The Least Mysterious of All Crafts
Good dialogue is a rare experience in games.
For one, even if it is well-written and acted, you can often undermine the weight of someone’s words by running away or swinging your sword or throwing a grenade while they are being spoken, unless all control is taken away during the scene. You will see developers stuff you into a tram or some other kind of apparatus that provides a fictional basis for restricting your freedom of moment and action for the duration of the conversation while, at the same time, providing at least a token sense of interactivity (perhaps you can look around, for example). But this solution isn’t all that ideal; besides feeling artificial, it often bores people. Watch someone play during these sections and they’re moving their camera in little circles or zooming in on a guy’s nose or getting a snack.
Secondly, spoken lines in games are often saddled with not just story exposition, which can be clunky in even the best films, but gameplay instruction, too. Imagine a movie that contained not just the background of its fictional premise but tried to work in some hints on how to operate your television as well. No matter how cleverly it is disguised as something happening in the game’s fiction (calibrating your sensors, or whatever) it does not actually fool anyone.
Dialogue is a tool. It has to be, in order to help ameliorate some of the communication problems inherent to games. Designers employ it to direct and inform the player, often to convey objectives, for example– where it struggles to make player instructions like “take out the anti-aircraft guns” or “destroy the generators” interesting. There is no innate interest to lines like these; they are conceived as gameplay objectives, nothing else, and trying to gussy them up just makes them more confusing. The player just wants to know: what do I do next? Get to the extraction point, that’s what. So we often hear those types of lines.
Communication is also the idea behind why your opponents will unwisely shout to each other– “I lost him! Where did he go?”, the instant you crouch behind a crate. The soldiers are stupid to behave this way, you think. But you still want to know if you’re in immediate danger or if it’s safe enough to reload and recover your health. In real life, people who fight each other try not to telegraph anything and neutralize their targets before they have a chance to recognize what is happening to them. But the player of a video game needs this chance to respond and recover, so we place some of the responsibility of creating the chance upon the dialogue.
And in games with frequent combat situations, the dialogue is usually handled by two different pieces of technology: the completely dynamic “barks” or battle chatter, which is triggered in a somewhat randomized fashion in reaction to game events, and scripted mission support dialogue. If you play many games, you have probably heard these two systems step on each other: “Nice job, rookie, let’s get to the warehouse DIE, ASSHOLES! –unlock that door”.
There is a further complication to all of this: spatialization. In games our agents often traverse great distances. A game designer can place a sound file on a game object, and the game’s audio system can situate that sound file inside its model of three-dimensional space. But while it can fade the sound or apply filters to it, it cannot dynamically change the quality of a human voice in intensity or performance.
Our speech in real life is a remarkably complex and variable thing. There is a myriad of factors– distance, context, emotion– that modulate the way we sound. But you cannot record several different versions of a line and fade in between them like you can with engine sounds or gunfire. In the recording booth, actors can pitch their performance to a distant target, but chances are in the game that distance will be quite different than what was imagined.
You will often hear lines of dialogue that come in loud and clear, as if the character who spoke them was right next to you, but he is not actually around, and you have to check your minimap to see where he is– dozens of meters away, or in the next room. Or a character begins saying a line and suddenly takes off, running full-speed ahead of you into the level, her standing around voice trailing into the distance unnaturally. The only easy solution to this is essentially a cop-out: having these voices come at you over the radio, crackling with static even in the future, or the “mystical voice in your head” fantasy equivalent.
Even tightly controlled situations, such as the interactive conversation systems in role-playing games, have their share of challenges. Tom Bissell in Extra Lives describes how actor Jennifer Hale had to read hundreds of lines convincingly but tonally consistent enough to allow a believable conversation to be assembled out of them on the fly. Hale’s performance is remarkable indeed, and for me one of the most enjoyable parts the Mass Effect series. But it has no arc; it simply can’t due to the way the game works. Her tone at hour one is her tone at hour fifty.
Now is the part where it seems obvious to conclude with a look forward to some magical future technology that will come along and solve everything for us. In a decade’s time, maybe we will be able to take actors’ performances and pestle them into a kind of meta-reading of the line, from which we can simply query for the appropriate one: tell the player to set the charges with 5 urgency, 2 annoyance and 2.5 flirtiness. This does not seem out of the range of possibility given what we can do with audio right now. At the same time, though, I can’t help but think that would be unnatural in its own way.
Commentary | June 19, 2010
Reader Comments (20)
However, don't you think that if you create a really well written cut scene that does not restrict the player's movement and thus allows him or her to shoot three inches to the left of a chatty and articulate NPC's ear, that the problem is less with the game's design and more with the player being an impatient jerk? A novelist can't anticipate a lunatic tearing out the pages of chapter three, after all. I've been thinking about this lately. Maybe, in certain kinds of dissonance, the problem is actually us.
Of course we come up short when we try to write and execute a conventional film dialog sequence. If we were less afraid to pursue definitions of success better suited to our medium, we would probably eschew the written and spoken word a good deal more than the current status quo of game design.
"In a decade’s time, maybe we will be able to take actors’ performances and pestle them into a kind of meta-reading of the line..."
This is another common problem. We wait/pray for technology to solve these kinds of intractable problems for us, when we could be spending that effort proving out new patterns for the conveyance of meaning that are more native to the fabric of our medium. Whether the radio device is a cop-out or a carefully chosen limitation depends on what aesthetic ideals you think games should aspire to. Speaking from personal experience, every time we tried to use dialog delivery devices other than radios or logs on the Bioshock games, we saw player engagement and understanding plummet while development cost and difficulty went up... with a single, notable exception that worked only because it was used exactly once.
@JPThe way people have traditionally envisioned or understood or practiced "written" storytelling in video games is obviously very problematic. But I still think that there's a lot of gold to mine in the medium's storytelling possibilities.
With all that going for it, they kept screwing up the execution. The two sides of the conversations were spliced together awkwardly, with what felt like the wrong pauses between the delivery or inflections that didn't match. I figured the actors wouldn't record at the same session, but the editing made it really obvious. Worse, you might go through 2 - 3 scripted conversations during one ride, but they were sequenced poorly: you could get into a heated argument about what a shitbag John Marsten's always been, and then suddenly one beat later they're talking about the weather. It could've been one of the best parts of the game, but I'm frustrated that they didn't give it more polish.
Oh and p.s.: meant to thank you for your Game Developer piece on chess. It cheered me up right at the tail end of my kidney stone adventure.
The problem with the medium is that, in order to support gameplay that's interesting and challenging, games are forced to be imperfect and frequently sloppy abstractions of the stories they purport to tell. Environments can't adhere to architectural logic, play mechanics can't represent physical realism, and a good chunk of the player's actions in a given game are non-canonical glosses, illogical asides that can't be reconciled with the normative progression of the plot and the motives of the main character.Your avatar didn't really fall down that pit. He didn't really take 20 gunshots or lightning bolts to the head and restore his vitality with a box of rations while singlehandedly fighting off a horde of 50 zombie demons. He didn't really tie that nun to the railroad tracks. He certainly didn't spend an entire cut-scene jumping up and down in the corner. These are all iconically represented stylizations of what's "actually" happening in the game. It's very difficult to deliver a compelling, meaningful story when the player has tools at his disposal to subvert and negate its narrative thrust.
I don't think there is a solution for conventionally scripted games. Improvements in tech, like the context-sensitive mixdown of dialogue takes you suggest, can only sharpen the resolution of verisimilitude a little more; they can add a few more layers of nuance to the behaving player's experience of in-game reality, but they can't address player psychology. It seems to me that, so long as players are asked to step into the shoes of a "character" and handed a mission in which to move him forward, the tensility of the game's narrative will fail whenever the player's interests don't align with the ostensible interests of the character they inhabit.
And yet I persist in believing that if you create a world that makes a strong enough case for itself and its fictional primacy, people will somehow want to behave in it, and act in what I guess you'd characterize as "in character," which is to say, in ways that do not violate the gameworld or -character's imposed fictional integrity. I realize all the problems with what I want from games. I even realize that maybe this isn't what games at their best are even for. And yet I persist, I suppose foolishly, in wanting that.
Now of course this can limit the sort of story you are going to tell, but if youaccept that on some level the very act of playing a game requires a acknowledgment of the rules of a gameworld then all players have a kind of self awareness that they are part of game anyways, and people wanting to work within the medium may have to accept that games are a intrinsically more self aware medium than most.
The point McCawley makes at the end of his post about player vs authorial intent rings very true for me.
I think of the performances which are most, convincing in videogames are the ones which the player can project their own feeling onto the most easily without the game trying to prescribe a interpretation. Although Hale's tone may be the same in hour one as it is in hour 50, a players perception of his/her Shepard's tone may not be(This opens up the entire silent character in video games can of worms too).Body language plays a important part in face to face communication, so perhaps that's one way of making a vocal performance seem different without having to change the performance itself, but once again if that clashes with the players own expectation of the character's reaction then it creates discordance.
All in all thanks for the interesting read its helped burn off some of my excess brain energy(which has no right to exist at 4:00 in the morning).
Seems like there's a lot more utility in that approach that trying to shoehorn character development in between direction on where to throw the next plasma grenade.
Obviously, that solution doesn't work for conventional, linear experiences. But I think it's the more promising direction for the future.
I like to contemplate sentences when I read, considering what metaphors, and irony can be inferred, but if I read them again, that is acceptable because I am the one reading, at my pace, and discretion. Being forced to listen to someone saying the same thing, over and over again, is boring, and grows infuriating. Game writers who truly wish their work to be considered can create verbatim logs of important conversations--I know some games have had these, though I cannot think of specific examples.
Cutscenes are not, inherently, bad--they can express interesting ideas, or interestingly weird shit--but discretion is vital to their placement.
Kenneth Young has a good post on a similar topic, Voice in Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins
http://soundspam.blogspot.com/2010/05/voice-in-biowares-dragon-age-origins.html
For better examples of the dialog during transportation trick -- a great trick, I think -- see Prince of Persia (2008) or Grand Theft Auto IV.
@Matthew W
I think you put too much emphasis on "if it is well-written and acted" and not enough on "is it well-written and acted." Too often I'm embarrassed to play a game in front of my wife because the dialog just sounds immature or melodramatic to an outsider.
I'm inclined to think that if dialog improves, the player would be compelled to listen. If not, there's always the possibility of punishment, as examined by Elrod here:
http://corvus.zakelro.com/2008/09/verb-restriction-vs-immersion/
Demon's Souls did a nice job of this. NPCs would chastise you for running away mid-conversation. One would refuse to trade with you until you spoke with him once more.
JP: I think I used the term “cop-out” too quickly, especially as your experience on BioShock is really interesting to hear about. In a few of the games I worked on, when we couldn’t get characters close enough to the player to explain the intelligibility of his or her voice, we just reverted to using the radio filter. To me, that approach felt lazy– but it was much too late to do anything else, of course.
Chris: I very much agree that a lot of the riding conversations in Red Dead Redemption seemed to be in search of a quality they never quite achieved. I found John Marston’s apparent unreserved gabbiness a bit out of character, too. I’d hazard a guess many of them were written out of fear a compulsory but entirely silent ride would be boring for players, who as a general rule crave constant stimulation.
Jared: Initially I wanted to address the writing aspect as well, but the piece was getting too unwieldy. There is a lot to talk about there, from the beginning concept through execution. I decided to focus on the challenges of dialogue and its performance; I may talk about writing in a later post.
"But maybe as players get drawn into the story, that sort of thing will happen less, naturally, like a theatre that starts out chatty but quiets down as the play turns absorbing."
I think designers have more to gain by taking the opposite tone and assuming that their work is only as strong as the engagement of their least sympathetic players. That's certainly the way you have to treat usability-related design points (if a player doesn't understand something, don't immediately assume it's their fault!) and definitely some more subjective creative ones. For me, Heavy Rain suggests a future where aloof, self-indulgent designers can stick their fingers in their ears and ignore what their players do, think and interpret. Ultimately, the game tells you what it's about, and you have to listen. Bissell's aspiration sounds a bit like a more enlightened version of "you're playing it wrong". Maybe a difference in the way critics vs designers see this is okay though.
"I think I used the term “cop-out” too quickly ... In a few of the games I worked on..."
That's just it, I think a radio drama style of storytelling has to be in your plan very early in order to work well. With Bioshock it was, though it comes with many painful limitations as well. I just prefer those limitations, when consistently and honestly presented to the player, to the false freedoms and frequently shallow meaning-making of a cutscene-heavy narrative veneer. It does restrict the kinds of stories you can tell, but maybe games should hold off on trying to tell those more often? The elegance and power of Portal's storytelling is hard to dismiss.
I remember laughing out loud the first time I heard three characters shout "reloading!" simultaneously in L4D. It was crazy to hear other characters in a multiplayer game talking so much, so usefully, and I never got sick of it. The plot may be minimal (as Bissell describes in Extra Lives), but L4D does have a great deal of talking; it is simply judicious in its use of idiosyncratic lines.
The constant functional chatter in L4D is ingenious, I think, for reminding you that the survivors are alone in the world (most of the time). They're pitted against hostile, nonverbal hordes, and they keep talking to remind each other that they're still alive. There's still not much "innate interest" in the random lines, but the player can imagine the Survivors' need for constant communication with each other, their relief at hearing each others' voices, going deeper than their explicit reasons for speaking.
Nearly all verbal communication comes through those 4 distinct characters, so the writers weren't burdened with generic enemy lines. (The great difficulty in writing barks is the typical lack of a specific character and situation to source them from.) The result, as Bissell wrote, is a compact marvel of a script, one the most down-to-earth (though funny) zombie stories in any medium.
For all that, it still has the glaring problems you described above about line priority. Somebody else recently mentioned the weirdness of the saferoom dialogue, which I had forgotten; even if your character is in the middle of screaming about some other terror, he will interrupt himself with one of the "safe and sound" lines when the safehouse door closes.
I find the conflict suggested by this extremely interesting.
Fundamentally, a game designer's job is to create an activity. Maybe they create content as well... but every game designer is creating an activity for the player to engage in. This is true whether you're creating a board game, a sport, a piece of Interactive Fiction, or Bioshock 5: Moonshock.
What makes that activity satisfying is subject to the same rules that make any other activity satisfying. I agree with Gladwell's assertion in "Outliers"... a job needs three things to be satisfying: autonomy, challenge, and clear action-and-result feedback. I think this is not only true of the activity of work, but of any activity, including gameplay.
So allowing player agency/autonomy is fundamentally important to making a good game/activity. The conflict comes when you decide to also tell a story in your game. You can't script an event to happen in the game world without a violation of autonomy (the player can't prevent or change that event)... and possibly violating challenge and responsiveness as well.
Putting speed bumps on the road reduces peoples' enjoyment of driving, in exchange for increasing safety. Story events are speed bumps: they reduce the enjoyment of the activity of gameplay, in exchange for the enjoyment of experiencing a story. The bumps are gentler when they interfere less with player autonomy; but they're still bumps, and you must choose carefully whether the trade-off of enjoyment is worthwhile.
So I guess that, yes, superiority of player agency over authorial intent (with regards to story) is - to me - unquestionable. Gameplay is one thing, story is another, and they're not just separate, they're usually antagonistic. As a designer, you'll often have to choose between them... and if you choose story over gameplay, then why are you even making a game? Games are just not a very good storytelling medium compared to many others. If you love your story so much, then go tell it in another medium... but leave the game behind, that's what I want to play.
My individual opinion matters little here, but I do believe you can play a game well to varying degrees. Maybe that sounds like semantics, but for me the difference of perspective is crucial. Game designers want players to play their games well, to meet their meaning halfway and enable the player's full expressive potential.
Designers who think of their players as playing "wrong" or "right" are clamping or altogether disregarding that expressive potential, which along the battle lines of the old ludology vs narratology debate suggests you are underutilizing / devaluing the interactive side of your game. Heavy Rain for example doesn't reward you for playing "well" and couldn't without adding a lot more game mechanics (eg "That's not really how a grieving single father would open a cabinet, FAIL"). You simply pass or fail various survival conditions and decision gates.
The Hitman games, on the other hand, give you a rating based on how well you perform the role handed to you, and you're given a lot of latitude to play to that role skillfully, stylishly or efficiently. Every element of the design is crafted to help you realize that potential. The game is most engaging for you when you are making the game look good, and that forms a virtuous cycle of immersion, emergence, etc.
For me, an ounce of that is worth a pound of heavy-handed traditional storytelling and wishful thinking.