This development log will track and summarise some of the research undertaken during this project.
I began this project with the objective of making a philosophically engaged game, specifically connected to language and dialogue. With most narrative-driven games using dialogue systems to simulate acts of speech, I decided that J. L. Austin’s seminal text How To Do Things With Words would be the start of my research, and might be a source of inspiration in how to approach the creation of alternative dialogue systems. From Austin I would move to John Searle, and then began connecting my own background in actor training and theory to some writings on constructing game dialogue.
How To Do Things With Words (J. L. Austin)
A series of lectures delivered by the philosopher J. L. Austin between 1955 and 1962, this collection forms the basis of much modern philosophy of language.
Central to Austin’s proposition is a categorisation of spoken language into three different acts:
- Locutionary acts, in which the intention or meaning of a speech act is bound up in what is said.
- Illocutionary acts, in which the intention is separated from what is being said. For example, the phrase ‘is there any salt?’ often contains the illocutionary request ‘please pass me the salt.’
- Perlocutionary acts, in which – thanks to particular contexts – a change is made to the world of the speaker. Perlocutionary acts are conditional, in that they only have an effect if specific conditions are met: saying ‘I now pronounce you to be married’ has no effect if the speaker is not legally ordained to marry two people, nor will it have an effect if there is no couple present to be married; if these conditions are met, though, then two people become a legal entity known as a marriage!
The consequence of a speech act that doesn’t rely on true and false statements can also be defined as either ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous,’ depending on whether the consequence is in line with the speaker’s intention. These will prove useful definitions when thinking about dialogue.
What Is A Speech Act? (John Searle)
Searle extends Austin’s work, breaking down language into rules, propositions and meaning. It is the last of these that most concerns the writing of dialogue. In order to analyse meaning within speech, we must define aspects both intentional (what the speaker is trying to achieve with the speech act) and conventional (what is commonly understood as being meant by the speech act). I would contend that, in the pursuit of directing the player’s attention, game writing has a tendency to over-clarify both of these aspects, and that an opportunity for play might exist in the interplay between them, and perhaps even in their muddying.
Sparkling Dialogue: A Masterclass (Jon Ingold)
One of many talks and articles written by the lead developer of British game studio Inkle, this one focuses on simple techniques to sharpen up game dialogue.
In his analysis of an excerpt from an Assassin’s Creed game, Ingold makes some gentle criticism of the similarity between the lines – in order to hammer home a few crucial pieces of information, the writer essentially repeats the same line three times. It doesn’t take a huge leap to see some of Austin and Searle in Ingold’s thinking. The dialogue in Assassin’s Creed is locutionary, with its intention almost entirely bound up in its content. The result is dialogue full of information but devoid of subtext and drama.
Ingold also outlines his own writing approach, which largely consists of three dialogue propositions: accepting, rejecting or deflecting. He maps these to three player types (those who prefer to dig deeper, those who want to get to the point, and those who want to disrupt narrative), but also to what he has found to be historically useful in writing dramatic game dialogue, namely that ensuring every player choice is in direct relation to the previous line of dialogue increases narrative engagement. The other upside to writing in this mindset is that if any programming needs to reference dialogue choices in terms of ‘attitude’, half the work of categorising them is already done!
Instant Acting (Jeremy Whelan)
One of my favourite books on actor technique, this connects elegantly with Ingold’s suggestion of ‘accepting, rejecting and deflecting.’ Whelan maintains that every action on stage (and indeed in life) can be broken down into three reactions – being ‘impelled’ towards someone or something; being ‘repelled’ away from it, or being ‘compelled’ to stay still in relation to it. By slowing down rehearsal (using a technique involving the recording and playback of spoken lines), actors can discover just how much they are impelled / repelled / compelled by each line they say and hear, and so uncover deeper emotions.
While Ingold supposes that certain types of players will ‘tend’ towards particular options (and hence that always writing these three can subtly ensure engagement across all player profiles), Whelan might contend that a player’s choice would always be contingent on what the line meant to them in that moment, and that creating the space for that reading to be fully felt might allow for a deeper, more considered, and more varied player response.
The Actor and the Target (Declan Donnellan) / Actions, The Actors’ Thesaurus (Marina Caldarone & Maggie Lloyd-Williams)
Declan Donnelan’s manual for actors defines that everything a character does (including what they say) is always in relation to another character’s perception of them. We never ‘see’ other people; rather, we see the image of ourselves that they see, projected back at us, and our egos are in a constant battle to change that image.
Underpinning this work is Max Stafford-Clarke’s technique of ‘actioning.’ Actioning is the process of applying a transitive verb to the delivery of a line of dialogue, referencing both the speaker and the target. For example, a line might sound very differently read with the action ‘I frighten you’ than if it were read with the action ‘I console you,’ yet both might be perfectly legitimate readings of that line. Each action choice creates a new context for performers to react to; the process of actioning suggests agreeing during rehearsal on a pattern of actions to be performed every night. The actions chosen might usefully connect to the theme of the play as well, to provide subconscious emotional and thematic prompts to its audience.
The reason The Actor and the Target is such a seminal manual is because it helps an actor to simplify and clarify what they’re doing when they’re not talking. By specifying what they hope to achieve, and the verb by which they go about trying to achieve it, they open themselves up to the possibility of success (‘felicity’) – or failure (‘infelicity’) – lying in the other actor’s line. Games have rarely engaged with this suspenseful moment between choices; indeed, contemporary titles still struggle with what to do with character animations while waiting for player input, resulting in a ‘waiting at a bus stop’ feel during more fully animated games.
Towards Expressive Input for Character Dialogue in Digital Games (Nick Junius, Michael Mateas & Noah Wardrip-Fruin)
This paper, written by Masters students at UC Santa Cruz, reviews traditional game dialogue inputs and compares them to the work of performance theorists Konstantin Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht, as well as the traditional Japanese noh theatre, in order to identify avenues for designing dialogue inputs that allowed for greater expression.
The writers share my puzzlement that players, more often than not, are cast in the role of the writers and directors of dialogue scenes, rather than as actors playing a role. Of particular interest to me was their proposition surrounding animation – that, given the advances in procedural techniques, it would not be difficult to have animation responding to different types of Stanislavksian emotional ‘energy’ given off by players due to the quality of their input, in order to create a truly responsive scene.
Takeaways
This research led me towards some clearer definitions of how I would like to represent or explore Austin’s work in a game. I would like to:
- Open up the ‘illocutionary space’ as an arena for play.
- Reassess the importance of ‘plot’ and ‘progression’ in making a player feel like part of a dialogue.
- Increase player sensitivity to the proximity and energy of their ‘partner,’ using ‘impel / repel / compel’ and ‘accept / reject / deflect’ as rubrics.
- Encourage the player to (either consciously or subconsciously) define the effect they would like to have on their ‘partner’, and find an emotional reaction in whether the partner response is in line with or opposed to that effect.
- Experiment with a more sensitive and expressive system than ‘clicking.’
With these objectives in mind, I can begin work on the game proper.