PAX East 2011: Discussing Interactive Drama And Dialogue As Gameplay

Indie writers, PhD researchers, and AAA writers gathered together at a PAX East panel today to agree almost completely on the state of writing in games and their hopes for its future. The focus for the panel was not dialogue as a feature of games, but dialogue as the game itself, like the famous insult swordfighting scene in Monkey Island. Moderator Jonathon Myers, writer and co-founder of Reactive Games, kicked off the panel by asking the panelists what they thought was the proper place of conversations in games. For Daniel Erickson, writer on Dragon Age Origins and the upcoming The Old Republic MMO, conversation is one of the key ways games can capture the majority of real-life conflicts that are verbal, rather than physical. Creating conversation in games should be as fun as any of the more visceral aspects of games, he said. Erickson said he didn't want what's often considered the holy grail of in-game conversations -- an AI that can talk and act like a human -- for the same reason he didn’t want a real fight. In-game conversations need to be stylized, he said, to create something that feels more powerful than reality, just like virtual combat does. Jeff Orkin, an industry veteran from games like No One Lives Forever II and F.E.A.R., talked about his PhD project, Improviso, a game that asks players to control actors in a low-budget sci-fi film in order to create a massive database of responses. His goal, he said, was “to have a seamless interweaving of physical imagery and dialogue.” Aaron Reed, representing the interactive fiction contingent on the panel, started with a passage from Emily Short, who thinks of dialogue as a means for players to take on a role. In this model, conversation ins't just an aspect of or excuse for gameplay, but a personally motivated process that puts the player in the chief narrative role. “For dialogue to have gameplay it has to have rules, a goal, and tools to achieve it,” said Dan Tanguay of Vicarious Visions. For him, the small things were the most necessary. Conversation trees should tell players when they're on the path they wanted, he said, and include failure states that aren’t serious enough to turn the player off completely. Martin Van Velsen, Senior Research Engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, also shied away from the concept of realistic conversation systems. Rather than creating computers that think, which he compared to making “a boat that can swim,” he felt that the genre conventions that might seem limiting were in fact helpful to telling a story. Orkin expressed his frustration with how dialogue systems are separated from other forms of gameplay. He wished for a system that let him interrupt combat with dialogue, such as a plea for mercy. But Erickson defended the traditional separation, likening the different gameplay systems to different emotional states. For Erickson, and the rest of Bioware, agency is the most important thing. He mentioned Heavy Rain as an example of a game that keeps players feeling involved and participating even when they aren’t making life-altering decisions. In fact, Erikson said the reason Bioware games often have a very basic, conventional plot is because the player has to understand the choices they have to make in order to have agency. Complicated plots indicate that the plot is important, not the player, he said. “Self expression and the ability for players to feeling like they are making decisions are more important than the things that we, as writers, think are awesome,” Erickson said, adding that the mere introduction of player agency eliminates all of that. “We always talk about when there's going to be the Citizen Kane of games,” he continued. ”There’s never going to be a Citizen Kane for ballet either. It’s a dumb concept. It’s a totally different genre of storytelling. Our biggest advantages is player agency so it’s what we have to put first.”