Give players an Insta-Pass to Your NPCs' personalities.
This chapter
focuses on making single lines of dialogue by minor NPCs interesting.
NPC dialogue often prompts action, sometimes gives crucial information, sometimes adds color,[1] and sometimes, of course, it performs two or three of these functions at once.
No matter what the function of the dialogue, giving the speaker one or two Traits can make that dialogue a lot more interesting.
Let's see this concept applied to different types NPC dialogue.
Say you're playing a game set in WWII. You and the troops have been battling your way across Europe. The going has been rough. To get health points, you've got to eat the slop that passes for food in your rag-tag regiment. (The war's been dragging on, and both the tent lodgings and the food look progressively less appealing.)
Let's look at some the dialogue of the Cook, a minor NPC. First we'll critique a weak example, and then consider how it could be made interesting.
You approach the Cook, who's serving food. He says:
COOK: Here's your food.
You might say that you'd never write a line like that. Maybe not. To my ears, however, far too much NPC dialogue hovers at that level of artistry.
How can you lure people who have become accustomed to hearing writing in films and television into your game, if they're going to have to suffer through lines like this?
I call this kind of writing “robo-speak,” because the dialogue might as well have been spoken by a robot. It reveals no discernable personality by the speaker. Have you ever met someone who has no detectable personality? Probably not. Thus, robo-speak breaks emotional immersion, because it's not realistic.
Believe it or not, I have actually encountered such a person. She's an elderly member of my extended family. In my entire life, I have never once heard her offer an opinion on any subject or color a sentence with any kind of opinion or slant. If you told me that she was a Pod Person, I'd probably feel relieved to finally have an explanation.
The bottom line, though, is that she's hard to be around, because there's no “there” there.
So NPCs who only talk in “robo-speak”:
Won't appeal to people raised on the better writing often found in films and television.
Seem unrealistic and, therefore, break the flow of emotional immersion.
Aren't likeable. No one wants to hang around a lifeless person.
Let's see if the Cook's dialogue can be improved upon.
You walk up to the Cook to get your meal.
COOK (concerned): They said you were dead.
At least he has some emotion; he expressed concern for you.
Or:
COOK (re: the food): Eat it -- before it eats you.
He's sarcastic.
He has now shown at least one Trait. Let's see if we can give the Cook two Traits:
COOK (pleasant): It's probably chicken.
Here he's both Pleasant and Ironic. Another example:
COOK (apologetic): It's bad, I know. But hey, at least you're alive to eat it.
In this example, he has two different Traits. He's Caring with a sincere desire to feed the men well, and he's a bit Cynical.
You probably noticed that I needed to extend the length of the dialogue in the last example, possibly to an unacceptable degree, to get in the second Trait. The more Emotioneering you cram into a single line of dialogue, in general, the harder it is to keep that line brief.
Things get more complicated when the dialogue needs to not only add color, but to also prompt the player to take action. Most NPC dialogue prompts player action or gives the player important information.
Let's return to our Cook. First we'll feed him some weak dialogue, then add some technique to it.
You walk up to the Cook.
COOK: I heard the Captain wants to see you.
True, you know you need to seek out the Captain, perhaps to get your next mission, but the dialogue is amateur.
Approach that Cook again.
COOK: Captain says go see him so he can kill you.
Or:
COOK: Captain's been by four times. Looking for you.
Or, after you've done something heroic:
COOK (in an admiring tone): Captain's says go see him. Pick up a medal or two.
Again, you notice that keeping better dialogue short is tough when it needs to provide the double function of prompting action and staying interesting.
These are the kinds of tradeoffs the game writer must weigh. In a game, short dialogue is almost always preferable to longer pieces of dialogue.
Often NPCs provide the function of supplying information. This dialogue can be quite dry and wooden. Of course, making the dialogue interesting is key.
One way is to “split up” the information so that, to understand what's needed to be known, the player must talk to more than one NPC.
This could be made even more natural if the player isn't just wandering around in a room or other environment, talking to one NPC after another. Instead, pieces of the needed information can be seeded into the game beginning earlier on, with the final NPC supplying the last piece.
Of course, this kind of detective work has several additional advantages:
It might allow the player to hear different points of view on the same subject. These multiple points of view make the game's world richer and is a World Induction Technique (see Chapter 2.18).
It means that the dialogue from the NPCs doesn't have to simply convey all the information, thus leaving more room for color. This adds to the atmospheric emotions in the game.
It can be used to create plot twists and missions. For example, the player might learn that he or she needs to go to a different location where the rest of the required information can be found. Or the player might need to go on a mission to retrieve an item he or she must trade with a particular NPC to get critical information. Or the player might realize that another, more urgent task must be handled immediately, interrupting the task he or she thought needed attention.
And of course, ideally, information will also be given out in all sorts of nonverbal ways as well. If the hospital is regularly being robbed of its medicines, you don't need to discover this from an NPC. You could turn the corner at night to see two men coming out a back door with boxes in their hands, and tail them.
Combining these kinds of approaches with interesting NPC dialogue can contribute to a rich game experience and a feeling that the player is both discovering the plot and moving it forward amidst a world of life-like characters.
Some game designers and writers justify their poor NPC dialogue by claiming that most games have weak dialogue and, therefore, gamers won't object.
Sometimes, doing the writing is considered the “fun part,” and those in the game studio don't want to turn it over to someone who might do a more professional job. This would be fine if they took the time to study and master the art of writing themselves—but the state of game writing lets us know this has rarely been the case.
Sometimes the justification is that weak doesn't matter, because the voice actors will add the emotion in the way they pronounce the lines. The truth is, there's only a limited amount a talented actor can do with poor dialogue.[2]
People who hold fast to these beliefs and behaviors are hurting the chances for good buzz and good press, and thus are restricting game sales and costing their publisher money.
It would be almost impossible to make every line of NPC dialogue interesting, especially when it needs to prompt player action. Sometimes it's okay, and even quite necessary, to have the NPC say colorless such lines as: “Over there!” or “Duck!” or “Drop the gun!” or “Back again?” In such situations, you just have to let the voice actor bring as much life as he or she can to the line. After all, in times of emergency or in urgent situations, people speak much less colorfully.
In other, less danger-packed situations, the ideal to strive for is to make NPC dialogue interesting, even when the NPC is giving crucial information to or prompting action by the player.
Now that this chapter has shown some of the challenges in writing NPC dialogue, and hopefully some of the solutions, let's complicate matters more (in a good way) in the next chapter, where we'll look at Dialogue Deepening Techniques.
[1] By dialogue that adds color, I mean dialogue that gives flavor to a scene or a person, and that possibly evokes emotion, but the dialogue doesn't prompt the player to take any specific action.
[2] Even still, what a good actor can do with weak—or well-written—dialogue shouldn't be minimized. Poor voice acting can annihilate emotional immersion by the player. Most developers have finally conceded that it's worth spending the money to hire pros.