Game Mechanics and Dialogue
Sunday, April 17th, 2011Gamasutra has a hat-trick of articles from UCSC’s recent Inventing the Future of Play symposium.
In, “The Listening Player”, Emily Short (interactive fiction writer who made a large contribution to Graham Nelson’s radical new interactive fiction development system, Inform 7) talks about building game-play mechanics out of listening to dialogue. Drawing the user into passive sequences by requiring them to pick out subtle details and use intuition. Of course this needs careful attention to detail on the part of the game designers and content creators too, not to mention the pitfalls of the uncanny valley. This is a mechanic which looks to have been employed by Rockstar’s L.A. Noire.
Graeme Devine (The 7th Guest, The 11th Hour) talks about making the player the lead character in Drawing The Player Into A Story. Whilst believing that your are the main protagonist and that you have the power to cause or prevent change is one thing, I’m not sure that we need to be able to play as ourselves. I guess it depends to what degree this is meant. If a game supports multiple playing styles, it may satisfy a wider group of users. However, games are often a vehicle for escapism and so I don’t necessarily have to project myself completely into the game.
Marilyn Walker, Director of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Games and Playable Media program’s talks about Generating Natural Language For Game Dialogue. She asks if bigger and bolder games will require Interactive Fiction writers to pen thousands of more lines of dialogue, or if we can create tools to procedurally generate NPC speech. With authentically generated speech, we could create responses specific to the player’s current context. The obvious hurdle is creating dialogue that is as rich as that written by an Interactive Fiction writer.