In my research for this project, I identified two key approaches to dialogue systems in games. The first system – the so-called ‘hub’ system – has been widely adopted across game genres. The second – which I’ll call the ‘hatch’ system – has been developed almost as a response to the pervasiveness and rigidness of the first. I have also identified contemporary games that use each system, and which provide interesting examples of these systems being used to place players more firmly in the role of ‘actor’ or ‘performer.’
The dialogue ‘hub’
The ‘hub’ system remains the industry standard for designing interactive game dialogue, and has its roots in the earliest instances of branching dialogue – Choose Your Own Adventure books, which presented dialogue options linking to different pages of a printed book. Conversations for the digital adaptation of this system are generally designed to the following rubric:
This system can be characterised by a wealth of apparent choice – the player can pursue many different avenues of inquiry, defining what they want to talk about, with the game (usually) cooperating – but very little actual choice beyond accepting quests or deepening the player’s knowledge of the world and its characters. Options remain mostly static, and any ‘action’-based options are often signposted as ‘leave conversation’ options – ‘begin combat’ / ‘attack’, for example. High-consequence dialogue options (often ‘gated’ behind ‘skill checks’) are similarly bolded out to the player, encouraging them either to act now and skip extraneous information, or hold off until they’ve exhausted all other options. Additionally, the outside game world is often paused or ‘suspended’ while choices are selected.
We can see the power of this system in games like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment, where the philosophical and emotional beats of the story are delivered through excavating reams of text, both spoken and narrated.
By breaking these up into clear points of investigation, the writers can avoid overwhelming players with information, while also sharpening their attention to key themes or clues; these games also make use of omniscient ‘narrator’ voices on top of character text to add even more context. These detail-oriented, text-heavy games are favourites of players who love reading novels, and owe much to the genre of fantasy fiction and tabletop role-playing from which they draw both mechanical and aesthetic inspiration.
The ‘hub’ system evolved significantly with Bioware’s Mass Effect. This game abandoned visualisation of every line of dialogue in favour of a ‘radial’ system that both paraphrased the content of a player’s chosen line and displayed the likely in-game consequences of that choice (divided mainly between the alignment choices of ‘paragon’ and ‘renegade). This simplification was necessary for a fully-voice-acted game, as well as one that was interested in functioning ‘on cinema time’ rather than ‘on novel time.’
This design represented a significant shift in player role as well. Rather than functioning as the writer of the game’s script, as in earlier Bioware titles, the player now worked more as a director of a film – less concerned with the word-by-word script-work than by triggering character beats and altering the compositional flow of conversation (Mass Effect ran an advanced-for-its-time cinematic camera system). This system has remained largely unchanged for fifteen years, and features in such modern titles as Fallout 4: initiating dialogue triggers a series of shot / reverse-shot camera movements, pausing or slowing events in the game world outside.
This system is obviously great at developing thoughts; it may be less so at developing relationships or emotions, and I would argue that none of the ‘hub’ systems mentioned allow for the player to truly feel like the ‘actor’ of the story.
2019’s Disco Elysium takes a significant step towards correcting that. Though it returns to the word-focused ‘hub’ presentation of Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate, it makes the player feel more like an actor by innovating on the formula in two subtle ways.
Firstly, the game does away with the idea of an omniscient, or at least halfway-reliable, narrator, replacing it instead with an ensemble of voices, representing the protagonist’s fractured internal monologue. Core mental and physical traits like ‘Logic,’ ‘Reaction Speed,’ and ‘Endurance’ are all given voice, but so are more ineffable qualities: ‘Shivers’ and ‘Inland Empire’ representing physical and psychic intuition respectively. Also characterised are the player character’s life experience: ‘Esprit d’Corp’ is the voice of the player character’s level of ‘cop,’ while ‘Electrochemistry’ represents the player character’s facility with, and desire for, drugs.
The more a player relies on or improves these skills, the more that particular voice will be called upon to narrate the action or provide advice. This funnels the player’s experiential attention through the lenses of those voices – touch, hearing, smell or intuition might dominate different players’ stories. This provides for some significantly different playthroughs, but also activates specific imaginative senses. In actor training, the term ‘sense memory’ is often used, and it refers to tying a particular emotional memory onto a sensation (trauma onto the smell of gasoline, attraction onto the texture of chocolate). By experiencing the sense during performance, the actor can relive the emotional memory, and certain actors find different senses more useful for this. DE’s dialogue system replicates this to a compelling degree, providing the player with the experience of being a sensationally specific character.
Secondly, DE introduces time. Mass Effect and Fallout 3 can be rightly critiqued for the dissonance between the fast-paced action gameplay and the glutinous slowdown of their dialogue scenes. The writers and voice actors of these games work hard to convey a sense of immediacy, but no amount of visual or emotional pyrotechnics can distract from the fact that what the player is really engaged in is a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. Even with all the background explosions, climactic music etc, talking still feels like it ‘suspends’ the world. In DE, however, every dialogue choice advances the game’s clock by three ‘minutes’. Bar reading a book or sleeping, this is the only way to advance time, and given that events in the story are tied to particular times of day, and that the central mystery is a time-sensitive affair, your (and your character’s) relationship to time is of extreme narrative significance.
The dialogue ‘hatch’
The second system is slightly more difficult to analyse, as one of its chief components is a lack of concern with showing how it works. As detailed in Jon Ingold’s AdventureX 2018 talk ‘Sparkling Dialogue’, it is concerned with fostering meaningful choice by limiting dialogue options. As such, I have chosen the metaphor of the service hatch to describe it. A waiter receives meals through the service hatch at a restaurant; behind the hatch is the kitchen, and until the meals are ready it remains closed. When the waiter is in position and the correct meals are ready, the hatch opens. The waiter selects the meal they need, and the hatch is closed. It’s difficult to conduct a comprehensive analysis without looking at the system’s underlying code, but it broadly functions broadly like this:
Inkle’s games, like Heaven’s Vault and 80 Days, make heavy use of these weighting systems to provide seamless and context-bespoke options to the player. Dialogue choices are often trinary or binary, and uniformly short in length.
The immediate advantage of this system is that players are no longer choosing between options that might make no sense to them. NPCs ‘act’ towards the player in more complex and subtle ways (certainly more so than Bioware or Bethesda’s alignment / reputation systems). The visual design of the system itself also becomes incredibly flexible, and can procedurally inform other game systems. For example, Heaven’s Vault relies on a procedural camera positioning system which reacts to weights based on player position and dialogue choices in order to determine shot composition; Pendragon reads the state of its game board, including previous player ‘moves’, in order to generate its dialogue options between characters; the player’s moves after a choice further inform the development of that dialogue.
All of this can only be good for story cohesion and player immersion, and the ways in which story systems have been incorporated within games already is inspirational. However, sometimes the exposure of a game’s systems is key to how players ‘grok’ it, and I find that, more often than not, I need someone to explain how the narrative systems in Inkle games are actually working in order to appreciate their elegance and responsiveness. While its intention might be to make the player feel more in line with the character – by limiting player knowledge to the player character’s immediate knowledge – in effect what it does is make the player feel more like a disciplined writer, and rarely (if ever) into the ‘actor’ position.
One game that bucks this trend is Signs of the Sojourner. Now, whether Signs of the Sojourner actually uses an Inkle-style system under its hood I’ve no idea (it’ll be worth contacting the writer and developer should I continue this kind of research for my thesis), but on its surface it shares many similarities. Dialogue responses seem to be heavily context-dependent, and ‘options’ are almost non-existent, beyond who you talk to first in a location. Instead, the player utilises a deck of ‘cards’, each representing different emotional approaches. By matching them with their scene partner’s cards, the player either progresses the conversation constructively, or allows it trail off.
After each conversation, the player must discard one card from their deck, replacing it with one of the NPC’s. This way, their future conversations are informed by their past ones, both mechanically and narratively – most importantly, the player has an easily referenced record of how this has happened. Many ‘hatch’-based games rely upon your ability to retain informational details in order to build up a sense of your character, and expect you to perform consistently with choices you have made during your playthrough. Not every player is likely to be this kind of ‘method player’, and games must provide shortcuts to memory and emotional association in order to remain accessible to attention-poor players – Signs of the Sojourner’s matching system does this with a careful simplicity. Players are reminded of their connections with other characters by the makeup of their deck, and – in an elegant mechanical metaphor – the more it changes the more their relationships with earlier characters shift.