Making dialog fun.

"To chatter is easy. To talk resultfully with the hostile, suspicious, indifferent or even friendly is an art."

--Milton Wright

Something that always bothers me in games is how even really well-written dialogue can be mind-numbingly boring compared to the rest of the game. Nobody ever wonders why. The reason is most likely that we're taking the mechanics from a book, and putting it into a game. Almost every game, with the exception of Facade and some text-based adventures, the mechanics of dialogue are read-flip-read-flip-read-flip... This is terribly boring and not interactive. Even games that were praised for their "complex" dialogue like Mass Effect and Dragon Age took their mechanics from a choose-your-own-adventure book, so it was read-choose-flip-read-choose-flip. A little more interactive, but still boring. Why? Because it's easy to emulate a book, text parsing is difficult and often inaccurate, and nothing better has been considered yet.

So, if games are to progress as a medium, we need to take storytelling, more specifically the act of communicating, and make it our own. We need to discard books, and take a close look at what REALLY happens during a conversation. After we do that, we can break that down into mechanics build a prototype, and find out what's fun.

So, what really happens in a conversation?

I don't think it's necessarily important what words are used, but is important how they are used, why they are used, and in what context these two things change. So right there in one sentence, we have a game. Can you figure it out? Let me explain before cutting to the chase. Whenever one is engaged in a conversation, there is always a purpose to it. Whether it's seeking companionship, exchanging ideas, persuasion, argument, or maybe just because you want to talk to occupy time. This reason is our Goal for starting a conversation in the first place. If we didn't have a reason for talking, we wouldn't be talking.

Even with a limited vocabulary, one can convince someone of an idea, make a friend, or maybe make someone furious and storm off. It's not necessarily the specific word choice, but how we use these words. The tone of the sentence of important for sure, whether it's accusatory, interesting, sincere, boastful, etc can have a large influence on the other party. Of course there are also good practices like not interrupting, not changing the subject, correcting the other party's grammar etc. These techniques are how we use words, they are what we are actually thinking of doing while conversing. If a person is fluent in a language, they very rarely are picking every word in a conversation, but they are deciding how to put those words together. These techniques, and knowing when to use which technique, are the Mechanics of communication. But these things change depending on context. We converse differently if we're in a bar, or discussing politics, or even whether or not we're on the internet to some extent. In other words, the context of the conversation determines the Rules that govern what techniques are effective, and which ones will make the other person walk away disgusted.

So, here we have it: How: mechanics. Why: goal. Context: rules

Let's make a prototype!