying simply “For fuck’s sake!” and objected: Scara isn’t Scottish!

This caught both Larry and me by surprise, since the phrase apparently sees use in Canada (where Larry is from) and I just had no idea it was a locally specific saying. Thankfully Gelo was present at that point, so he could confirm that indeed “For fuck’s sake” is not a term they use in the US. You learn something every day, I guess, but this serves to highlight my biggest problem: I want to be able to write in English on a professional level, and when even native English-speakers can be taken aback by the language-differences between various English-speaking nations, how am I supposed to ever fully master such nuances of the language?

The good writer knows how to use the language to define and describe his characters. This is especially important in screenwriting, where the audience will never have the chance to read thorough descriptions of the characters, so the lines themselves are incredibly important in building personality and attitude. Incidentally, game writing is usually a lot closer to screenwriting than novel-writing in that regard. If you want to be a really good writer (and it just so happens I do), you have to understand how different people use the language differently and reflect that in your characters.

Smike once suggested, in an effort to make me think about how I was writing Scara, that some of Scara’s lines make him out to probably be from somewhere around Boston. I could do nothing but accept his evaluation, but I have no idea what to do with the information. Even if I decided one of my characters would be from Boston, I would be very very hard pressed to write him in a way that sets him apart from eg. a New Yorker. My grasp of the English language, however impressive for a foreigner, just doesn’t extend that far.

I consider myself pretty proficient at English. My spoken English is lacking in the accent department, I admit, but I understand the language quite well and I write it even better. Despite this, I still use subtitles on all my films and games. I find that I have a much harder time hearing what’s said in games than in most movies – the audio tends to be less meticulously balanced and timed, and often things will be exploding and guns will be firing while a character is trying to tell you something important.

A couple of recent games have succeeded in frustrating me with their lack of subtitles. Assassin’s Creed managed to make several long dialogue sequences completely incoherent to me by having the voice actors use more or less authentic generic middle-eastern accents and placing the characters in large rooms with terrible acoustics as if in a conscious effort to obscure the words even more. Stranglehold exclusively features characters with difficult accents, primarily Chinese or Cantonese or whatever it’s called, since it takes place in Hong Kong. Yun-Fat Chow (or is it Chow Yun-Fat? I can never remember) is a fine actor, but his English is terrible.

Bioshock is a good example that subtitles aren’t always as easy as they seem (in the Xbox version and the PC version prior to the latest patch, the subtitles were really badly timed to the audio), but if you design your dialogue system around it from the beginning, surely it’s not that much extra work – just make sure your writers are typing their lines into the game at the same time as they’re writing the script for your actors, or hire an intern to type them from the script into a spreadsheet or something. Almost no games are localized in the Nordic languages because publishers (correctly) believe most Scandinavians have a good grasp of English, but if you don’t include subtitles, you’re making it harder for us than it really needs to be.

And if you really want to go the extra mile and be a right champ, make sure you support closed captioning for the hearing impaired like Valve do. Just please seperate the two so those of us who like our English games with subtitles don’t have to put up with the silly [Explosions].

Take his retrospective article on Torment. Having read it, there’s only really one way I can respond: Yes. Absolutely. My thoughts exactly. Bravo.

If you’ve never played Torment, read it so you can be converted – convinced to obtain and play it. On the other hand, if you’ve played the game, join the choir and allow yourself to be preached to. It’s not a long article, but it brilliantly sums up why Torment is an absolute must-play game, a prerequisite for participation in any discussion about narrative in computer games.

I think the problem stems from the fact that I never play them. I’ve played some of the classics of course, including the old arcade games that used to be hard-core but are now considered casual: Pac-man, Tetris, Bejewelled… and my all-time favourite, Breakout (aka. Arcanoid, aka. Aquanoid, aka. Action Ball, etc.) I also played a lot of Solitaire once, when I had nothing better to do (during elementary school before I discovered game modifications). But in the last 10 years, the only casual games I’ve played are Sudoku, Bookworm Adventures, and the Peggle demo.

Almost all the games I play are AAA titles. Action games, roleplaying games, adventure games, platform games, and even the occasional strategy game. I play games with stories – if a game has a good story or allows me to create one, I’ll play it. But stories seem oddly incompatible with casual games. The most story you can get out of that is “…so I was just about to miss the ball but there was ONE brick left on the screen, up in the corner, and somehow my mind just shut down and by pure instinct I moved my mouse to barely hit the ball and…”. This is all good, but it’s not exactly dramatically satisfying, is it? I mean… you pretty much had to be there.

Now, if I was in a position to design AAA games, then this wouldn’t be much of a problem. I’d have limited my job opportunities a little, but I could just stick to what I can do: Making games with stories. Unfortunately AAA titles these days cost at the very least $5 million USD to develop, and that’s not exactly the sort of funding I have access to right now. In other words if I ever hope to get up there, I need to do some smaller games. Basically my choice is between text-heavy games with 2D graphics or casual games with no story at all.

What I want to ask is, if anybody reading this cares enough to post about it: Have you ever played a small story-based game with good visuals? Or a casual game with a story? Is it possible to have a story in a casual game at all, or is it too important to the genre that there be no storyline at all so players can pick up a game and play it for 20 minutes at a time?

I attended the following presentations Wednesday:

9:30 – 10:15
T. L. Taylor
Keynote entitled: From Box to World and Back Again: How People Transform the Games They Play

Summary: This talk will explore the ways players act as lively co-creators of the online games they play, shaping game culture in powerful ways.

My notes: Although MMOG’s are not my favourite category of games, Taylor had a lot of interesting things to say about online game culture in general, and her presentation served perfectly as an intro to Sotamaa’s:

10:30 – 11:15
Olli Sotamaa
Lecture entitled: Building on Player Creativity: Exploring Game Modifications and Modder Networks

Summary: The presentation examines the motivations and organization of mod makers. The benefits and downsides of modifications from the perspective of game developers are also discussed.

My notes: This talk was basically about me. There was nothing in here that I didn’t already know, but it was sort of nice to have it structured and conveyed in an academic fashion.

11:30 – 12:15
Simon Niedenthal
Lecture entitled: Novem Corda: Understanding Communities of Creative Practice in Game Design

Summary: We have developed an interactive tool called Novem Corda, which supports our inquiries into how digital artists think about, and communicate qualities of simulated illumination in the game design process.

My notes: Niedenthal has conducted a cross-disciplinary study of light in games, and he had some really interesting things to say about that.

13:15 – 14:00
Hilmar Veigar Pétursson
Keynote entitled: The Tao of Virtual World Societies

Summary: CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson looks to the East for inspiration in achieving a balance between the development team’s vision and the community’s desires.

My notes: This talk made me want to instantly pick up a subscription to EVE Online. Then I remembered the ludicrous death penalties and thought better of it.

14:15 – 15:00
Bart Simon
Lecture entitled: Against Immersion: Towards a Theory of Gaming as Interactive Performance

Summary: This paper against the utility of the concept of immersion for thinking about the idea of critical or reflexive gameplay.

My notes: Bart Simon is a very angry man. A very angry man.

15:15 – 16:00
Alessandro Canossa
Lecture entitled: Towards a Theory of the Player: Designing for Experience

Summary: After sketching a model describing the cognitive and physiological processes involved in the “player-avatar-game world” relationship, Alessandro intends to show how all player-types coexist within the implied player. Designers can increase the emotional and experiential impact of games by planning a “flow” path for each one of the player-types during the concept phase.

My notes: This stuff was directly applicable both in game analysis and in reducing the early iteration phase of a game development cycle. I gotta get my hands on his Ph.D.

16:15 – 17:00
Marek Walton
Lecture entitled: Beyond Storytelling: MMOs and the Role of Writers

Summary: MMOs require different skills from writers. Marek explores where the role’s reduced, where it’s increased, and where it’s an evolution of their development function.

My notes: I want to work for The Mustard Corp.