Conversation in Games: Trigger, Branch, Repeat

Bento Smile's Air Pressure

Why is there so little variety in conversation systems in games?  Conversation is one of the most essential and frequent things humans do.  It is a common source of interest, drama, and comedy in both real life and fiction.  It reveals character, it advances plotlines, and it uncovers information.  It's hugely important to most stories about people.  Yet almost every videogame, regardless of genre, that employs playable conversation uses the same two basic mechanics for it.  Some use one or the other, some use a combination.  These two mechanics are:

Response Triggering.  The player employs some kind of trigger action towards another character.  The trigger could be an object, a topic selected from a list, or just the choice to talk to the character at all.  Each trigger leads to a specific canned response from the character.  Employing the same trigger multiple times will usually get the same response.  The order in which triggers are deployed is not significant.

Branching Paths.  This is a variation on basic response triggering in which each response opens up a new set of triggers.  This allows for conversations with a temporal progression and usually involves choices about the direction the dialogue takes.

Less Flicks More Bits

The indie developer Craig "Superbrothers" Adams recently published a manifesto called "Less Talk More Rock," based on a talk he gave at the Game Developer's Conference.  It is a good and glorious thing that we have finally reached the "artistic manifesto" phase in the development of the videogame medium; let us rejoice and hope for more to come.

Adams's piece starts with some very sensible-sounding advice on the game development process and then makes a more interesting turn into recommendations on game style.  The gist of the thing is that Adams feels that the native language of videogames is audiovisual; that excessive use of written or spoken text in games engages too much of the intellectual rather than the more holistic parts of the brain; and therefore that text in games disrupts the natural communication between designer and player. I think all of these points are highly debatable, but the one I want to push back against the most is the first one.

A familiar debate about empathy in videogames

Peter Suderman, a film and culture writer I quite like, had a short post yesterday at The American Scene of the familiar "videogames can't really evoke emotion" type.  I doubt I can contribute much to this old argument, except to say that it seems dreadfully premature to be making pronouncements on the capabilities of the medium when it's barely out of diapers.  I think that it's dangerously easy to look at a new medium and see only the points where it differs from an older medium to which you are more attached, and to try and build a case about what the new medium can and can't do based on that catalogue of differences.  But that's a style of analysis that too easily misses the forest for the trees.

EDIT: Oops!  I accidentally linked the wrong article above.  Sorry, here's the Suderman piece.

EDIT: Woah, where's my head at today?!  The real piece is here.