frog blast the vent core
25.1.07
  Dialoging


You can't accuse Canadian RPG developer Bioware of an overabundance of innovation. I don't intend that as an insult; Bioware has turned in more than its share of smash market successes, and its 1998 hit Baldur's Gate has even been credited (by particularly credulous reviewers possessing a weak grasp of history) with "saving" the PC CRPG market. But Bioware's achievements have generally been refinements rather than innovations.

Fast forward to, well, right now: Bioware's Mass Effect is set to hit XBox 360 this year, and previews and interviews are popping up right and left. For the most part, Bioware publicly grounds the game in generic design traditions rather than radical departures (project director Casey Hudson, to GamerSquad: "What will blow people away about Mass Effect is how it is able to achieve both of these [familiar RPG design approaches] at the same time"), but a notable exception is Bioware's much-hyped new "real-time conversation system".

Here's Hudson on Mass Effect's dialog system, again speaking with GamerSquad:
[The] new conversation system . . . will allow players to have fully real-time conversations with in-game characters. Not only does everyone (including your character) have full voice, but the new interface is based more on types of emotional reactions, allowing you to react faster and more intuitively. That immediate and fluid interactivity, in combination with extremely advanced digital actors, means that conversations in Mass Effect take on the incredible feeling of simultaneously watching and being inside a dramatic scene from a movie.

You can see the system in action here:
Shepard's challenge

Shepard = total BADASS

Despite outward appearances, this is not your grandmother's RPG dialog tree. The first screen's dialog options can be chosen at any time during the (fully voiced) conversation, offering the ability to interrupt the character with whom you're conversing; screenshots cannot convey this flexibility. (Games have long offered the ability to "interrupt" dialogs in order to move to the next conversational exchange, but Bioware suggests that your interruptions will actually be recognized as interruptions - i.e., the act of interrupting now carries its own content. We'll return to this in a few paragraphs.) More notable, and obvious even from the screenshots, is that the dialog option chosen in the first screen is not the same as the resulting dialog in the second screen.

For now, let's leave aside the larger question of the differential relationship between "real-time" and "turn-based", a bizarre ideological minefield in current game design. Suffice it to say that "real-time" is associated these days with a more direct interface between the game and the player; "real-time" is seen as more immersive, more visceral, more involving. Underscoring this promise, Hudson avers that this real-time conversational system enables players to "react faster and more intuitively", and indeed this seems obvious at first glance: you (the player / Captain Shepard) can interrupt your conversational partner and move to the next dialog exchange as quickly as you choose.

The problem is that Bioware's "real-time conversation system" suffers from the same flaw as other real-time systems: the presumption of enhanced "directness" is mistaken. This approach to dialog may be faster-paced than, say, riddling with Ravel in Planescape: Torment, but it's potentially less direct because it interposes an additional layer of abstraction - and therefore latency - between the game and the player. It's temporally quicker but conceptually more roundabout.

Abstracting linguistic communication is nothing new; recall the rudimentary emoticons in Fable or the masterful "Simlish". These examples are fundamentally different from Bioware's approach in Mass Effect, however, because these older games employ signs (visual, auditory, gestural) to stand in for relatively undifferentiated meaning rather than highly specific, literally-fixed meaning. Put another way, you can grasp the emotional content of Simlish without literally specifying it; a Sim's "unhappiness" remains undifferentiated "unhappiness" rather than any of the multitude of much more specific, diverse, and distinct emotions enabled (and required) by the use of language (sorrow, despair, mournfulness, pique, depression, dejection, etc.). There's not much translation required. Mass Effect, in contrast, uses only literal meaning. It employs literal conversational fragments to stand in for complete conversations, which means it requires that the player accurately translate less specific (less differentiated) language into highly specific (highly differentiated) dialog - which in turn means, as with most processes of translation, you can get it wrong.

Dialog options are already abstractions in most games; most of us are so fluent in generic game mechanics that we don't notice, but traditional dialog implementations represent or stand in for complete human conversational exchanges. Even MCA at his best, in Planescape: Torment, doesn't write most in-game dialogs as they would really happen, and most games fall far short of his standard. In Mass Effect, therefore, Bioware has taken a layer of player-game interaction that's already abstracted from a player's real-life experience, and added another even more abstracted layer to it - with the ostensible goal of making things more direct and realistic.

Let's address this more concretely, referencing the screenshots above. In the circle of dialog choices, the highlighted option reads "I gave you an order!" What that actually means, as you see upon its real-time elaboration, is "I'm in charge here, Garrus! Not you. I gave you an order and you damn well better follow it!" However, the elaborated dialog is only one of (at least) several possible elaborations of the first screen's chosen option ("I gave you an order!"). The game has now put itself in the business not only of limiting your potential choices (as all games do), but of actually making your choices less meaningful by potentially forcing your character to use dialog that doesn't match what you (thought you) chose.

Will this be much of a problem with the game as a whole? Smart writing can mitigate this inherent flaw to some degree, but there's no way to abstract the player's entire statement of several sentences to only a few words without losing meaning along the way - and eventually (probably frequently) forcing dialog upon the player that's significantly different in tone and content from what she thought she was choosing. The alternative, and Bioware's probable solution, is to significantly constrain Commander Shepard's range of responses and thereby reduce much of the opportunity for character role-playing and player choice.

This isn't the limit of the design pitfalls. In other sources, Bioware representatives (mostly the embarrassingly hyperbolic Casey Hudson) have stressed the player's ability to interrupt dialogs or, conversely, to offer no response at all; in other words, NPCs in Mass Effect will apparently recognize those actions as meaningful content. There's promise here, but this approach is less straightforward than it may appear: by implementing time as a separate axis of meaning within conversations, Bioware's conversation system compounds the translation problem mentioned above by also mixing spoken and written text in real time. That is, players must process the audio of the spoken dialog simultaneously with the written text of the possible responses (translating or "upconverting" those abstracted options into multi-sentence dialog responses in order to evaluate them), then decide whether to intervene (since non-response is always an option) and, if so, when (since interruption is always an option) - then choose the desired response, which is finally translated by the game into fully-voiced dialog that may or may not match the player's intention.

The human brain is extraordinary, and similar mental gymnastics are performed in each of our daily conversations. "Real-time" and "immediate" human conversations, however, don't require concurrent linguistic processing of both written and spoken speech, while simultaneously compelling you to choose your response from among a few conversational fragments that can only be vocalized according to somebody else's translation.

It's not all rainclouds and sad hobbled ponies, as real-time interruption and non-response could provide genuinely new conversational interactions. Implicit in this flexibility is a choice for players, of whether to treat an NPC with patience and courtesy; well-written NPCs may even be able to greet these player choices variously, some responding to conversational aggressiveness with respect and others with annoyance or even fear. In the process, however, this system imposes additional layers of abstraction and translation on the player, and potentially undermines the game's promise of faithfully mediating between the player and the gameworld. And for what? Skillful writers, working with traditional dialog trees, can already allow player reactions ranging from impatient eagerness to brusque dismissiveness and even hostility.

There may be independent value in allowing players to use time in a dialog system, deciding whether to manipulate the conversation by impatiently interrupting or not responding at all, but it remains to be seen whether the "immediate and fluid interactivity" promised by Bioware's Hudson will be worth the tradeoffs in such a narrative-heavy genre - or, indeed, if it will be more "immediate" at all. In any case, game designers too often forget that gaming is inherently abstracted, and there's no shame in this. If designers truly wish to offer "cinematic" experiences, why not take a cue from cinema and develop games which celebrate, rather than hide, the constraints on immediacy and interactivity inherent in our medium?

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Comments:
Interesting breakdown, Suibhne. What do you have in mind by "games which celebrate, rather than hide, the constraints on immediacy and interactivity inherent in our medium"? Are you advocating a kind of metagaming experience here?
 
I'm working on a response to that right now, as well as a bit of an update to this post. Expect it in a few days, and sorry it's taken me so long to respond!
 
Btw, I wouldn't say that I'm advocating metagaming so much as suggesting that it's inevitable. We play games in what Henry Jenkins calls a "transmedia environment", in which games derive meaning from other games and from other media, and part of our current challenge is to develop a useful, broadly-shared vocabulary (or cultural toolkit, if you'd prefer) both for developing games and for playing them. Cinema has that kind of vocabulary, and directors/creators often access or manipulate it very intentionally; with games I think the vocabulary is much less mature and used much less intentionally. Accessing that vocabulary is "metagaming" in a technical sense, I suppose, because we're talking about deriving meaning from outside a particular game - but I also think it's a mistake to think of any individual game as an entirely independent product, free of influence or meaning connected to any other games or media.
 
I see a lot of pomp and not much meat or understanding of the system actually works.

Rather than understanding, you seem to take two screenshots and extrapolate an entire system from them.

For starters, the dialog decisions are arranged based on their effect. Like Kotor. From good to evil, along with skill choices, like persuasion or hacking or whatever.

So really you don't even need to read the choices, but just know where each choice is.

Also, conversations are rarely timed, and you're overthinking this, you freak.
 
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