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I've recently been reading many articles on game design and a recurring question is that of making conversations in game mean as much as the killing. Giving the player real tools to have a meaningful conversation with real outcomes.

And so I've been pondering various ways of making conversations into a core game mechanic, rather than a side to action.

Traditional approaches to the problem:

Dialogue trees - The prevailing mechanic for interactive conversation. Choose one of a number of responses and see where it goes. This bores me and I never get a sense that I'm affecting any change with my choices. And I dont like how static these conversations usually are; i.e staring at one guys face for half an hour in Fallout3, or standing round for 15 minutes in Mass Effect.



Dialogue based upon items you have or clues you've discovered - Like in Broken sword. I prefer this to dialogue trees. There are many similarities, but I feel a sense of achievement in going off into the world, discovering something and coming back to an NPC and using what I have to progress the conversation and plot.

No interaction - Like in most games. Sometimes it works very well. Concise cutscenes set the scene well. Taking power away from the player makes the job of the game developer much simpler, therefore they're more likely to do a better job. Can be boring though, and can detract from the action if they're too long. And game scripts tend to be worse than movie scripts, so cutscenes end up being crappy versions of more superior Hollywood efforts.

New Approaches?

Well, this is where you come in. Any brilliant ideas? Could you have a game thats just conversation and make it as thrilling as Bayonetta.

A couple to get the ball rolling.

In the style of turn based RPG combat - You have a little drop down menu with a set of moves, maybe theres some time pressure for you to complete actions. Learn abilities such as charm, or threatening and try to 'beat' your opponent in the conversation. Pursuasion, interrogation for information etc. Not quite sure how thiswould handle more casual conversation.

Natural language - i.e entering via keyboard or headset whatever you want to say. Not a new idea, and personally I dont believe this would be a great mechanic until AI is advanced enough to handle not only conversation, but complex social interaction. Sometimes it could give the player too much freedom and not direct them enough towards their goal.

Based on shooting mechanics? -... dont know how this would work.

Any thoughts or ideas? What are your favourite games that implement dialogue well, and how'd they achieive it?

I've been pondering a new game mechanic for my 'big' project at the moment.
I always thought that mass effect made one fatal flaw in it's conversation system. I would like the wheel to remain but you only use the analogue stick to select the response you want. When the NPC has finished his sentence, it automatically chooses the highlighted response. I figured, most people don't wait around for a couple of minutes trying to figure out what response would benefit them the best, but say things more impulsively and dynamically. As long as you give enough information before the wheel comes up, rather than in the last sentence(in case they miss the vital information they are trying to respond to), then they should have enough time to formulate an impulsive response and still take in the information.
I'll try this out in a quick mock up within my engine to see if it will work, the writing might have to be quite clever as to not put vital bits of information in the final words of the last sentence just so they clearly know what they are responding to and can then make an impulsive response.
I think the problem with some of your ideas is that they seem like they would detract from the dialogue itself. If you are trying to have a unique game mechanic for dialogue, you have to make sure that the mechanic itself doesn't overshadow what your characters are trying to say. If they are too busy trying to navigate complex menu's or are under too much of a time pressure to get a response they may not catch all the information and as a result, lose focus in the storyline.


I think having this kind of thing as an option is bad, maybe just change dialogue options based on stats hidden behind the screen.

While I was writing this, I had a brainwave. Maybe there could be a node based response system where you connect up lines of responses (kismet style). Not sure how you'd do this on the fly, maybe just have a scrolling guitar hero style bar at the bottom where the dialogue rolls on while you dynamically connect up lines on the fly. Maybe even a score at the end based on your responses and how much information you managed to retrieve.

I do believe though, that having certain game mechanics for dialogue should only be used sparingly, like my node based idea. The idea was to have it as an interrogation 'mini game' and just have a more simple conversation system for story telling, having a big blown conversation dynamic all of the time might wear a little thin after a while.

Emily Short has written a great deal of very important stuff on this topic. Have a look here and elsewhere on her website. This is specifically about how to do conversation in the context of Interactive Fiction (i.e., text games), but the principles are the same.

The fundamental question, really, is whether you want a system of pre-programmed questions and responses, or one where characters actually construct their own dialogue. The former is obviously simpler and more traditional, and will usually be implemented as a "tree" - although of course such trees can be very complex if you take the time to make them so. With that route, you're basically looking at some variant of the Mass Effect system, which I think is the best version. The alternative, where dialogue is written on the fly, is obviously much harder but more interesting. I think a way to tackle this might be to start with the concept of knowledge. What does each character know? You might think in terms of topics or objects that are found in the game. Each topic or object has a number of categories (location, ownership, history, etc.). Now think in terms of a three-dimensional table that plots topic, category, and character. Each box contains a tick (the character knows that fact) or a cross (the character doesn't know it). For example, you might have Knife (topic), Location (category), and Janitor (character). If he knows where the knife is, that box will contain a tick.

Now you can think about how conversation could work. You might allow the player to choose a question type, which would correspond to the categories. For example, "Where is the...?". She could also choose an object to ask about, such as "the knife". Result: you ask the janitor where the knife is. If he knows where it is, he will tell you. If he doesn't, he won't.

Now that system is relatively simple. But it could be expanded upon to become more interesting. For example, it would be easy to add the ability to tell NPCs things. If the janitor doesn't know where the knife is, you could tell him. The array containing everyone's knowledge would be updated, and from then on, he knows. NPCs could tell each other things. Suppose you tell the janitor where the knife is, and then the supervisor comes in. The janitor now tells the supervisor where the knife is. It's easy to imagine interesting game situations arising from this sort of thing. It is usual in games to make conversation between NPCs entirely scripted, but with this system, you could make NPC-NPC conversation follow the same system as PC-NPC conversation, and that is more interesting.

Or even better: what if, instead of just a tick or a cross in the knowledge array, you have more detailed information. For example, under Knife -> Location -> Janitor, you might have "in the cupboard". This is interesting because now you have the ability to give characters wrong information! Perhaps the knife is actually in the shed. Ask the janitor where it is and he will give you misinformation. Now we have the possibility of correcting NPCs' information - or, even more interestingly, of lying to them. Lie to the janitor about the location of the knife and perhaps he will pass the misinformation on to the supervisor. What happens then?

You could add complexity by adding additional tags to each entry in the knowledge array. You could, for example, have each entry contain not only the information itself ("in the cupboard", in this case), but also how the character learned this information (who told him, or whether he saw it for himself), whether the character is inclined to be truthful about this information if asked about it, and so on. In our example, perhaps the janitor tells the supervisor that the knife is in the cupboard, when in fact it is in the shed. The supervisor goes to the cupboard to find it and is angry at the janitor. The janitor protests that the PC told him it was in the cupboard. The supervisor goes to have a word with the PC!

This kind of system is interesting not simply because of the complexity of beliefs and behaviour that it allows but because it gets us away from the "player asks NPC question - NPC responds" model of conversation which has become so cliched in games. Sometimes it seems like every NPC is just a sort of encyclopaedia on legs, ready to dish out endless information in response to the player's endless questions. What is really needed is a conversation system that will allow NPCs to take the initiative and behave in believable ways. I think the system I've just suggested might work as a basis for starting to put something like that together.

I have a "big" project on the back-burner that uses conversation (or hopefully it will ).
My game idea was that you are a Mafia boss and you talk via the keyboard, it would be a totally text-based game.
The reason I wanted keyboard input is that I thought about the secrecy and treachery of the Mafia, and using predefined options seemed to take that feeling away.

Okay so how would it work?...
All NPC's have three attributes concerning you: they are Love, Fear and Respect.
They also have three mental attributes: Loyalty, Bravery and Intelligence.

The way they would talk to you would depend on these attributes.
Simple things like saying "how are you?" to people would put them in a better mood with you.
As I write this I see how crazily ambitious this is but how cool would it be if you had NPCs that lied to you and tried to trick you into an ambush!

Like Oolite said, I got carried away with looking at how to make conversation a fun mechanic and forgot about the importance of dialogue in the first place. I think the ideas based on the Mass Effect wheel are improvements. I certainly found that whilst playing the game I'd select my option as quickly as possible, trying not to labour too hard over my decisions.

But I do think that there is a fundamental flaw with the conversation mechanic in Mass Effect and other games that employ the dialogue tree. Plotinus summed it up well by descibing NPCs in such games as "just a sort of encyclopaedia on legs". I like the idea of giving NPCs knowledge that they can use or share. I think that is a great way to make conversation a real tool to affect change in the game world and not simply use it to drive plot.

I suppose thats it. Conversation is commonly used only to give the player more knowledge of the plot or characters, rarely does it work in reverse. The player is rarely giving the game information that it can act on. The only thing the player ever tells game characters is "i did that quest for you" or "i killed that guy" or "i have enough money to buy that awesome sword now".

I agree with OBese87 that NPCs that could plan and carry out cunning schemes against you would be crazy awesome. No scripting, just based on how you interact with them etc. But then, thats becoming a simulation of human intelligence which is somewhat far off, and some might argue that there's no point developing AI to such levels for games when you can just play against other people!

I like the idea of giving NPCs knowledge that they can use or share too. I have an idea on how I would approach implementing a physical transaction of transferring `knowledge` between NPCs.

I would use pathfinding and collision. When a NPC receives new info, their goal will be to locate other NPCs and transfer the info. The transaction could be viewed by the player as a conversation bubble in which questions and answers between NPCs. Perhaps, Player/NPC convo could be based on Questions/Answers and Statements.

This mechanism would provide NPC dialog with a purpose and path goals to keep NPCs moving busily about. This mechanism may also provide the Player incentive to talk to NPC to gather new info or insert new info into the game world.