How a more holistic conception of style can support branching dialogue in video games

Style and branching dialogue: how a more holistic conception of style can support the creation and assessment of branching dialogue in video games

By Richard Rabil, Jr. Texas Tech University April 2010

Perhaps better than anyone else in the 21st century, video game designers understand what Dr. Richard Lanham (2006) has called the “attention economy” (p.xii) we live in today and how to manipulate it (p. 17). That is, they are keenly aware that the success of their product lives and dies by its ability to swiftly capture and manage attention.1 However, for all their emphasis on keeping players engaged, few game designers discuss the practical role that rhetoric plays in supporting this activity.2 This is all the more strange considering that ever since its birth in ancient Greece, rhetoric has been almost exclusively concerned with how to hold attention long enough to achieve practical goals (Lanham 2006, p.20).

And the primary means of doing this has been through what rhetoricians call “style.”

Part of the reason for the disconnect may be rhetoric’s bad reputation.

“Style” and “rhetoric” often connote chicanery and ostentation. Worse yet, they connote words, which, as one respected designer has put it, are not the “native language” of video games, which are an audiovisual phenomenon (Boyer 2010).

With this in mind, it is the purpose of this article to propose an alternative understanding of style and rhetoric, one which recognizes that just as style can bring “voice” to the written word, so it can help create emotional, immersive interactive experiences. To concretely illustrate this connection, a specific facet of game design will be examined: branching dialogue. How, this article asks, can a more holistic understanding of style

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See, for example, Aki Jarvinen’s Gamasutra article “First Five Minutes: How Tutorials Make or Break Your Social Game.” April 21, 2010.

There are, of course, many extensive resources on the relationship between rhetoric and video games on a broader level. Ian Bogost’s Persuasive Games is a prime example. His book has a broad focus: the procedural nature of games and how they mount claims about reality.

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help game writers and designers in creating and evaluating branching dialogue?

There are (this article proposes) at least two ways. First, it helps to consider style as something more than words on the screen. Style encompasses all activities involved in “putting it across” such that the player “gets it”—and keeps getting it. Seen in this light, style is also about how voice, gesture, color, sound, indeed signs and symbols of any kind which are employed to communicate with people and produce effects on them.

Second, ever since Aristotle defined style 3 thousands of years ago, the whole domain of style has been deeply concerned with customizing language, or whatever signs and symbols are being used, to the context.4 As such, style can provide video game writers and designers with a useful set of heuristics for evaluating the “naturalness” of branching dialogue in accordance with the various interactions that can occur between player characters and non-player characters.

The remaining sections of this article elaborate on these two main thoughts, arguing that creating and evaluating branching dialogue is not just a storytelling activity that comes with its own unique technical challenges, but a complex rhetorical undertaking that must always in some sense account for audience, context, and purpose.

Defining the terms: What is video game dialogue?

Generally speaking, dialogue in narrative-driven video games is conversation between player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs). At a high level, there are two broad categories: branching and nonbranching.

Non-branching dialogue is conversation with an NPC in which the player does not have any control over how the dialogue proceeds, such as in Final Fantasy or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Ellison 2008). The player cannot make any choices other than initiating the encounter or clicking through to the next dialogue window.

Branching dialogue, by contrast, allows the player to choose response options from a menu or “dialogue tree,” while getting appropriate responses from the NPC (Howard 2008, p.69). Recent action role-playing 3 In Rhetoric, Book III, Chapter 1, Aristotle opened his discussion of style with the following line: “For it is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also say it as we ought.”

4 In an ancient Roman text Rhetorica ad Herennium, style is defined as “the adaptation of suitable words and sentences to the matter devised” (I.3).

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games (RPGs) like Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, and Dragon Age: Origins make extensive use of interactive dialogue as an integral part of their gameplay.

In these games, “Conversation typically moves forward such that the player cannot go back to previous topics or responses” (Ellison 2008).

Figure 1 provides an example of basic branching dialogue from the computer RPG Neverwinter Nights produced by BioWare in 2002.

Figure 1: An example of basic branching dialogue from BioWare’s 2002 RPG game Neverwinter Nights. The NPC will give a different responses depending on the option that the PC chooses. In more advanced dialogue systems, different scores are assigned to each option.

In most branching dialogue systems, the player has an unlimited amount of time to choose a preferred option, though games like Indigo Prophecy impose a time limit, in which case the game makes a decision for the player if time runs out (Ellison 2008). Response options are not always represented as full-length sentences, but sometimes as symbols or a few words of text that summarize the core message of the response. Mass Effect uses this design, as shown later in this article in Figure 3. This design aims to reduce reading time and facilitate conversation flow.

The weight behind each dialogue choice may vary widely. On one end of the spectrum, branching dialogue is as simple as letting the player choose Rabil 3

“Yes” or “No” from the menu. In more complex (and higher budget) games, the player can choose from more sophisticated options which can affect the PC’s relationship with the NPC. Take, for example, Figure 2, which comes from one of the opening scenes in Fallout 3. Here, players can try improving their relationship with Butch, an NPC who pretty much fits the stereotype of a mean, arrogant bully you would forever want to avoid. Prior to this menu, Butch had demanded that you hand over the sweetroll that Mrs. Palmer had given you as a birthday gift.

Figure 2: Example of dialogue options in Fallout 3. The dialogue options suggest that the player can affect his or her standing with the NPC.

Also in Fallout 3, players can influence NPCs through their Charisma, one of the primary attributes you as the player can build up over time.

Likewise, in Dragon Age: Origins, the dialogue system lets you use speechrelated abilities, such as persuasion and intimidation, in an attempt to change the outcomes of your relationships with NPCs. Several other branching dialogue models have been explored, as summarized in the table below. (The table is based on Brent Ellison’s 2008 Gamasutra article, “Defining Dialogue Systems.”)

Model

Definition

Hubs and Spokes

The player can listen to an NPC’s responses and then choose from a “hub” of response options. Each option, in turn, may lead to another set of options that the player can explore. The

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Model

Definition player can always return to the main hub in order to exit the conversation. Examples include Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.

ParserDriven

The player types a response manually, rather than choosing from a set of pre-defined options. “The NPC then replies with one of a number of pre-set responses, or builds a response based around the words used by the player in combination with pre-set phrases” (Ellison). Examples include ELIZA and Façade.

Systemic Interactions

The player has limited, surface-level interactions with NPCs, based on gestures or attitudes instead of full-length conversations. For example, the player can start clapping to indicate that he or she likes another NPC. The NPC can respond with similar gestures.

Examples include Fable and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Time Scheduling

The player progresses through a game based on the time spent in different locations and with different NPCs. Branching dialogue is still used, but its value is associated with the time spent in the interaction. An example is the Japanese Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3.

Branching dialogue lets readers start at the top, middle, or bottom of a dialogue tree. Such a lack of linearity, or what Dr. Jay Bolter (2001) has called the “multilinear” nature of hypertext (p. 128), presents major stylistic challenges for the writer, who must ensure the dialogue remains coherent and engaging regardless of the order of selection. To explore this and other related stylistic challenges, the next section examines the immersive role such dialogue can play in the overall effort to construct emotional, enjoyable experiences.

Defining the purpose: What is the role of branching dialogue?

Branching dialogue does not seem essential to a great game. Gears of War and Final Fantasy VII, for example, successfully implemented nonbranching dialogue to advance the story and convey quest information or mission objectives. Why, then, should game designers invest so much time in creating alternate conversations for a range of different NPCs, many of whom gamers may never choose to engage?

On the other hand, video game journalist Tim Cross (2009) has argued that branching dialogue can add considerable depth and player agency to a Rabil 5

game. This seems to be the case with recent story-driven games Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, and Heavy Rain, where player choices can alter the story in significant ways, greatly increasing his or her sense of agency.

Ultimately, both views raise questions about the fundamental nature of the video game medium, apart from branching dialogue cannot be fully understood. At bottom, video games are about a special type of interaction: gameplay (Juul 2003). What makes gameplay so unique? A summary from an article by Dr. Pippin Barr et al. (2007, p.182) provides a helpful reminder: 1. Games are driven by process, not by results 2. The goals of games emerge from within the game world, not outside it 3. Games inspire a variety of experiences over consistency 4. Games impose constraints, while conventional software tries to remove them 5. Visual and audio content in video games are meant to convey environment rather than functionality Video games, then, thrive on interactive, entertaining challenges. In keeping with this paradigm, Dr. Lewis Pulsipher (2010) in a recent Gamasutra article highlighted some of the major emotional effects that gamer designers seek to produce. The list is worth repeating.

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Realism

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Flow

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Verisimilitude

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Aesthetic

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Suspension of Disbelief

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“Experiences”

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Immersion

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Surprise

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Catharsis

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Reward

What these points suggest is that at the end of the day, video game designers are experience engineers. “It’s all about the experience,” wrote game designer Rick Ellis (2003). “Through the use of visuals, artificial intelligence, and targeted audio, we get to play with your emotions, get you attached to characters, provide the unexpected, and influence your heart rate. When we do our jobs well, you forget that you are playing a game, and the events in it feel very real and matter to you.”

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Of course, this art of experience engineering has many elements to it, and the one element to which branching dialogue has the strongest tie is storytelling. Although the merging of gameplay and storytelling is a hotlydebated topic in the field, there seems to be a general consensus that due to technological developments in the industry, video game designers are positioned to integrate storytelling into games better than ever before (Shirinian; McLaughlin). It is within this intersection—the intersection of gameplay and storytelling—that the role of branching dialogue more clearly comes to light. Branching dialogue not only has the potential to advance the story and enhance a game’s realism, but to increase a game’s level of interactivity (Howard 2008, p.70). Specifically, branching dialogue can present the player with meaningful choices to shape the conversation and the story in ways that are not possible in movies or books (Howard 2008, p.70). For example, in Fallout 3, there is a scene where the player encounters a gang bullying a girl named Amata in the hallway of the Vault, the underground facility where the PC starts off. The player has a few options on how to handle the encounter. One is to get in a fist fight with Butch, the leader of the gang. Another is to speak to one of the gang members and navigate the dialogue just right so that they ultimately disband and leave Amata alone. In this case, the branching dialogue allows the player to solve the problem in more ways than one. As a result, the player can choose a solution that fits their preferences in thinking and behavior, which has great potential in letting them reflect on their personal preferences, as well as let them try out different styles of problem solving (Gee 2007, p.78). These abilities, in turn, not only deepen the immersion, but attach greater meaning and significance to the player’s choices.

Moreover, branching dialogue can immerse players in the story without requiring a cut scene or a fixed conversation where there is no player participation. The benefit? Less of a break in the flow of the gameplay. In Mass Effect, for instance, the player can often inquire into topics that are not related directly to the objective at hand, as shown below in the dialogue tree in Figure 3.

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Figure 3: Example of how the dialogue tree in Mass Effect allows exploration of story topics which may or may not be directly related to the quest at hand. The player can choose to browse these topics or cut to the chase.

Video game critic Tim Cross (2009) explains why this can deepen the gaming experience: It’s intriguing to encounter completely non-mandatory, optional dialogue. It’s often of a more personal, characterdriven nature, this dialogue: it adds little things into your body of knowledge concerning the fiction. It means that you can contextualize the characters and settings within the game as much as you want to.

Still, veteran video game writers often resound the same warning: branching dialog is not linear and is in fact very different from the dialogue found in film and novels (Dille and Platten 2007, p.15; Volk 2009; Sheffield 2010). Largely this is due to the technical challenges branching dialogue presents, as well as its non-linear nature. The table below identifies these challenges and speculates about their implications for style.

Challenges to Branching Dialogue

Implications for Style

Disruption to the flow. While having a range of dialogue choices increases interactivity and can

Concision rises in importance, as do

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Challenges to Branching Dialogue

Implications for Style

foster immersion, it can also do harm when the player has to click through so many options and listen to voice acting without the ability to skip forward. Furthermore, it does not seem realistic when the NPC has incredible patience in answering naïve questions or waiting so long for the player to choose an option. If not managed well, this can end up disrupting the immersion (Ellison 2008), prompting designers and players alike to ask for more cut scenes to substitute for dialogue (Hulshof 2010).

gesture and tone of voice, which can communicate just as much as the words themselves.

Sounding natural. Of all complaints against branching dialogue, unnatural and stilted dialogue may top the list. For example, despite its success in providing a compelling branching narrative, Heavy Rain has been criticized for its “cliché-ridden” script (Stuart 2010). One reason for this rampant sin is that video games have to account for major repetition. Especially in free-roaming RPG worlds like the Capital Wasteland in Fallout 3 or Ferelden in Dragon Age: Origins, the player inevitably talks to the same NPCs or revisits the same locations.

Another aspect of this challenge is collaboration with the voice actors. It is one thing to write branching dialogue; it is another thing to speak it, and thus to “perform” it. Speaking the words out loud can lead to iterative revisions and working sessions with voice actors to ensure that the meaning is communicated effectively.

Defining what “natural” means.

Scripting something that not only looks real on screen, but sounds real.

Collaboration with voice actors, who must take a stance towards the writing.

Accounting for different paths—and therefore different tones of voice. If branching dialogue means that players can affect NPC attitudes, then it inevitably requires a lot of “alt text.” Writers must account for a wide range of alternate “voices” for

Determining the appropriate style and tone for the occasion, according to

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Challenges to Branching Dialogue

Implications for Style

the PC and NPC, like anger or politeness, humor or apathy, depending on the options which the player chooses to select. BioWare game writer David Gaider (2009a) summarized the issue well: “Often what happens is that the writer has a very particular path in mind and fails to account for different player ‘voices’: the player who’s trying to do the right thing, the player who wants to be a bastard, the player who is the suspicious and reluctant hero, etc.” Writing dialogue thus requires creation of dialogue variables and conditions that specify when a character will say what. This is done using dialogue editors that come with toolsets like the Aurora Neverwinter Toolset, the G.E.C.K (Garden of Eden Creation Kit™) for Fallout 3, or the Dragon Age Toolset. These toolsets come with dialogue editing programs that are quite different from tools like Microsoft Word, and may require significant technical skill in developing program scripts, or at least an understanding of how such systems work.

Moreover, the toolsets come with voice-over narration capabilities. Depending on who the writer / designer works for, creating the dialogue will most likely require collaboration with a voice actor.

factors such as genre, fictional world, in-game character relationships, point in the story, and the relationship between the human player and his or her avatar.

Collaboration with voice actors to get the tone right.

Saying so much in so little space, while maintaining balance with visual cues. Brevity is another major stylistic challenge in branching dialogue. Generally speaking, NPC lines need to be quick and to the point, and the dialogue of the PC should be even shorter. No more than 10 words is David Gaider’s recommendation (2009b). And since the word length can impact the game’s pacing (Howard 2008, p.70), it is ideal to focus on providing information the player can use (Dille and Platten, p. 32). One aspect to this is determining when it is just as

Strategies for achieving concision (active vs. passive voice) become important. Just as important, though, is judging what qualifies as “the right amount” in a

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Challenges to Branching Dialogue

Implications for Style

effective to convey story or instructions via sound or graphics. BioWare’s Pieter Parker (2010) has observed that video game technology has grown powerful enough that more and more designers can convey narrative visually as opposed to verbally.

Hence, creating the dialogue requires close collaboration between the writers and developers to ask how much can be expressed through other communicative means.

given scenario, and whether there’s a better alternative.

Deciding how to balance the conveyance of plot, information, and personality. Branching dialogue not only involves conveying the plot and bringing personality to a game, but sometimes requires explaining what the player needs to know in order to accomplish a quest or use the controls. The dialogue therefore runs the risk of having an unnatural expository style. See, for example, the following screenshot from Neverwinter Nights:

Determining how to embed practical information into the dialogue while sounding natural.

Figure 4: Example of dialogue imbued with an expository style. The explicit instructions on how to use the controls do not sound natural.

Players know that no one in real life would give instructions like this in the middle of a conversation.

So to maintain believability, it is ideal to couch the instructions or quest objectives in a style that befits

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Challenges to Branching Dialogue

Implications for Style

the NPC and conveys an attitude, giving the player the impression of a living world. For instance, in Fallout 3, there are numerous scenarios where the player can encounter and engage with NPCs who use jargon and slang that suits their personality, but that also contains requests for help or explains the objectives of a quest without sounding like they are giving a tutorial.

All of these challenges relate, in the end, to maintaining the continuity of the experience. To do this, the dialogue needs to correspond to the look and feel of the game, and harmonize with the overall mood. If the dialogue is forced or artificial, if it is long-winded or somehow incites confusion or frustration, or if some NPC interaction or behavior seems out of place, then the flow of the experience suffers. But if it is natural, if it somehow fits in with the game world and resonates with the audience, then somehow the game succeeds.

Again, though, these points are vague and highly contextual. It is difficult if not downright impossible to set hard and fast standards for what counts as “artificial,” “clear,” or “interesting.” This is where a more a holistic understanding of the role and rhetorical nature of style has great potential to assist video game writers and designers.

What can a more holistic of style contribute to dialogue creation or assessment?

With respect to video game dialogue, style commonly amounts to whether the PC or NPC should speak with a high fantasy British accent or rugged Western slang. On top of that, in a rather general sort of way, video game designers insist on being as simple (Gaider 2009b) and clear as possible, while somehow packing depth into the fewest number of words. In this sense, views on the style of video game dialogue often fall into what English professor Dr. Richard Lanham (2003) calls the C-B-S theory of communication: clarity, brevity, and sincerity (p.1). According to this paradigm, style is simply how writers dress up language to convey the “substance.” Video games are a visual medium after all, and if words must be used, they should be as transparent Rabil 12

and unobtrusive as possible in conveying one’s intent. Of course, this view of style confines style to text rather than let it encompass pictures, sound, or the gestures of PCs and NPCs. Furthermore, it insists on a hard separation between the “substance” of game design—i.e., the gameplay—and the “icing on the cake”—i.e., minutiae such as NPC facial expressions, a quality script, or well-directed voice acting.

Why is this dominant view of style so dangerous to game design?

Because it is precisely the “icing on the cake” that makes all the difference in an industry where so many video games shout for players’ attention.

Spending time and money on details such as deepening the emotional engagement of the dialogue and NPC interactions can go a long way in drawing players into a video game’s world, and keeping them there.

Nowhere does this seem more clear than in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, one of the most successful games to combine story and gameplay in the past year. In the passage below, IGN editor Mike Cassamassina comments on the impact of this game’s artful nuances: When Nate and longtime friend Sully team up to take on mercenaries and explore the jungle, they talk to each other, crack jokes, make suggestions and genuinely feel like buddies.

You believe they have a history. Meanwhile, when Drake's latest girlfriend, Chloe, inevitably comes face-to-face with Elena (who calls herself "last year's model"), you can sense the tension between the two, not just in the dialog, but also in their collective tone… These are the kinds of nuances that are too often passed over in other games, which is a shame because it is these details -- some would call them minutia -that give life to the heroes and villains and make them real.

Insofar as style relates to such nuances, it plays an indispensable role in the modern electronic media of video game design, where people are inundated by competing demands for their attention. Video games are, after all, just one of the landscapes in what Dr. Lanham (2007) calls the modern “attention economy” where the scarcest commodity of all is not information but the human attention needed to unpack it (p.xi). Style in this economy is the means through which the substance is engaged, a reality which makes style just as important, perhaps more important, than the substance itself. Such a view style is of course impossibly broad and situational. Still, it is a far more useful and powerful understanding of style Rabil 13

for video game designers, because it expands the scope of style to cover gesture, voice, sound, visual activity, and perhaps most importantly of all, context. It defines style as the art and science of choosing one or more of these elements instead of or in conjunction with other elements, depending on a wide range of contextual factors such as audience, purpose, technology, and genre.

This understanding of style has important implications for branching dialogue. At a high level, it means that style figures into the way that video game writers and designers “put the dialogue across” so that it contributes to the emotional experience that game designers want to deliver—one charged with realism, surprise, and reward. Style not only helps illuminate why “tone of voice” and “gesture” are important methods of communication, but why and how the context in which they are employed largely determines the shape they ought to take. To illustrate this idea, the final section of this paper focuses on how style can offer systematic heuristics in judging the “naturalness” of branching dialogue.

Style and the problem of “natural” in-game dialogue As mentioned above, one of the hardest parts of writing in-game dialogue is sounding “natural.” The problem, of course, is that “natural” is highly subjective and contextual. There is by no means one-size-fits-all guidance on how to achieve it. So what does style as a rhetorical concept do?

Instead of giving universal principles, it provides a set of heuristics for gauging what counts as “natural” in a given scenario. Such heuristics establish scale sliders, so to speak, coordinates for thinking about expressions which suit the scenario. At minimum, the heuristics revolve around three elements which are foundational to rhetoric: audience, context, and purpose.

Heuristic #1: Who is the audience of the dialogue?

There are several layers to this question, the first of which is who is the ingame audience at a particular point in time? Who, in other words, is the PC talking to? Is it one person or a group of people? Is the NPC an old woman?

A king? A drill sergeant? A beautiful sorceress? A handsome Dracula? The relationship between the PC and the NPC also has great relevance. Is the PC of a certain age, race, or appearance that might affect how NPCs perceive or respond to them? What is his or her disposition towards the Rabil 14

listeners? Are they in love or in conflict? Are they friends or foes? Is one of them a soldier, the other a peasant? Is one an elf, the other a dwarf? How might these differences affect the tone of dialogue options the player can choose from? How might they affect the tone of the NPC’s replies? As Dille and Platten have put it, in-game dialogue is typically much more engaging and immersive the more that the story is built on interesting character relationships (41).

At this point, video game designers face a unique and interesting challenge: the relationships between the speaker and audience can change very quickly throughout the course of the game, based on the user’s choices and actions. In Dragon Age: Origins, for example, the player can give enough compliments to members of his or her party to increase their loyalty and even make them fall in love. Conversely, the player can make choices (such as stealing objects) that can cause an NPC to lose faith in the PC’s moral integrity and abandon the party.

Or take an example from Fallout 3. As shown above in Figure 2, the relationship between the NPC Butch and the PC starts off sour. Later in the game, however, Butch asks the PC for help in saving his mother. If the player accepts the quest and fulfills it successfully, the relationship with Butch changes dramatically, as does the tone of the dialogue. However, if the player refuses the quest, then the social dynamic between Butch and PC, and thus the tone of conversation, remains the same. Keeping the dialogue “natural” in response to these factors is a continual balancing act that requires long-term contingency planning and technical skill.

Finally, the “audience” heuristic relates more broadly to the game’s target consumer base. The dialogue must account for considerations such as the player’s age, gender, and cultural values and assumptions. The branching dialogue for a Japanese RPG, for example, will probably have some nuances and expressions that will not immediately connect with an American audience. These sorts of considerations will play into the video game writer’s or designer’s choices about slang, jargon, tone, or colloquial expression.

Heuristic #2: What is the context of the dialogue?

This question is almost too a broad question, but it is a mistake not to ask.

For one thing, context refers to the genre conventions within which the video game operates. The dialogue for Uncharted is quite different from

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Dragon Age: Origins. In the latter game, characters say things like “Your fascination with glory and legends will be your undoing.” Not so with the first Uncharted, which centers on a witty Indiana Jones-like protagonist who’s much more likely to say “damn,” “whatever,” and “let’s tear it up.”

Or in a game like Mass Effect, much of dialogue between characters has a militaristic ring to it, given the many spaceship environments or nearby scenes of combat. To assist authors in making choices about such genrebound situations, the book Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG contains an excellent collection of essays that describe specific strategies for aligning in-game dialogue with various player expectations associated with genre conventions.

Secondly, context can refer to the physical scene or the geographic location in which the dialogue takes place. Are the characters in a castle or a spaceship? In a quaint village or a bustling town? If in a spaceship, what part of the spaceship? If in a town, what part of town? Each of these locations will have their own unique stories, tensions, and ambience, which in turn will affect the jargon, slang, and tone of the NPCs who inhabit them. It is for this reason that Dille and Platten insist on creating a deep and interesting world (31), and it is why popular fantasy fiction novelist R.A. Salvatore has spent so much time working with a company called 38 Studios to build a complex, believable world that lays the foundation for a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game that persuades players to suspend their disbelief (Nutt 2010).

Third, the context may refer to the events in the story that are currently taking place, which took place beforehand, or which will occur soon afterwards. For instance, a conversation between the PC and NPC moments before an epic battle may convey emotions of excitement or fear, or revolve around attitudes towards death or glory, depending on how the characters feel about the impending event.

Fourth, context may refer to the motives of the people involved in the dialogue. In this sense, context relates partly to the first heuristic on audience analysis. An NPC with a love motive will respond differently to the player’s dialogue choices than an NPC who has a profit motive. Motive also relates to dimension of purpose behind the encounter, which is considered in the next point.

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Heuristic #3: What is the purpose of the dialogue?

Just like the first two heuristics, this heuristic has several dimensions. The first has to do with the many purposes behind the in-game dialogues. Is the PC trying to negotiate a deal with the NPC? Is the PC looking for information, an in-game object, or instructions about a quest? In cases where the purpose is to simply convey details about the next course of action, one of the great challenges in dialogue writing is to gracefully imply what the player must do without being “on the nose” about it (i.e., too direct or obvious). As video game journalist Matt Cassamassina explains, a script which pulls this off well is Uncharted 2: Among Thieves: [The writer] seems to understand how integral it is that characters behave like real humans as opposed to videogame clichés. When Chloe and Nate approach a building ledge, she asks, "Do you reckon we're going to have to climb that thing?" Nate muses, "Yeahhh -- that's usually what happens."

This exchange alerts you to your next objective without beating you over the head with camera sweeps or an unnecessary cinematic. It's lighthearted and amusing, but it also demonstrates that Nate is aware of how absurd his predicaments sometimes are. It's a small, unimportant communication, but it makes sense that the two would behave exactly as they do.

Furthermore, the “purpose” heuristic encourages game designers and writers to be more strategic about the personalities they want to convey through their NPCs. Given the larger mission to create immersive experiences, the designer’s purposes may be somewhat abstract in nature, such as attempting to create an engaging character interactions that evoke different kinds of emotional responses. Such purposes are essentially what David Freeman (2004) discusses at length in his book Creating emotion in games: the craft and art of emotioneering. Though he seldom uses the words “style” and “rhetoric,” Freeman provides a wide range of practical examples on how to transform the style of the dialogue depending on the purpose that the writer or designer has in mind. For instance, he devotes two chapters to what he calls Dialogue Deepening and Dialogue Interesting

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techniques. As an example of the latter, he gives four lines of dialogue that convey different personality traits: Deep Doubts COOK (looking over the battered and weary men; cynical): How’s the ‘cause’?

Regret COOK (regretful): Tom was still limping. I shoulda’ stopped him from going.

Self Sacrifice COOK: Sorry about the slop. Up all night with the wounded.

Wisdom or Insight COOK (downcast): You know, our kids won’t even care about this war. (p. 81) In each case, the emotion or personality that the game writer or designer intends to convey through the NPC affects the choice of words and tone used to convey it.

Finally, purpose considers the motives of the player. Why is the player playing the game to begin with? This strikes at the heart of the desire for an experience. In a medium where the player needs to frequently experience rewards in order to keep on playing, he or she can only bear so much negative feedback from dialogue with NPCs. Game designers Steve Danuser and Tracy Seamster give an interesting example of this in Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG. In describing their work on an early iteration of EverQuest II, they made a design decision to demonstrate the evil nature of a city by making its inhabitants constantly chastise the PC. Apparently this crossed the line. Instead of feeling immersed, players simply felt unwanted. “When we released a revamped newbie experience,” wrote Danuser and Seamster, “one of the major changes we made was changing the tone and recognizing the players as heroes” (Despain 2004, p.9). So while the style of dialogue should convey challenges to the player, it should also convey enough positive encouragement to keep the player motivated.

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Conclusion Branching dialogue is a unique communications tool in that it must account for the alternative decisions a gamer has the ability to make, and thus the many voices and emotions that a PC or NPC can express. This requires long-term planning and sophisticated knowledge of complex toolsets and their associated features, such as dialogue nodes, audio files, conditions, and variables. At the same time, the need for branching dialogue to sound “natural” and consistent within the game world, and to convey emotion and believability, demands exceptional stylistic skill on the part of the writer or designer—a range which the industry’s current view of style does not adequately support. The current “language as a tool” view of style is in need of a more holistic conception of style, one which encompasses the full range of symbolic expression and recognizes the ever-important factors of audience, context, and purpose. It is this conception of style which offers a practical framework through which to create and assess branching dialogue that suits the variables upon which dialogue systems depend.

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