issue 22 // volume 42

Flawed by Design: Use your words

> Chopping down dialogue trees

Adam Tatelman
Arts Editor

 

M any video games concern
themselves with creating

an avatar for the player, usually
by offering some level of
customization in the areas

of character appearance and
skill specialization. Most

often, these games will allow
the player to choose between
different dialogue options when
in conversation with other
characters. On paper, this seems
like a great idea—giving the
player a wide range of potential
responses allows them to
further shape their character
and the surrounding narrative.
However, this is often handled
in a stunningly amateurish

way, counter-intuitively
wrecking player immersion
through lack of clarity.

The idea of dialogue trees is
actually older than most people
think. Isometric top-down
RPG’s like the original Fallout,
Baldur’s Gate, and Planescape
Torment offered many and varied
dialogue choices in virtually every
interaction. This was much easier
to accomplish because these
games mostly used text boxes
instead of voice work. The text
boxes had room to show exactly

what words would come out of
the player character’s mouth for
each option. This allowed players
to weigh their options very
carefully, and select their options
according to the situation.

The problem with modern
dialogue trees in fully-voiced
RPG titles like Mass Effect, Alpha
Protocol, or Fallout 4 is that
there are no longer text boxes
to show players exactly what
each response will be. Instead,
players are left to intuit the
general tone of the response
through general one-sentence
summaries. This often leads to
players misunderstanding the
content of an option, which
results in an out-of-character
action or sentiment that runs
totally contrary to the character
archetype the player is trying to
imitate.

Say you are roleplaying a
married soldier. You miss your
wife, and you are lonely. You
strike up a friendship with a
soldier of the opposite sex,
choosing the dialogue options
you think sound most friendly.
To your surprise, the other soldier
thinks you're hitting on her. You
hadn't meant for that, so you
choose the dialogue option that
reads “I’m married,” only for your
character to call the other soldier
a trollop and tell her to go trolling

elsewhere, along with a bunch
of screed you never intended to
say. Now that character will hate
you for the rest of the game. Poor
communication kills, it seems.
Another immersion-breaking
fault found in real-time, fully
voiced dialogue exchanges is the
way characters stare blankly into
space while waiting for player
input to cue the next line, This
looks very robotic, even though
these are supposed to be human
beings in conversation. Having
the characters do stuff while
they talk would go a long way
towards making them seem

For the love of the craft

> John Vaillant talks non-fiction

Adam Tatelman
Arts Editor

 

n February 23, local
Vancouver wordsmith

John Vaillant met with creative
writing students in Douglas
College’s Aboriginal Gathering
Place to discuss the writing and
publishing of his award winning
books The Golden Spruce, The
Tiger, and The Jaguar’s Children.

After a brief introduction,
Vaillant discussed the research
that went into the writing of his
first novel, The Golden Spruce.
He was inspired to write the
story after hearing about Grant
Hadwin, a logger who cut down
the Kiidk’yaas—a sitka spruce
tree with golden needles—in
the Haida Gwaii archipelago.
Hadwin had intended to make
an anti-logging statement,
but the tree was of special
significance to the Haida people.
Although he was arrested for his
crime, he later disappeared.

Vaillant visited the Haida
Gwaii people to ask permission
to tell the story on their behalf,
and he was invited to take part
ina pole raising ritual in honour

of a fallen Haida tribe member.
Vaillant included the funeral
ritual in The Golden Spruce,
and made his description of
ita selected reading during
the talk. The reading was very
engaging, offering an excellent
sample of Vaillant’s imagistic
writing style, as well as his
concise and poetic prose.

Such writing may seem
effortless when read, but Vaillant
stressed that this is always
the result of many revisions.

He reportedly completed his
first draft of The Tiger in six
weeks, but it went through

two years of revisions before it
was finally published. For this
reason, Vaillant emphasized the
importance of staying passionate
about the work. “The readers
can sense your boredom,” he
said, “and they can sense your
excitement, too. There’s nothing
worse than getting a hundred
pages into a story and giving up.”

Vaillant also spoke about The
Tiger in the context of writing
non-fiction. As the story was
based ona series of man-eating
tiger attacks in eastern Russia, he
took it upon himself to create the
most detailed rendition possible,

going above and beyond merely
seeking out documentaries and
historical accounts. He travelled
to Primorsky Krai, the actual
site of the attacks, to experience
the environment personally, as
well as to seek out friends of
the deceased for secondhand
information. He went so far
as to find out what phase the
moon was in at the time of the
attacks, just to be sure that a
single line of prose about the
crescent moon was accurate.
Despite his evident
dedication to storytelling,
Vaillant remained quite humble
and self-effacing when asked
about his thorough method. “It’s
almost a kind of pathology,” he
said. “I mean, why else would you
spend eight hours ona story? Is
your own company really that
intriguing? I think of it almost as
a birth defect that I’ve managed
to turn into something positive.”
John Vaillant’s most
recent novel, The Jaguar’s
Children, was released in 2015.
It received similar acclaim to
his other novels, including
a nomination for the Rogers
Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

more believable. The soldiers, for
instance, might be cleaning their
weapons during conversation.
This sense of movement can keep
the characters from being static.
The difficulty of writing
dynamic characters who are
subject to the will of the player
is their inevitable lack of
consistency. This can easily result
in nonsensical character arcs.
Making an open-ended free-
roaming RPG can kill pacing
to begin with. Having a totally
ambiguous main character who
can flip-flop on any subject at any
time makes it seem as if he has no

arts // no. 7

 

character at all, rendering most
of the plot an exercise in futility
because it must carry on to the
end regardless of the supposed
input the player has.

This is not to say that all
storytelling in gaming should
be linear. There is certainly a
place for customizable character
arcs in gaming. However, they
could be much more functional
if some of the old elements were
reintroduced, allowing more
specificity in character choice
rather than forcing players
to guess their way through
generalities.

Screenshot from Mass Effect 2