Tips of Fingers, Tips of Tongues: Emulating Authentic Dialogue in Roleplaying Video Games
Stephanie Caskenette
The Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montréal October 2017
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of a Master’s of Arts (Communication Studies). © Stephanie Caskenette, 2017
1 Table of Contents
Abstract ...... 3
Acknowledgements ...... 4
Introduction ...... 5
Chapter 1 – Game Feel and Other Methodological Considerations ...... 22
Chapter 2 – Dialogue Systems in Roleplaying Games ...... 44
Chapter 3 –Evaluating Contemporary Dialogue Systems ...... 62
Chapter 4 – Designing Around Hardware Limitations ...... 77
Conclusion ...... 94
Works Cited ...... 99
Figures...... 111
2 Abstract
Dialogue systems are integral mechanics in roleplaying video games, as forms of worldbuilding that acknowledge player choice. Early conceptions of game dialogue in text adventure games let players type in whatever they want to say, in attempts to emulate true conversational fidelity. However, their rudimentary structures limit the possibility of direct and topical responses to typed input, breaking immersion within the game. Furthermore, consumer shifts in primary gaming platforms, from personal computers to dedicated video game consoles, influence how dialogue is designed within technological restraints. This thesis examines how video game dialogue effectively mimics conversations with the player while maintaining a sense of immersion despite platform limitations. An exploration of critical game design factors, including the balance between gameplay and narrative, reveals how dialogue systems historically shift from freeform designs to more scripted structures. Though a consideration and application of commonly-used game design strategies in other development areas, this thesis promotes innovation in dialogue system design, offering new potentials for play.
Les systèmes de dialogue sont des mécanismes intégraux qui reconnaissent les choix du joueur dans les jeux de rôle en tant que formes de worldbuilding. Les premières conceptions du dialogue dans les jeux d'aventure textuels permettent aux joueurs d’entrer ce qu’ils veulent, afin d'imiter la fidélité d’une conversation. Cependant, leurs structures rudimentaires limitent la possibilité de réponses directes et topiques à l'entrée dactylographiée, brisant l'immersion dans le jeu. De plus, les changements de consommation dans les plates-formes de jeu primaires depuis les ordinateurs personnels jusqu'aux consoles de jeux vidéo dédiées influencent la façon dont le dialogue est conçu dans le cadre des contraintes technologiques. Cette thèse examine comment le dialogue dans le jeu vidéo imite efficacement les conversations avec le joueur tout en conservant un sentiment d'immersion malgré les limites de la plate-forme. Une exploration des facteurs critiques de la conception du jeu, y compris l'équilibre entre le gameplay et le récit, révèle comment les systèmes de dialogue se sont historiquement éloignés des conceptions libres vers des structures plus scénarisées. Bien qu'il s'agisse d'une considération et d’une application de stratégies de conception de jeu couramment utilisées dans d'autres domaines de développement, cette thèse encourage l'innovation dans la conception de systèmes de dialogue, offrant de nouveaux potentiels de jeu.
3 Acknowledgements
To begin, I cannot be grateful enough for the unwavering support of Professor Jonathan
Sterne. This thesis owes itself in its entirety to his never-ending patience and guidance over the past two years. Truly, none of this could have been done without him, and I am incredibly fortunate to have such a wonderful supervisor. I would also like to extend my thanks to several other faculty members: Professors Becky Lentz, Thomas Lamarre, Biella Coleman, and Yuri
Furuhata. Their seminars challenged my perspectives and research in ways that I regularly revisit outside of the classroom. Moving provinces to attend McGill has been an endlessly rewarding experience, and I now look back on the experience as one of my best decisions thus far. In addition, I thank McGill’s Art History and Communications department, the College of Arts, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support.
From my first exposure to my AHCS cohort during an orientation gathering in August
2016, I have felt welcomed by my Montreal family and enjoyed the wonderful friendship of
Lindsay Corbett and Kyrstin Felts, whose passion and laughter made this experience so unforgettable. I am also lucky to enjoy the presence of the video game development community of Montreal, with groups such as Pixelles allowing me to attend the 2017 Game Developers
Conference. Most importantly, thank you to my family back in Ontario, my parents and dog
Bella. I hope they are proud of me, or at least are now slightly convinced that my youth was not entirely wasted playing video games.
4 Introduction
This is Belwit Square. Its many historic and picturesque buildings are obscured by a
cloud of orange smoke.
>go south
You can’t see well enough to find your way out.
>get down
That sentence isn’t one I recognize.
>go back
I don’t know the word “back.”
>what
There was no verb in that sentence!
>quit
Your score is 0 of a possible 600, in 15 moves. This puts you in the class of Charlatan.12
The above transcript comes from my first playthrough of the challenging 1985 text adventure game Spellbreaker,3 Prior to high fidelity video game graphics with characters flirting with the uncanny valley boundary, prior to rich voice acting and full orchestral scores, prior to any type of controllable avatar walking around, text adventures are considered some of the first roleplaying video games.4 To some, the two components of the phrase text adventure stand at
1 Infocom, Spellbreaker, Apple II (Infocom, 1985). 2 Transcribed excerpts from text adventure games use a “>” to indicate the player’s input. Following this, lines without this are prompts from the game. 3 Throughout this work I use both “text adventures” and “text adventure games” to refer to the same genre of games. 4 Earlier video games include arcade experiences such as Pong, whereas the games I include in my scope are personal video games played within the home.
5 odds with each other, akin to a cheesy Reading Rainbow-eqsue campaign promoting literacy as cool and hip to young teens. Those accustomed to action-packed gunplay of modern shooter video games can find themselves restless at the thought of reading being the primary component of a game. However, text adventure games represent the potential of interactivity and sociality with a digital other during a period when such concepts seemed futuristic and unattainable.
Personal computers in their infancy were used to receive input, but with this software it could actually talk back. Through fantastical scenarios, these games mimic conversations, delivered by a technology that was programed and perceived as impartial and impersonal. Despite the constraints of computers in the early 1980s, text adventures made the most of existing technological capabilities and convinced the player they were listened to, and it was exciting.5
The typical gameplay experience of a classical text adventure game is summed up as follows. A player reads a passage on a computer monitor describing the surroundings of a fictional in-game space and any contextual information, such as tools within sight or obstacles blocking a path forward. For example, consider the opening passage of the 1976 game Adventure
(later renamed to Colossal Cave Adventure) by Will Crowther, for the PDP-10 mainframe computer:
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a
forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.6
Beneath the text is a flashing cursor indicating the option to input text, similar to those in conventional word processing programs (fig. 1). The player, using the computer’s keyboard, types in their desired action in as few words as possible. The computer immediately returns an
5 Krystina Madej, Interactivity, Collaboration, and Authoring in Social Media (Cham: Springer, 2016), 49-54. 6 Will Crowther, Adventure, PDP-10 (Crowther, 1976).
6 appropriate response, and a new description follows. This gameplay loop continues across various tasks and puzzles until the game is completed (or the player gives up). Many text adventure games do not have a “game over” screen, and so the player can potentially spend long periods of time glaring at their monitor in frustration over a puzzle blocking their path and overall progress.7 Reviews of Spellbreaker classify it as an “expert” level game, with one from
Computer Gaming World claiming “when Infocom said that [this] would be hard, they weren’t kidding.”8 The isolated nature of video gaming during this time offered few community-based resources for bypassing difficult challenges, save for video game magazines offering hints and tips for popular releases, and clever peers who had already beaten the game.
While later text adventure games feature accompanying images and graphical user interfaces (GUI), the core component of this genre is text, in both typed input and read forms.
Rudimentary ASCII illustrations offer a barebones and rough representation of various scenes, but lush descriptions of fantasy scenarios paint far more vivid pictures in the player’s mind.9
Creators of these games aim “to find a way of turning imaginary worlds lodged in the writer’s head unto virtual worlds lodged in the computer’s memory.”10 The interactivity of a computer interface then transforms static descriptions into playgrounds of creative problem-solving.
Adventure and its peers became the first to offer the player the freedom of exploration in a world that gradually reveals itself room-by-room; they are, as Jasper Juul identifies, “games of
7 This claim comes from a long history of playing complex text adventure games and a stubbornness in refusing to seek out clues or solutions online, eventually roping in friends to assist in usually fruitless efforts. 8 Scorpia, "Spellbreaker," Computer Gaming World, March 1986, 12. 9 By ASCII art, I refer to imagery created from printed characters in any text editor. While they can be elaborate, here is a simple sword as an example: ()==[:::::::::::::> 10 Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (London: Penguin books, 1993), 155.
7 progression” in which players face obstacles in a virtual world that they must overcome.11 This fantasy space, created with only text, feels lived-in because of the narrator/computer “speaking” to the player, constituting a type of conversational loop of queries and responses.12 It represents a sociality not commonly seen from computers during this time, as well as a new form of entertainment. Edward Castronova goes as far to suggest that games were important to the early financial success of the personal computer, as it was easier to make sales through demonstrating engaged fun and leisure, rather than list technical explanations of how it functioned and being
“pummeled with numbers and bullet points.”13 David Sudnow’s 1983 account, contemporary to
Castronova’s scenario, agrees when he asks:
How could we not play these "games"? How could we not stand in awe of the computer
… ? How not to be enthralled by the lights, sounds, and colors, knowing they result from
the purest modes of human thought -- adding, subtracting, subdividing, and the like?14
The appeal of a new technology is not its initial improvement of one’s daily routine, but the sensations it has on our creativities and the potentials it has to affect future societal habits.
However, while the game narrator’s response to certain text input seems impressive, it is only to the terms of the programmer who wrote it, as it is not an organically formed phrase or the result of complex artificial intelligence algorithms. This is where my experience with
11 Jesper Juul, "The Open and the Closed: Game of Emergence and Games of Progression," in Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings, ed. Frans Mäyrä (Tampere: Tampere University Press). 12 For simplicity’s sake and to reiterate the importance of storytelling in creating believable game worlds, I am referring to the input-receiver-and-responder within text adventure games as the narrator from this point onwards. 13 Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 22-23. 14 David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 47.
8 Spellbreaker went awry. In many cases of early text adventure games, what the computer returns is not always contextually-appropriate, or even a response at all. This is because of the coding foundations of text adventure games, which are built around a basic text parser. To explain, when the player enters typed input, this string (a sequence of characters that may form words or phrases) is used to search through a database of input-and-response pairs of strings that the programmer has anticipated. If the entered string matches a listing, the computer returns the appropriate response. Otherwise, it sends back a null fallback statement, such as “I do not understand [string input]”. Passing the string “help” into the text adventure Zork receives the reply “You are dealing with a fairly stupid parser”; a charming self-awareness that at least acknowledges the system’s shortcomings.15
This relationship between the player and computer offers a glimpse into the original aspiration of such games. Book readers are widely seen as “breathing life unto the texts they read”, but to explore a fictional world within the tale itself (and to read through the transcript after playing) conveys fantastical immersive storytelling.16 In emulating a conversational experience with a simulated character (the all-knowing narrator guiding the player), its inspiration is more clear through tabletop role playing games (TRPGs). Such activities revolve around collaborative and conversational improvisation, as players tell a leading storyteller (the
Game Master) what actions they wish to perform in a world that is described through narration.
As later chapters show, early text adventure games wanted to emulate this direct dialogue, but faced restrictions in its implementation. Programmers can only predict so many different possible player inputs, and a game’s hardware limits the complexity of software functions. What
15 Infocom, Zork I, Apple II (Infocom, 1980). 16 J. Yellowlees Douglas, "What Hypertext Can Do that Print Narratives Cannot," Reader 28 (1992): 9.
9 emerges then, in the junction between idealized game design and restricted platform functionality, is the risk of immersion-breaking experiences confronting the player.
But video games today rarely, if ever, use text parsing as a mechanic; its relative obscurity is the very reason for my explanation of how text adventure games work in the first place. Game development and design decisions are influenced by several different factors. For one, the platform capabilities of a computer or a games console can prevent features, such as text parsers, from working as intended. Processing power and graphics capabilities influence what a game is capable of, and developers use various workarounds to disguise the constant negotiation that takes place between an idealized design ambition and the reality of technological limits.
Instead of parsing, contemporary interaction between a player and a game character is mostly done through a dialogue interface, which lets the player select from a series of predetermined options they wish to say. These encounters, called branching dialogues because they separate into branching paths, are similar in structure to choose-your-own-adventure books.17 Player input is prewritten and not manually typed in, which distances itself from notions of simulated conversions with narrators who were actually listening. In many combat video games in the home and arcade alike, players perform intricate combos with a flurry of calculated button presses, yet the complexities of dialogue and human interaction are limited to multiple- choice selection on a static UI screen. Branching dialogues are overwhelmingly the status quo of dialogue systems in contemporary games, but is that enough? Did the limitations of text parsing push innovation in a static mechanic into a forgotten corner?
While Adventure feature heavily within this work, I am not pursuing Adventure studies or even text adventure games studies. Instead, I work towards the realization of satisfying game feel
17 Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2014), 239.
10 when it comes to dialogue systems, using the concept of perfect conversational fidelity attempted by text adventure games as an idealized aspiration. Game feel, a term coined in writing by Steve
Swink but undoubtedly used in game development communities prior, is the culmination of all elements of a game, including input, aesthetics, and rules, creating an intangible and pleasurable experience.18 Likened to a music’s timbre or a meal’s flavor, it is a mostly abstract and invisible quality, but getting it right in a game is critical. More is described about game feel later but it is, at its core, the goal for a video game to be fun. How dialogue is handled in a game can affect game feel, as the mechanic must feel smooth and natural to control. But how is this possible when approaches to organic and immersive communication with game characters have become so far removed from initial TRPG inspirations?
I am interested in examining how video games can effectively communicate with a player, and emulate authentic interactive dialogues while maintaining good game feel. Such a topic involves a multifaceted consideration of the many elements of a video game, from their hardware platform, to the capabilities of the game software, to the broader design choices influenced by social contexts of what makes a game good. In this work, I argue that both the interactivity of TRPGs and the technological limitations of video game platforms directly influence the design of dialogue systems in video games. I examine existing debates that juxtapose ludology and narratology, conversations that have since expanded to broader cultural discourse within the video games media and the development of “game feel” as a concept. I explore the dialogue system’s earliest iterations and inspirations, and show how platform limitations guided their design to a more structured and scripted form. Finally, I suggest that the
18 Steve Swink, Game Feel: A Game Designers Guide to Virtual Sensation (Hoboken: CRC Press, 2014).
11 design of current dialogue systems require careful attention to several different worldbuilding elements that can benefit with a consideration of mechanics recalled in earlier text adventure games. Overall, I show that dialogue systems in video games have the potential for further innovation to offer new conceptions of play and smart design.
Within the past several years, narrative, worldbuilding, and storytelling have received increased attention from both the games industry and academia. Visual novels, for example, receive attention and praise in the popular press. Games are also more easily and commonly criticized for a poor story or subpar character development, reflecting that players care about such features. The increasing number of video game award ceremonies such as the British
Academy Game Awards and the Game Developers Conference Awards also include awards championing excellent writing in games, in addition to the Writers Guild of America and the
Canadian Video Game Writing Awards. Despite an outwards emphasis of actions in video games, words are critical to the playful experience. Smaller studios dedicated to interactive fiction stories, such as Inkle and Telltale Games, are blossoming and experiencing great commercial success. While some games excel at non-verbal storytelling, the ability to communicate with a fictional character makes a game world feel alive and offers endless variations in the design of encounters. Characters in games are not always enemies that the player has to defeat, they are often valuable allies that aid the player if approached.
However, dialogue systems remain relatively static in design, despite their earlier foundation from a mechanic that offers far more player interaction and immersion. Revisiting this mechanic and its design, through a lens of decades of progress in games development since its conception, offers potential for new methods of play and storytelling.
12 Important Terms
Like many disciplines within media studies and the broader humanities, the academic field of game design wears many hats and can address many different research objects: player or developer, front end or back end, textual analysis, genre analysis, historiography, graphics, audio, platform studies. From this, there are a few key terms that I focus on and deploy in my argumentation. My emphasis is less on the player experience with a completed product and more on the design process and the strategies used in creating successful game experiences.
Video Games
Mark J.P. Wolf, in breaking down the term shows the implicit and separate meanings of
“video games”. The “video” component refers to the analog image formed from pixels displayed on a cathode ray tube, a secondary platform to the game console in order to see what is being played. Wolf then defines a game as consisting of “a conflict, rules, player ability and some kind of valued outcome.”19 While straightforward definitions, the term put together invites ambitious descriptions that attempt to encompass the experiences that video games can bring, from the classic arcade game Pac Man to experimental virtual reality simulations. For my interests,
Wolf’s classification of games is enhanced with Jane McGonigal’s reading of the medium. In her view, video games are made of two elements: a type of storytelling that is also combined with puzzles and interactivity in order to progress.20 This latter part is most unique to games in that they “refuse player progression until certain actions have been completed in a particular order”;
19 Mark J. P. Wolf, The Medium of the Video Game (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 14. 20 Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (London: Vintage, 2012).
13 in contrast, a book never slams itself shut to a reader, and refuses to let them begin the next chapter unless they pass a test on character arcs or conflicts in the plot.21
In a physical sense, I treat a video game as a piece of software that is playable on an electronic device, that requires the player’s input to progress. While the etymology of the
“video” of “video game” comes from its aforementioned analog image origins, I expand this definition to its more common use in popular culture. Video games are played on video game consoles, like the Sega Dreamcast or Sony PlayStation 2. They are also played on personal computers of all shapes and sizes; the boom of mobile smart phones within the past decade has greatly expanded the demographic of video game players. Similarly, video games are short experiences with an entire start-to-end gameplay experience taking a few seconds, such as the short bursts of gameplay in Wario Ware.22 They are also never-ending experiences spanning hundreds of hours in online Massively-Multiplayer-Role-Playing-Games (MMORPGS) such as
World of Warcraft.23 There are many different types of video games referenced in the following chapters, varying genres, gameplay length, and platform, and all are legitimate forms of play.
Text Adventure Games
The term “text adventure” is used in different ways. Nick Montfort in his comprehensive book on the genre, Twisty Little Passages, focuses on the adventure delineation as the key definer of the term; to him, text adventure games are not mystery games, they are “some out-of-
21 This comparison is derived from a comedy routine by Dana O’Brien. See also Ewan Kirkland, "Storytelling in Survival Horror Videogames," in Horror Video Games, ed. Bernard Perron (London: McFarland & Company, 2009), 73. 22 Nintendo R&D1, Wario Ware, GameBoy Advance (Nintendo, 2003). 23 Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft, Microsoft Windows (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004).
14 the-ordinary undertaking involving risk or danger.”24 I, however, take a contrasting stance. My scope prioritizes text over adventure, mystery, or any other secondary genre of gameplay. Early text adventures all extend from the aforementioned use of a text parser, while later games discussed still show some inspiration from this player-input foundation in iterative mechanics.
As an aside, text adventure games often fall within the broader genre of interactive fiction (IF).
Much of my research refers to these games as IF and it is correct in doing so. However, I resist using that term so as to not include other types of IF games which do not incorporate text parsing mechanics. These games function through the use of hypertext, where the player clicks through links embedded in a field of text, revealing continuing linear passages. This type of game in particular receives growing participation by independent creators due to the availability of the open-source IF game engine Twine, making games easy to create and share.25 While fulfilling and engaging in their own right, they are not my focus in this work as they are not always mimicking a conversation.
The text adventure games I touch upon earlier are one of the two types of games I focus on. Broadly speaking, they reached popularity from the 1970s until the mid 1980s, and are playable on a personal computer (PC). While there are certainly text adventure games produced after this period, the ones I examine fit within this timeframe; this is because it illustrates the shift of game style from PC to emerging console platforms. By platforms, I refer to specific, independent hardware connected to a display screen, that plays game programs published for that
24 Nick Montfort, Twisty Little passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 6. 25 Twine, accessed March 07, 2017, https://twinery.org/.
15 particular device.26 These include the Atari, Apple II personal computer, and the PlayStation 3, and also mobile devices like the iPhone or Game Boy.
Roleplaying Games and Dialogue Systems
Crossing different genres and platforms, the second category of games that I discuss share specific characteristics. First, they all insert the player into a story by assuming the role of a character within that world. All games incorporate player input, making interactivity interactive, but this excludes games such as Tetris where the player does not have a narrative purpose as an actor within this game world of falling blocks. This element is prominently seen within the Role Playing Game (RPG) genre, in which the player takes on the role of a specific character, possessing their own abilities and personality quirks. Their presence critically impacts the game’s narrative. As Ilana Snyder describes, these games “always involve some kind of exploration of the game’s world, meaning that players can spend a lot of time just looking around, uncovering the features and the secrets of that world.”27 However, other types of genres with a character focus are put into this category, within action-adventure genres or even romantic visual novels. What narrows down this grouping of games even more is their inclusion of dialogue systems.
Dialogue systems are a mechanic in games that textually represent a conversation between the player and at least one non-playable character (NPC). The player, when interacting with a NPC, gains the opportunity to speak to them. In deciding what is said to NPCs, the player
26 Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers," in DAC 09: After Media, Embodiment and Context: Proceedings of the Digital Arts and Culture Conference, 2009, University of California, Irvine, Saturday, Dec 12-Tuesday Dec. 15 (Irvine, CA: Digital Arts and Culture, 2010). 27 Ilana Snyder, Hypertext: The Electronic Labyrinth (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 182.
16 can “project into the personality of the character they play”28 Depending on the game’s interface and and the freedom of movement for the player’s avatar, the design of such encounters differ.
For text adventure games discussed so far, this takes place through the text interface. The Hobbit for example, a later and more advanced peer to Adventure, describes the characters within the same room as the player (who roleplays as Bilbo, the lead protagonist of the J.R.R. Tolkien book); if Gandalf is present, the player can type “Talk to Gandalf” to get his attention. The
Narrator, in response, replies “Gandalf is waiting”, letting the player input “Say…” in addition to whatever they wish to say to the wizard.29 In later 3D video games with character models in a graphical world space, the player normally receives a prompt to press a button when within close proximity to a NPC. The 1999 RPG Final Fantasy IX indicates that an NPC is interactable by displaying an exclamation mark above their head (fig. 2).30 Resulting dialogue text blossoms onto screen inside a speech bubble similar to that of comic books. It is this later interface that is most commonly seen in contemporary console video games. The functions of a dialogue system are multifaceted, but it aspires to communicate useful information to the player. This dialogue goes both ways; the game gives the player narrative information and objectives and the player, in return, uses dialogue options to communicate how they wish to role play their character. Further examples the role of dialogue in games are illustrated throughout this work.
State of the Field
Current scholarship gives little attention to dialogue systems specifically. As I chronicle in the next chapter, discourse on the purpose of narrative within games filters through game
28 Rusel DeMaria, Reset: Changing the Way We Look at Video Games (San Francisco: Berrett- Koehler, 2007), 102. 29 Beam Software, The Hobbit, ZX Spectrum (Melbourne House, 1982). 30 Square, Final Fantasy IX, PlayStation (Square, 2000).
17 studies in debates between ludology and narratology. However, there is no identifiable field of dialogue studies in terms of video game mechanics. There are a few reasons for this. As video games are a relatively new medium, the academic field of games studies remains small and in its infancy. Many works from game studies emerge from similar media fields including film studies and cultural studies and thus are influenced by their academic frames, but a screenplay’s dialogue and a game’s dialogue have different objectives and presentations.
Furthermore, academic analysis on specific games commonly focus on their completed forms. While platform studies and software studies, as discussed in the next chapter, offer helpful glimpses beneath the plastic coating of hardware in assessing a game’s technological foundation, scholarly consideration of game design is not given adequate attention, considering the variety of different game genres present. Game analysis views its objects of study as texts to be read, and rarely focuses on the iterative process of game design, prototyping, and playtesting.
As such, various game elements, such as dialogue systems, float into the background due to their ubiquity and are considered as a given. Of course games have textual options for a player to select; nearly all video games begin with an instruction to “Press Start” to start playing and this in itself is an input-based option incorporating text. Text-based instruction is such a standard feature of video games that it is considered not worth investigating. However, the narrator within a text adventure game, or an NPC with a message to say, prompting the player to play the game in its intended manner, is not often considered in game studies discourse.
Extending from this, I argue that there is great merit in research that takes on critical making as a form of knowledge production. Areas of study that require an understanding of a creative practice, such as game development, have much to gain by examining the creation of research objects alongside critical and thoughtful analysis. Game development is an iterative
18 process, and should prototypes enter an academic discourse, they are continually critiqued and improved; such practices make design less of a privatized experience, following growing desires expressed in the digital humanities. In this framework I hypothesize unique and diverse approaches to game design, specifically with the goal of innovating dialogue systems. My work then provides value in contributing to ongoing narratology debates while also highlighting the benefits of design research and the importance of analysis of the game design process, rather than the final product.
My views come from the perspective of a life-long player of video games and active consumer but also as a creator involved within game development, having attended the annual
Game Developers Conference in San Francisco for the past two years. A recent involvement in games writing, including my participation in a six month games writing incubator in Montreal, as well as my networking with narrative designers, script writers, and other figures who mash words and games together, offer useful insights into the craft of making video games.
Considering the views of both audiences and creators in games can help improve games writing, including dialogue and innovative mechanics.
Chapter Overview
Chapter one details the scholarly background for this investigation. It outlines the academic debates that posture narratology against ludology, in order to give a foundation to future discussions of the use of dialogue as a storytelling and worldbuilding device. Above all else, it frames two key themes: the importance of storytelling and narrative in games, and the objective of designing good game feel.
With this foundation, chapter two focuses on the history of dialogue systems. In this chapter, I first give an overview of the history of dialogue in games. I discuss the direct influence
19 Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) had on the development of Crowther and Wood’s 1977 Colossal
Cave Adventure, one of the first games to provide text parsing abilities to the player. From this, I emphasize the importance the player’s freedom to converse has in maintaining immersive experiences, in terms of D&D (in dialogue between the player and the game master) and text adventure games (in input between the player and computer).
Chapter three continues this line of thought to explore the technological limitations that influence this shift in game design from text to visually-based experiences. It explores game platforms and their limitations, including the impact of controller design. In filling this research gap, I identify the importance of diegetic mechanics in game design. I call upon research concerning game feel to strengthen this concept before examining two games that illustrate its use in affecting graphics and gameplay mechanics. From this I question if diegetic mechanics are helpfully applied to other forms of game design that face hardware limitations, such as dialogue systems.
Chapter four reflects on the ways that clever game design circumvents hardware limitations. I look at ways that game designers successfully hide setbacks in other areas, including graphics and gameplay, and apply these techniques to dialogue design. While dialogue systems in video games have much room for evolution, I analyze games that expand the frame of the mechanic. I also overview my own experimentations as a way of introducing diegetic systems to dialogue mechanics, as inspired by text adventure games. The objective of this is to not suggest that there is a be-all-end-all approach in dialogue, but to show the unique potentials that such design paradigms can offer; in my examples I suggest the use of constructed languages, or conlangs, as a gameplay trope that can increase immersion in NPC dialogue.
20 Overall I argue that while dialogue systems in games take after TRPG structures, the hardware limitations of early game consoles prevented them from reaching true fidelity and thus not meeting an accurate sense of game feel. The introduction of consoles then mark a clear shift in their design. There has been an increase of technological capabilities in game platforms over the years, but little is done to further evolve this vital component of the roleplaying experience in games. Despite this, there is much potential available if one were to look at other areas of game design for problem-solving techniques. This work then is not only a reflection of how dialogue systems function but a challenge in how they can be better designed.
21 Chapter 1 – Game Feel and Other Methodological Considerations
The study of video games often finds itself spread across several different fields of literature from which I draw from in this work. This chapter details key works while also mapping out relevant histories and providing additional definitions for important terms. I am centrally interested in the discourse between ludology and narratology: a debate that, while mostly settled within academic scholarship, still persists within broader cultural contexts in video game popular culture and media. The organization of this literature review illustrates how these works influence my methodologies and argumentation, specifically in pushing game feel forward as my focus in this research.
To refer to the discipline of studying video games, I use the term video game studies, video game design studies or simply games studies. This is for two reasons. First, the plurals in
“games studies”, stands to indicate the vast number of approaches and disciplines that come to bear on the creation of and study of video games. Video games themselves offer so many different experiences to the player that providing a comprehensive definition can be difficult.
David Buckingham notes this succinctly:
The attempt to identify an essential 'gameness' of computer games may encourage us to
recognize what games such as Tetris (1988) and Final Fantasy X (2001) have in common;
but what they have in common may in fact be rather less interesting or important than the
ways in which they differ.31
31 Diane Carr et al., Computer Games: Text, Narrative and Play (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 7.
22 Games studies share similarities with other media-based disciplines, such as film studies, in that certain works may be excluded in order to preserve overarching theories.32 33 There are studies that apply broadly to ludology, but also detailed analyses on singular titles and it is challenging to find a middle ground. A video game contains the hardware and code component of software, more attuned with computer science and other STEM fields. It also has a design layer with creative qualities which is better suited for a humanities-based approach. For every bit of praise given to the organized code foundation of a game, the same attention is deservingly directed to its writing, music, level design, or artwork. Espen Aarseth echoes this in observing that
“computer games are not one medium, but many different media” making “a traditional medium perspective almost useless.”34 The difficulties in prioritizing a game as a software experience or artistic text naturally affect how research approaches games as research objects.
Games studies is filled with rich debates, partially due to the synthesis of fields in the creation of a game. Scholarship tends to fall within three broad fields of interest.35 There is an immersive approach that believes a game’s detailed and played experience is necessary in order to understand workings of the game and the reasoning of the players.36 A structuralist approach examines patterns of narration, communication and structures.37 And there is a contextual
32 Noë l Carrol and David Bordwell, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 33 In the face of potential irony after stating this, I hope that I have not disregarded a wholly successful and revolutionary dialogue system in this work. 34 Espen Aarseth, "Computer Game Studies, Year One," Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001): July 2001, http://gamestudies.org/0101/editorial.html. 35 This is, of course, a generalization of the different nuanced approaches within games studies. The sample articles referenced are by no means representative of the entirety of the paradigms listed, but they are meant to act as examples for what these approaches have included. 36 Dušan Stamenković and Milan Jaćević, "Time, Space, and Motion in Braid," Games and Culture 10, no. 2 (November 2014): 178-203. 37 Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, "Self-Reflexivity and Humor in Adventure Games," Game Studies 15, no. 1 (July 2015): http://gamestudies.org/1501/articles/bonello_k.
23 approach focusing on the broader social spheres in which games exists, examining how games influence society through legal, economical, or gender-based discourses surrounding games.38 It is difficult to take any of these approaches independent of each other.
Secondly, I make this decision in order to slightly lessen the importance of ludological approaches in my argumentation. Ludology, the study of play, is widely influential within games studies. According to Gonzalo Frasca’s definition, its study is to “focus on the understanding of its structure and elements –particularly its rules– as well as creating typologies and models for explaining the mechanics of games.”39 My focus is on the design and development process, rather than the end product where play occurs. I am interested in the discourse between ludology and narrativology, as both strongly prioritize particular video game elements over others.
Dialogue finds itself in a unique position in that it has a structured presence in games and has the potential to become a type of play. However, its use in a game is rarely considered in a ludologic paradigm as it is, as previously argued, an element of games often pushed to the background of more action-based elements. In later chapters, I will describe and propose ways that dialogue become a type of gameplay, considering its ludologic appeal.
Narrative and Gameplay
Narrative is important to games, because all games tell stories in some sense. However, the question of “do games tell stories?” is one that continually comes up in scholarship.40 In a
38 Tracy L. Dietz, "An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior," Sex Roles 38, no. 5-6 (1998): 425-442. 39 Gonzalo Frasca, "Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology," in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 222. 40 Jesper Juul, "Games Telling Stories," Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2001); Espen Aarseth, "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation," in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
24 video game, the player’s objective is to reach the end of an assigned goal; in this, the player’s narrative progresses from the start of the game to the end where they finish and win. As Lev
Manovich summarizes, “computer games are always experienced by their players as narratives” in that “the player is given a well-defined task … that makes the player experience the game as a narrative” of success or fail.41 Salen and Zimmerman also emphasize the firsthand dimensions of narrative elements in games and take the presence of stories in games as a given.42 Various obstacles are inserted between the start and end which the player must overcome in order to win.
However, this binary win-lose state is often not enough to create a strong sense of immersion, and this observation comes into play against purely ludological approaches to games studies. For all the fun that a player can have in making a character jump and run around, they must want to continue to play.
Narrative in games often does not have to even be explicitly inserted into the game by dedicated writers. As I noted at a panel at the 2017 Game Developers Conference on video games writing, only about one third of a game’s narrative is explicitly written.43 For the remainder of the game-playing experience, players embed their own interpretations and experiences within the game world. Brenda Laurel agrees when she states, “all narrative… is interactive in the sense that there is active construction going on by the reader.”44 Many games
41 Lev Manovich, "Database as Symbolic Form," in Museums in a Digital Age, by Ross Parry (London: Routledge, 2010), 66. 42 Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010). 43 Taylor-Giles, Leanne, George Ziets, Chris Avellone, Colin McComb, and Gavin Jurgens- Fyhrie. "Everything's on Fire and No One Knows What to Do.” Panel, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, February 27, 2017. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024206/Everything-s-on-Fire-and. 44 Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (Lewes, East Sussex: Yellow Ant, 2010), 160.
25 gain meaning by players through interpersonal connections, not scripted narrative elements guiding their feelings. For example, a NPC can make an inconspicuous comment, causing curiosity and prompting the player to imagine this character’s backstory. Within this point,
Laurel goes on to provide excellent insights, noting that “stories” refers to the “bundle of potential created by characters, worlds, situations, histories and so forth.”45 While “video games can provide the props, the characters, and the settings”, it is up to the players “to make the game’s story come to life.”46 Video games are in and of themselves artistic works, but playing video games is just as much of a creative practice. Laurel goes on to say that “people construct narratives in real time in most gameplay situations, even those that seem not to have narrative content or structure.”47 Storytelling becomes a collaboration between the game and player, even if the player may not be able to make explicit choices in determining a narrative’s direction through dialogue.
Lines of game dialogue can have different functions and effects on the overall narrative flow. To contrast, a film is a linear media form with a concrete duration. The length of a common Hollywood film is approximately 90-120 minutes in order to keep a steady narrative pace that does not lose the audience’s attention. The wide number of directors’ cuts of films reflects that producers are economical in what makes the final theatrical cut: scenes and even individual lines that are not explicitly driving a narrative forward are removed. Games often enjoy a narrative similar to those found in film, in which a protagonist faces a central objective with obstacles in the way, but there is far more opportunity for exploration as they are not beholden to an explicit length of time. It is because of this reason that Egenfeldt-Nielsen et al
45 Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play, 379. 46 Snyder, Hypertext, 105. 47 Donovan, Replay, 185.
26 state that “fiction in video games does not work according to the same parameters as it does in representational media.”48 In RPGs, the player dictates the pace at which the narrative unfolds.
While intended as a criticism, Marie-Laure Ryan points out that of the three elements of narrative, setting, character, and action, the third is left in the hands of the player.49 However in terms of interactivity, such qualities can actually increase a player’s involvement, as their actions and choices impact the game world they exist in. They often have the opportunity to explore before completing an objective that triggers the next part of a story. These games that allow the player full freedom to wander at their own pace are described as “open world” and the recent
2017 Nintendo game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a prime example of this.50 The player is made aware that they must defeat four powerful enemies in order to progress the narrative, however they are not beholden to this path. Over a playtime of several dozen hours, they can wander across different provinces in a large world with no barriers, entering towns and avoiding the main storyline entirely. Whether they wish to beat the game as fast as possible or to take their time, it is entirely their choice.
The sculpting of a game world is an important aspect in guiding the player’s experience, to make them curious rather than entirely focused on the chief objective of a game. Creative
48 Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Jonas Heide Smith, and Susana Pajares Tosca, Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction (New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 203. 49 Marie-Laure Ryan, "Beyond Ludus: Narrative, Videogames, and the Split Condition of Digital Textuality," in Videogame, Player, Text, by Barry Atkins and Tanya Krzywinska (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 50 Nintendo, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo Switch (Nintendo, 2017); Eiji Aonuma, producer of this title, has stated in interviews that he prefers the term “open-air” to describe the exploration within this world, as the player is able to float from high terrain with a small paraglider. The concept of open-world gameplay, as I have defined it, still applies. See NintendoUK, "The making of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Open-Air Adventure (Part 2)," YouTube, March 14, 2017, accessed April 02, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC1GlgoR878.
27 director and game designer Ken Levine in his 2008 lecture at the Game Developers Conference defined the concept of the “pull narrative”, where a game’s world contains environmental elements that convince the player to pull the narrative to them.51 This echoes Henry Jenkins’ notion of embedded narratives where designers insert objects or characters that the player can approach optionally to gain more nuanced and contextual understanding of the space.52 It, as
Gordon Calleja suggests, “combines the scripted elements of narrative with the individual player’s cognitive effort to form a coherent whole.”53 Furthermore, sub-goals are set up along the way that the player can optionally engage with. These elective missions, called sidequests, are
“nonessential activities that players can electively pursue”, which “generally result in some game-related reward, but sometimes the fun and experience of the sidequest is worth more than any tangible gain the player gets.”54 Recalling The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the open-world concept becomes even more pronounced by the sheer number of optional events that can take the player off their main path. Before even facing the first of those aforementioned menacing enemies, I went a few hours out of my way to explore a town. Once there, I spoke to a villager in which the encounter unlocked a sidequest to buy and furnish my own house. This was entirely optional and did not affect the larger narrative as it is easily skipped had I not spoken to
51 Christian Nutt, "GDC: Ken Levine Speaks: Empowering Players to Care About Your Stupid Story," Gamasutra, February 20, 2008, , accessed March 23, 2017, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/108482/GDC_Ken_Levine_Speaks_Empowering_Players _to_Care_About_Your_Stupid_Story.php. 52 Henry Jenkins, "Game Design as Narrative Architecture," in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 53 Gordon Calleja, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 124. 54 Snyder, Hypertext, 103.
28 this NPC. The result of this sidequest fleshes out the environment I was exploring, making it feel like a vibrant and growing village.55
From this, we can observe that the dialogue of NPCs is not held strictly to drive a linear narrative constantly forward. NPCs exist within the moment, and are used to make a game world feel alive. Their dialogue is considered to be what Seymour Chatman refers to as “kernels”, or what Eugene Dorfman calls “narremes.”56 Dialogue is adaptive to the player’s choices in the game, even in a simple manner of referring to the player by a name they may have selected at the start of the game. In the Nintendo game series Animal Crossing, in which the player owns a home within a village of friendly, anthropomorphic animals, the player may be prompted by an
NPC to suggest a catchphrase; over several days this phrase is spread to other characters in the game, similar to organic social trends one may experience in real life.57 Just simple interactions like this, with NPCs living their normal lives can greatly enhance the attachment that a player has to a game world.
By virtue in their different priorities in studying games, narratology and ludology sometimes clash in opinion. This is observable in games studies discourse in the early 2000s,
55 I should note that none of my new villager neighbours judged me for focusing on my homestead when I should have been off saving the world from annihilation. A lack of coherency with lighthearted sidequests during a quest against evil can sometimes feel disconnected, but it is also freeing to take a break from the typical hero’s journey. 56 Seymour Benjamin Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).; Eugene Dorfman, The Narreme in the Medieval Romance Epic: An Introduction to Narrative Structures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969). 57 Nintendo EAD, Animal Crossing, Nintendo GameCube (Nintendo, 2002).; Animal Crossing offers a day and night cycle that is linked up to our own 24-hour-clock, and follows the same calendar. While idly suggested as an afterthought, my stupid phrase “Cool Beans” spread like wildfire throughout my town within days. I came to regret my seemingly strong social influence; months later, I still stumble across the odd villager NPC who tacked it on to the end of an idle comment about the weather.
29 during the field’s infancy. Many scholars who focus on games studies have a background in literature and film studies where narratological methodologies are common; King and
Krzywinska echo this in pointing out that “video game narratives share some similarities with cinema storytelling.58 The need to carve out a space for games studies as a discipline, for both scholarly and institutional departmental reasons, necessitates an emphasis on the unique qualities of video games, including their game-ness and interactivity. As such, ludologists often claim that games and stories are elements of two different categories. Celia Pearce argues that “unlike literature and film, which center on story, in games, everything revolves around play and the player experience.59 Thus, ludology examines the relationships between rules, strategy, and outcomes. To ludologists, narratives are for stories and rules are for games; Aarseth goes so far as to say: “the narration and the gameplay, like oil and water, are not easily mixed.”60 Scholars like Gonzalo Frasca have questioned if games should even attempt to tell stories.61 Similarly,
Ernest Adams and Greg Costikyan are in agreement in that games should be assessed by their playable mechanics only, the former stating that “interactivity is almost the opposite of narrative” and arguing that narrative must progress according to the author’s vision, not the player. 62
58 Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Videogame Forms and Contexts (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 121. 59 Celia Pearce, "Towards a Game Theory of Game," in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, 144. 60 Espen Aarseth, "Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation," in First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, 51. 61 Frasca, The Video Game Theory Reader, 221-235. 62 Ernest Adams, "The Designer's Notebook: Three Problems for Interactive Storytellers," Gamasutra, December 29, 1999, accessed March 18, 2017, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131821/the_designers_notebook_three_.php. See also Greg Costikyan, "I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for games," ed. Frans Mäyrä, in Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002).
30 Years later, that both narrative and ludologic scholarly approaches are still present within game studies reflects that this is debate has not reached a conclusion. The issue is mostly pushed under the table, with the odd commentary reaching popular media, such as Ian Bogost’s 2017 piece in The Atlantic boldly titled “Video Games Are Better Without Stories”.63 Regardless, narrative remains entwined with structure and mechanics. Frasca admitted that “ludologists love stories too” and referred to this conflict as “a debate that never took place.”64 Similarly, Klevjer amusingly refers to narrative-heavy games as “rhetorical–ludological bastards” before pointing out that it is “because we want them to be.”65 Regardless, both ludology and narratology in conjunction provide value to the study of dialogue systems. That these two different approaches appear at odds with each other is confusing from a design point of view because game development relies on both the mechanics of play and creative narrative design in order to create a cohesive gameplay experience. The question becomes not whether games are stories, but how narratives are best conveyed through gameplay. Staking out an exclusive niche within game studies by not understanding this intertwined relationship is a fruitless endeavor. It is perhaps for this reason that dialogue as a mechanic is not discussed much in games studies, as its multifaceted makeup of structural mechanics and literary features can cause one discipline to pass it to the other. Both what is being said and how it is being said in a game are necessary to consider when analyzing dialogue, requiring the use of both narratology and ludology.
63 Ian Bogost, "Video Games Are Better Without Stories," The Atlantic, April 25, 2017, , accessed April 25, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games- stories/524148/. 64 Gonzalo Frasca, "Ludologists Love Stories Too: Notes from a Debate that Never Took Place," in Digital Games Research Association Conference Proceedings (Utrecht, 2003). 65 Rune Klevjer, "In Defense of Cutscenes," ed. Frans Mäyrä, in Proceedings of Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2002), 197.
31 While these approaches are important to the viewing of games as their own object separate from other media, they neglect to consider the complicated relationship between the development of games and the struggle to compromise mechanics in order to fit narrative in a logical way. Effective game design makes the player believe that they are in control, but the same is said for successful games writing. Video games are experiences that cannot be reduced to their audio, visual, or narrative content. However, all of these come together to create a complete, emotive experience. I work from the perspective of game developers in the development process rather than one that is more exterior to the creation of games and only examines the final product; this includes the process of games writing, a craft often neglected in both the game development process as well as discourse on game design.
To expand on this point, academic discussions of game development is woefully limited for some reasons I can guess. First and most mundanely, because game developers are too busy developing to add support to academic debates. This is not just a comment on harmful “crunch time” practices, in which overtime and stressful working conditions can harm a developer’s wellbeing and social life. The game development industry has a tendency towards secrecy in their development process with NDAs abound among workers.66 It is rare for a large company to reveal details about a game if it is not in a finalized, polished state. Instead, some of the most valuable sources to understand the state of game design according to game developers are found in casual blog posts on Gamasutra, the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco
(with many video recordings available online to attendees with expensive “All Access” passes),
66 See Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig De Peuter, ""EA Spouse" and the Crisis of Video Game Labour: Enjoyment, Exclusion, Exploitation, and Exodus," Canadian Journal of Communication 31, no. 3 (October 2006), http://www.cjc- online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1771/1893.
32 and a handful of books situated as reference points for designers.67 As I am involved in game development with experience in programming as well as game design, and am also a full time graduate student, I am uniquely positioned within my research paradigm. My approach is informed by my practice in game development and finds theoretical footing in video games studies and design studies.
Methods
Because my research questions address issues in game design and game mechanic implementation, it is beneficial to use methodologies that practically address these areas. The methodologies I use come from different sources but all find common ground in their objective to understand the design of feeling in games and contribute to a broader understanding of design practices. Different in names and focuses, they all embody the same principle of understanding a technology through its development rather than a distanced look at a completed product.
Game Feel
Those interested in narratology are concerned with what is being said, while ludologists look towards the the logic and rules in allowing it to be said. Little writing has concerned how it is said. A perspective that considers both of these accounts is then useful when considering dialogue systems. This work comes from the perspective of game design, a discipline comprised of never-ending iterative prototyping and the most diminutive tweaking of an integer variable in order to make a character’s jumping height just right. As such, my interest is in games that engage the player through a combination of intelligent design choices while addressing a simple question: what makes a particular game mechanic fun? It is a completely subjective paradigm to
67 "Gamasutra - The Art & Business of Making Games," Gamasutra, accessed November 16, 2016, http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/.
33 follow, further emphasized by the contrast between a soft and arbitrary player’s experience and the strict logic of the programming creating games and rule systems. However, it is one tackled in games studies writing as the aptly-titled “game feel”. Brendan Keogh provides an excellent introduction to the term:
Mario hasn’t stood the test of time because we all really care about this plumber and his
mushroom kingdom. It has stood the test of time because Super Mario Bros feels really
good. If you’ve played it, you’re remembering what it feels like right now. The
sluggishness and inertia and floatiness. These sensations that are in your fingers are
fundamental to what Super Mario Bros ‘is’ as a creative work. All the interesting
mechanical systems would mean nothing if it didn’t feel good. Mechanics are the
skeleton. ‘Polish’ or ‘feel’ or ‘juice’ is the meat.68
Coined by Steve Swink, game feel is “intangible, below the surface, on the tips of fingers and the tips of tongues”, similar to trying to describe a colour.69 In more practical terms, it is the “real- time control of virtual objects in a simulated space, with interactions emphasized by polish.“70
Game feel is hard to describe through words as it is, at its purest, a feeling. Much like many phenomenologist terms, game feel is described through metaphors that attempt to bridge together a shared understanding. It is the kinesthetic experience of immersion and control in a game.
Through the controls, user interface, and structures of a gameplay experience, the act of playing becomes naturalized; all elements of the game work in harmony in a way that is taken for
68 Brendan Keogh, "An Incomplete Game Feel Reader," Brendan Keogh, March 31, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, https://brkeogh.com/2017/03/31/an-incomplete-game-feel-reader/. 69 Steve Swink, "Game Feel: The Secret Ingredient," Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games, November 23, 2007, accessed January 27, 2017, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130734/game_feel_the_secret_ingredient.php. 70 Swink, Game Feel, 32.
34 granted in its observed effortlessness. Ludologic approaches take a distanced look at a game’s systems of logic, but what matters in assessing video games is if they are simply fun and give us pleasure.
In his book dedicated to game feel, perhaps the most fundamental text to understanding the term, Swink addresses the different simultaneous experiences a player feels because of game feel: the aesthetic sensation of control, the pleasure of learning, practicing and mastering a skill, the extension of the senses and the player’s identity, and the interaction with a unique physical reality within the game.71 It is difficult to discuss game feel because it is different for every game. Most discussions of game feel concern the controlling of a character, if a jump is too high or delayed by too much, for example. Despite the lack of material on game feel concerning dialogue mechanics, I apply Swink’s framework to their design in the following chapters.
While game feel is an abstract concept, Swink takes great effort in applying metrics to support how game feel is created, through input, controls, responsiveness, polish, context, rules, polish, and metaphor. All are important in the implementation of dialogue systems that have good game feel and I discuss them, in some form, in this research. Of all of these listed games qualities, I argue that the metaphor metric is most important to dialogue, or at least one that most deserves attention and reconsideration. According to Swink, metaphor has two components: representation, as the “idea of the thing, or what it appears to be”, and treatment, which is “the cohesive whole formed by visual art, visual effects, sound effects, tactile effects and music.”72
Essentially, metaphor’s effect is to “prime a player with preconceptions about how a given object should behave.”73 Swink does not specifically apply this to measure the game feel of dialogue
71 Ibid., 33. 72 Ibid., 171. 73 Ibid., 172.
35 systems, but I argue that it has merit as it is a component that requires faithful representation in order to seem realistic. Game dialogue needs to feel like the player is actually talking to an NPC in order to be faithful as a metaphor and ensure good game feel within this mechanic. Text adventure games certainly attempt to mimic conversations and become an accurate metaphor. As seen in the following chapters, this challenge faces further difficulties as game design trends shift in the face of platform changes, changing what aspects of social interaction are mimicked. This is a driving crux for my argumentation.
It is odd that while approaches to effective game feel vary for every game, they all tend to use the same approach for dialogue systems. In light of action-packed roleplaying games revolving around combat, little attention is given to the quieter and introspective qualities of a character: characteristics that only come out in narrative capacities like personality, morality, or intellect. This is not a critique of violent games or espousing outdated (but still present) claims that video games are “murder simulators.”74 In fact, one of the reasons for the success of violent games has much to do with game feel. Maria Klawe makes an excellent point in evaluating the success of violent games when she states “… it provides a very effective form of immediate feedback and sense of progress through the game” and that it offers “a strong sense of winning at the game in small chunks that come at frequent intervals.”75 When a player swings a sword at an enemy, they immediately receive the rewards of that action, often with the satisfying knowledge that their actions have significance within the game. Achieving this feeling of instant feedback is difficult in games focused on dialogue, because as a narrative device, its usefulness is often
74 See Jack Thompson, Out of Harm’s way: One Man's Relentless Crusade to Topple Media Giants and Save Your Kids From Video Game Madness (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2006). 75 Amy Scholder and Eric Zimmerman, Re-Play: Game Design, Game Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 249.
36 revealed in a slow burn across the length of a game. An encounter with an NPC can include foreshadowing for future events in a game that is not obvious until later.
Beyond Swink, there are significant recent writings and conference talks about game feel, albeit sometimes using different vocabulary. Many designers refer to a game’s juice, that is, extra elements added to the core mechanical structure of a game to make it feel more responsive and enjoyable to the player.76 A game character’s walking animation may seem suitable and perfectly adequate until it is enhanced with subtle head nods and more bounce to their step. Or a user interface where a player can select a textual option can sway from side to side, make appropriate sound effects, or change colour to indicate that a certain option is currently selected; this is far more interesting than just a static screen of options. Overall these are little elements that make the game feel more alive, responsive, and juicier. The reason why I do not use juice over game feel has to do with the differences in how they are spoken of, and how they fit into a game’s development cycle.
Game juice is seemingly offered as a type of tack-on solution to automatically fix up any game, to “juice it or lose it”.77 If a game is diagnosed as not having enough juice, it just has to be made juicier, implying that more is better in that iterated form. It is a form of polish, a final external layer that is removed to observe all of the mechanical underbelly below. Game feel instead implies that the design decisions that are made in order to make a game more immersive and fun are intertwined with all other elements. Creating effective game feel starts from the core
76 Nathan Lovato, "Squeezing More Juice out of Your Game Design," Gamasutra, January 4, 2015, accessed April 08, 2017, http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/NathanLovato/20150401/240149/Squeezing_more_juice_out_ of_your_game_design.php. 77 Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho, "Juice it or Lose it" (lecture, Game Developers Conference, 2012), accessed April 15, 2017, http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016487/Juice-It-or-Lose.
37 foundational mechanics, and its elements are constantly improved upon and juxtaposed to ensure that the playable experience is just right. Game feel cannot be arbitrarily added at the end of the development process as it is the prospective vision that drives game creation.
Another work critical to my research was written far before game feel was even a verbalized concept. David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld offers insightful and subjective views of how video games were understood in the early 1980s, and what made them so enjoyable.78 Distinct from other writings on games during this time, credit is given to Sudnow’s experience as a jazz musician; his first published book Ways of the Hands, describes the relationship that a musician’s hands engage in with the instrumentalities of the piano.79 Pilgrim of the Microworld recollects Sudnow’s fascination in playing the 1978 game Breakout for the
Atari 2600 console, even going so far as to visiting Atari Inc. to understand the best strategies for playing.80 In poetic language, Sudnow’s accounts describe his attempts to grasp this medium still in its infancy, and its ability to entice both the creative and mechanical sides of design and storytelling. It is to him, a technological triumph that is also a phenomological pleasure, but still with the potentials of addition and an unknowing future ahead of it. Consider his description of being so immersed within the gameplay of Breakout that the flow of playing becomes an organic sensation:
Knowledge about the paddle’s programmed subdivisions and angles no more truly aids
the task at hand than a knowledge of physics could help you line up a certain point on a
bat with the ball in order to hit to the field. When a paddle or a bat is incorporated by the
body, becoming a continuation of ourselves into and through which we realize an aim in
78 David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld (New York, NY: Warner Books, 1984). 79 Sudnow, Ways of the hand. 80 Atari, Inc., Breakout, Atari 2600 (Atari, Inc., 1978).
38 a certain direction, such implements lose all existence as things in the world with the
sorts of dimensions you measure on rulers. They become incorporated within a system of
bodily spaces that can never be spoken of in the objective terms with which we speak of
objects outside of ourselves. 81
The ease with which Sudnow sinks into the game illustrates good game feel, as the controls feel so natural to him that they might as well be a continuation of his body. It feels good to him to aim the paddle, and its controls seem so perfectly designed and common sense that it would be difficult to imagine it in any other form. The prose Sudnow uses in capturing such an incorporeal sensation over 161 pages feels almost at odds with the game that he describes; Breakout is a relatively simple and straightforward game, originally for arcade machines. Despite this, it perfectly touches on so many of the concepts that current work is still attempting to verbalize with far more advanced titles.
Platform Studies
Most key to new media is the regular incorporation of computer technologies to create and support work. A video game exists as nothing but a physical cartridge or disc unless it is run on an appropriate console or computer. Certain games can only be run on certain devices, and all such technologies have their own limitations according to the hardware specifications. A monochrome device cannot display colour, for example, and a console without a keyboard cannot accept typed input. Such is the material specificity of media that rely on platforms.
Platforms, described by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, are “computing systems of any sort upon which further computing development can be done.”82 They are entirely hardware,
81 Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld, 84. 82 Bogost and Montfort, "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers", 2.
39 software, or a combination of the two (such as a personal computer running the Windows ’95 operating system). The critical characteristic of platforms is their programmability; platforms are reprogrammed and customized by outside developers in order to adapt to their needs. This distinction separates them from more metaphorical applications of the term, such as branding a stretched canvas as a platform for paint. Video game consoles are not the only types of platforms considered, but they have received the most attention in the field of platform studies. This is important because, as Laurie N. Taylor argues, “academic study has traditionally focused on computer games because of their… better access to computers than consoles.”83 Relatively new, the term was first coined in the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture conference, and was thoroughly explored by Bogost and Montfort in their analysis of the Atari system in their book Racing the
Beam.84 Platform studies concern the relationships between the hardware and software design of platforms, but also the creative works produced on those systems, such as video games, digital art, and electronic literature.
Discourses on computers often dissolve into a championing of their technical details, without giving meaningful consideration to their development and reception from broader audiences. Platforms are, like traditional media and their related technologies, culturally situated.
It is important then to ask practical and critical questions about how such technologies exist in society, and to not unconsciously factor it out when considering their software, even when obscured by user interfaces and novel program interactions. As societal expectations on how video games should perform have shifted over the past four decades, so too has the concept of
83 Laurie N. Taylor, "Platform Dependent: Console and Computer cultures," in The Player’s Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and Gaming, by J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2007), 223. 84 Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009).
40 what a video game console should comprise of. Memory allocations, hard drive space, and controller options all affect how audiences receive video game experiences, and reinforce standards for the technical specifications of games. As Terry Winograd argues, “Design cannot neatly be divided into compartments for software and for devices. The possibilities for software are both created and constrained by the physical interfaces.”85 Platforms affect the way things are played. If a game is ported to the controller-reliant Sony PlayStation instead of a personal computer with a keyboard, the experience is different.86 As seen later, this has a significant impact on how games are designed.
Design
At this point, it is important that I emphasize some practice-based methodologies that inspires the bulk of this research, drawn from my own practices in game design and prototyping.
The first of these is design research, following a framework outlined by Bruce Archer and Sir
Christopher Frayling.87 The method is described in three forms: research into design, which may look into the history of a design practice, research for design, which is research in order to contribute to a design process such as gathering materials, and research through design, which uses design as a tool for research. Specifically, in conducting research through design, I later detail possible game prototypes that appropriate existing game design techniques in order to avoid common issues surrounding player choice and immersion in dialogue systems.
Second is critical making, a term proposed by Matt Ratto from the University of Toronto as the use of “medial forms of engagement with technologies to supplement and extend critical
85 Terry Winograd, Bringing Design to Software (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1996), xviii. 86 Calleja, In-game, 14. 87 See Bruce Archer, "The Nature of Research," Co-design, Interdisciplinary Journal of Design, January 1995:6-13 and Christopher Frayling, "Research in Art and Design," Royal College of Art Research Papers 1 (1993-4):1-5.
41 reflection.”88 The connection between hands-on creation and theoretical assessment, largely involving digital technology at some level, is key in this approach. A natural evolution from a developing maker culture and a branch of the digital humanities, critical making focuses on the process of making, and how experimentation leads to iterative prototypes and concepts that may not be reached in other ways. Because of this priority of the journey rather than the destination, it is a field that offers openness and transparency in the development process.
A final useful resource for developing my methodology has been Brenda Laurel’s edited volume Design Research, demonstrating many individual case studies in which design research is performed and the ways it can permeate both academic fields as well as specific industrial practices.89 It was particularly interesting to note the presence of video games in the book, in terms of their mentioning in authors’ backgrounds, as well as the form of actual detailed prototypes. It demonstrates the usability of games in creating a virtual simulation of a specific scenario, which can also ask questions outside of their individual intellectual scope.
Conclusion
The works I examine do not explicitly make mention of game dialogue, but that is the case for most of games studies scholarship. Dialogue systems in games are often unspoken of, for a few reasons that I can guess. First, because they are so common and expected in so many games. It is normal for a video game with roleplaying elements to give the player dialogue options and the ability to engage with NPCs. It is part of a game’s status quo in the same way a
“Game Over” screen or a character’s ability to perform a jump is. Second, game dialogue
88 Matt Ratto, "Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life." The Information Society 27, no. 4 (2011): 255. 89 Brenda Laurel, Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
42 systems have little deviation from the mechanic’s standard structure, as detailed in later chapters.
As these mechanics are so expected and often do not appear to perform any novel function in games, they are easily overlooked. This is disappointing because, as I argue, dialogue is a critical part of both immersion and worldbuilding. Both the content of what is being said and the structural mechanics of how it is being said are critical to creating satisfying game feel. By using methodologies that do not prioritize a specific ludologic or narratologic perspective, and instead focusing on the design of these mechanics, scholarship can better understand how to look at existing dialogue systems, and how to improve them in future iterations. Following the efforts of these combined works, my research interest at its core wants to understand how to make dialogue systems feel natural and good to use.
43 Chapter 2 – Dialogue Systems in Roleplaying Games
This chapter offers an overview of dialogue in early video games, specifically in the text adventure game genre. In this, I argue that the loss of player choice and computer response found in text parsing in text adventure games, as well as the limited options of controller input in early console video games impacted feelings of player freedom within the game’s narrative. I begin with an understanding of worldbuilding in playful environments before narrowing my scope to the emergence of tabletop roleplaying games in the early 1970s. Focusing on the social qualities of storytelling involved in tabletop roleplaying games, I show how games like Adventure borrow from Dungeons and Dragons in order to give the player freedom in their responses to NPCs.
However, the hardware limitations of these text parsers prevent players from receiving accurate feedback that is faithful to a metaphor for real dialogue. As seen later, technological innovations and the introduction of video game consoles further influence how dialogue is treated in later games.
I do not emphasize Colossal Cave Adventure’s influence on future video games, but use it to show how it draws inspiration from contemporary practices of Tabletop Roleplaying Games
(TRPGs). Video games at this point were not distinguished as their own unique medium; until two decades later, many magazines for computer games referred to these as just programs.
Adventure was not intended to spark the video game form, and so considering it from a multimedium perspective can offer insights into key elements of the gameplay experience during its release and popularity.
Returning to Colossal Cave Adventure, a reiteration of its innovative characteristics should be made. Adventure was the first text adventure game, created by Will Crowther, a programmer and cave enthusiast, in 1975. Written in the programing language Fortran for the
44 PDP-10 microcomputer, the player controls a character exploring a mysterious cave. Displayed on the screen of the PDP-10, small green text describes the immediate area that surrounds the player, with a space for text input below. Upon reading the area’s description, players use the keyboard to type in text and press the enter key. There is no need to use the mouse to click anywhere, as the blinking text line indicates that the game is always expecting player input.
Crowther gives freedom to the player in their ability to type anything to the computer. And likewise, the player receives instant feedback to whatever they enter.
While I have previously described the first scene, there are additional provided instructions when starting a new game:
Somewhere nearby is Colossal Cave, where others have found fortunes in treasure and
gold, though it is rumored that some who enter are never seen again. Magic is said to
work in the cave. I will be your eyes and hands. Direct me with commands of 1 or 2
words. I should warn you that I look at only the first five letters of each word, so you’ll
have to enter “northeast” as “ne” to distinguish it from “north”. (Should you get stuck,
type “help” for some general hints. For information on how to end your adventure, etc.,
type “info”.)90
The player receives the rules for this fantasy world, but not through some static instructional text.
They are instead guided by a character, which I previously refer to as the narrator. The narrator speaks of themselves in the first person and uses casual contractions in their dialect. These small little narrative decorations have a huge impact on how the player experiences the game and its characters. The narrator feels more like a human, or at least not like a computer. While the player is in an unknown world with magic and the looming threat of moral peril, they always have a
90 Crowther, Adventure.
45 guide to bounce ideas off of, who is their “eyes and hands”. Their physical attributes are not described, so the player is able to conjure up their own mental image of their companion.
Because of these small qualities revealed in the first paragraph of the game, the player does not just play, they communicate. In outlining the type of conversation taking place between the player and narrator, the game defines the type of metaphor for conversation that they aim to achieve; following through with an authentic conversational experience then measures as good game feel. Ultimately, the experience is framed not as a solo adventure that the player embarks upon, but a pseudo-social journey in collaboration with the narrator. But where does this type of gameplay emerge from?
Developing technology that could not only receive commands but also reply in turn would be an important feature of personal technologies and digital presences. A decade prior,
Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a computer program designed to emulate interaction between the user and an artificial therapist.91 Much like text adventure games, the computer parses a user’s input and presents a response. Due to its modeling after a Rogerian psychologist, as Ian Bogost describes, “Eliza seeks out keywords such as ‘I am’ or ‘you’ and manufactures transformations based on them… spinning it into possible conversation.”92 The motivation in using a psychologist’s characterization is to spur the user to keep on responding, by continually prompting them to answer loaded questions such as “Tell me about your family”.93 Pamela
McCorduck points this out when she states that “when Weizenbaum was looking for a context where he could carry on that sort of illusion, he needed one where ignorance would not destroy
91 Joseph Weizenbaum,”Eliza – A Computer Program…” Communications of the ACM 9, no 1 (1966) 36-67. 92 Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 11. 93 Weizenbaum,”Eliza – A Computer Program…” 36-67.
46 the illusion of understanding.”94 Computers on a base level run commands based on coding, but by giving programs human names and embedding them with personalities, such approaches offer personal qualities to the digital, even if network-based communications were still in their infancy during ELIZA’s time.
Worldbuilding and the establishment of presence are key factors in creating meaningful and metaphoric experiences in video games. But how was sociality possible in early video games, before online play capabilities connected players? Interactivity is key to video games, but the player’s freedom can become constrained when trying to mimic genuine social interactions.
Following aspirations of good game feel, and specifically Swink’s metaphor metrics, it is important to meet the player’s expectations, as they “perceive things as they expect to perceive them, not necessarily as they really are.”95 If the player is controlling an avatar in a game, it is expected that there are other inhabitants in its world. Assuming these figures are not hostile and is approached at a close range, then they should be interactive. Without the ability to speak within a game or interact with NPCs, the player only wanders in the world, while the NPCs function as cardboard cut-outs to take up space as a façade for meaningful presence. What is said by NPCs is essential, but equally critical is how it is said (if said at all), and what the player can do in return.
To create a feeling of presence and consequence, it is important to not only feel like the player is in a fictional world, but that they can create an impact within it. The interactivity of video games requires the player to make choices, and to experience consequences for their actions. Furthermore, players need to assume a persona or role within this world that is realistic
94 Pamela McCorduck, Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence (Natick, MA: AK Peters, 2004), 293. 95 Swink, Game Feel, 177.
47 within the world space. Systems of rules are very important as they dictate how the world operates and how the player can act within it in order to be true to their role. We can see with
20th century roleplaying activities such as mock trials, model legislatures, and historical reenactments, there are systems put in place within the world that lets the participant take actions and see the results of their actions. Furthermore, these experiences are social and “always collaborative” as Adam Chapman suggests.96 Video games borrow heavily from these concepts, but first I will outline how interactivity in games eventually shift from dialogue-heavy gameplay to mechanics based more around action and combat.
In considering the social systems in Adventure, while there are no other named characters, the player does not explore alone. Whenever they wish to perform any action they must, in a way, “ask” the narrator if it may be performed; this is the text parser element of the system, which determines if there is a logged response to the player’s exact input. It is a purely mechanical function designed through code, but small narrative elements are added to bring the experience to life. Quirks are added to the narrator’s personality, making the player’s interaction feel like half of an authentic conversation. An example of this is seen in a puzzle involving a sleeping dragon:
> kill dragon
With what? Your bare hands?
> yes
Congratulations! You have just vanquished the dragon with your barehands!
(Unbelievable, isn’t it?)97
96 Adam Chapman, Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice (New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 184. 97 Crowther, Adventure.
48 The encounter is humorous, and plays on a conversational reassurance from the player that, yes, that is what they intend to do. The narrator cannot believe that the player wants to try killing the dragon with their bare hands, and this response is included in the game by programmers to make the parsing system feel like more than a circular feedback loop. It feels like a real conversation.
With only text description at hand, passages of Adventure use rich imagery not only to give the player a clear image of the scene before them, but to differentiate the 79 areas or rooms from one another. The maze-like qualities of the Colossal Cave demanded this treatment, less the player get more lost than intended by Crowther.98 Graham Nelson suggests that the prologue of the game, taking place in the above, open ground, “lends a much greater sense of claustrophobia and depth to the underground bulk of the game.”99 Those familiar with the Mammoth Cave in
Kentucky would echo this, as the layout in the game closely follows that of its presumed counterpart.100 Crowther himself has never confirmed this modelling after the real cave, however he has noted his previous mapping of the location. Regardless of whether it is directly modeled or simply a vivid illusion of a real location, his prose gives credence to the illusion that the place described could be real and that the narrator is on hand as a direct link to the player.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games
While Adventure was the first text adventure video game, its creator was influenced by his hobbies. Crowther was an avid cave enthusiast, but more than that, he was a player of the
TRPG Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) since the game’s release.101 As this game genre can
98 Alison Gazzard, Mazes in Videogames: Meaning, Metaphor and Design (McFarland & Company Incorporated, 2013). 99 Graham Nelson, The Inform Designer's Manual (St. Charles, IL: Interactive Fiction Library, 2001), 377. 100 Mark J. P. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (London: Routledge, 2014), 358. 101 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 140.
49 appear overly complicated to someone unfamiliar with it, a brief explanation of the game’s structure is helpful.
If one were to believe the criticism in the 1980s suggesting that D&D promoted Satanism and isolationist behaviours in children during critical stages of development (described in a 1985
60 Minutes episode dedicated to the topic), they would overpass the fundamental social mechanics involved in TRPGs.102 Inspired by miniature roleplaying games, D&D was created by
E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974 as the first commercially-available TRPG.103 It is worth pointing out that I am exclusively discussing D&D, but there are hundreds of other types of tabletop roleplaying games with different scenarios and rule sets; the Generic Universal Role
Playing System (GURPS) is in itself a flexible framework for any scenario or world genre.104
D&D is the source that countless others drew from, and so it is my main reference.
Constructed as a gathering with 3-6 players usually seated around a table (although contemporary gameplay may be conducted online), full games (campaigns) can be a single session of a few hours, or across several sessions over days and beyond. This latter type is usually presented as an overarching plot line divided up by session-specific objectives in escalating difficulty as the campaign progresses. Each player creates their own character who they roleplay as in the game, assigning numerical statistics to indicate their proficiency
(concerning their strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma), as well as a race, character class (or occupation) and moral alignment. Recording these details on a paper
102 David M. Ewalt, Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It (New York: Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2013), 159. 103 Harold Johnson et al., 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2004). 104 Matt Barton, Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2013), 50.
50 character sheet that is kept on hand for reference across all sessions, players also create their character’s own personal history and background.
While characters may start out weak, over the campaign they accumulate experience points, earned while succeeding in battles or achieving objectives, which can increase their level; this improves their overall statistics and can also reveal new abilities that they can perform, showing personal progression and growth alongside the game’s narrative. The narrator and mediator of each session is the Dungeon Master (DM) or Game Master (GM), who creates the setting and game world, including challenges such as puzzles, monsters, and villains for the players to overcome. The GM also portrays the world’s interactive inhabitants and NPCs who often provide clues or open up quests if players decide to speak to them.
In the actual act of playing D&D, a player describes their character’s actions, or they may discuss with other players what the best course of action might be. If the player performs a trivial feat such as looking around a room they are standing in or laying down in a bed, the GM deems these as automatically successful; this is of course, assuming that the room is not pitch black and the bed is not covered in sharp spikes. However, player actions that rely on their aforementioned proficiencies require the rolling of polyhedral dice which, after compared to the GM’s own rolling of dice, determines if that action was successful or not. Actions are not always granted on a pass-fail basis either. For example, if the player wants to check a room for traps, they are required to roll against their intelligence skill to see how well they detect any trouble; if there are actually traps in the room, the GM may respond that they detected no traps (for a low roll), a possibility of traps (for an average roll) or the certainty of traps (for a high roll).105
105 For a reference guide for the rules of Dungeons and Dragons, please see Mike Mearls et al., Dungeon Master's Guide (Renton, WA: Wizards of the Coast, 2014).
51 Above all else, TRPGs emphasizes storytelling through collaborative dialogue. Within the rules of the game, players have the freedom to improvise and ask the GM anything about the world. In doing so, the player certainly receives an answer of some sort. As all player actions require a GM to describe the outcome of those actions, the gameplay is implicitly social. Playing is done primarily through speech, and the performance of a game is comparable to a radio drama, or improvisational theatre.106 To play D&D is to play a game through dialogue.
While D&D has many characteristics and qualities worth further investigation, I want to emphasize the sociality and storytelling in sessions. According to Daniel MacKay, “in the role- playing game the rules are but a framework that facilitates the performance of the players and the game master.”107 That three of the six possible statistical attributes involve social and cognitive abilities (intelligence, wisdom, and charisma), speaks to the importance of the player’s creativity.
It is only through player interaction that a game world is inhabited and lively. Because of the variety of questions that players can ask the GM (“what kind of flowers are in this field?” or
“what colour is the carpet?”), worldbuilding is done on the fly, and offers infinite possibilities for the player to better visualize the world. Freedom of dialogue and player feedback is critical to
TRPGs as it further builds narratives through supplemental information. The player’s interaction with the world and its inhabitants is prioritized and experiences become highly personalized. As outlined earlier, narrative and worldbuilding are important to video games, but their use did not just emerge artificially.
Mimicking Sociality with Text Parsing
106 Marie-Laure Ryan, "On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology," in Narratology Beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity, ed. Jan Christoph Meister, Tom Kindt, and Wilhelm Schernus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 12. 107 Matt Barton, Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games (Wellesley, MA: Peters, 2008), 23.
52 It is with these qualities that we can observe similar characteristics with text adventure games. Will Crowther had been an avid player of Dungeons and Dragons, meeting weekly with his regular group. His character, as described by an old party member, was a thief: a class more associated with composure, persuasion, observation and litheness than combat-focused aptitudes.108 His desire to emulate the storytelling experience of D&D is clearly summed up in a
1994 interview:
Meanwhile, we had been playing Dragons & Dungeons game. You know these rolemodel,
role playing games at the Dave Walden’s house, and so I thought, ‘‘Gee, I’d make a
computer version of the Dragons & Dungeons game,’’ and that turned out to be
Adventure.109
With this, D&D’s influence on Crowther is clear. Reexamining Adventure as a peer to TRPGs then gives us a fresh perspective on its design. The aforementioned narrator that speaks to the player as their stand-in within this space bears many similarities to a Game Master. They both describe the setting of a games space, and is able to respond to questions or requests to perform actions. They inform the player if their action is successful or not, and it all is conversational.
This aspiration for Adventure’s core game mechanic, as a naturalized dialogue, would be highly regarded under metaphor metrics of game feel. When a player is confronted with the ability to type in anything to a seemingly-aware narrator, the expectation of a conversation is faithfully upheld, especially when any input is instantly followed by a response. However, this is where
108 Sarah Sloane, Digital Fictions: Storytelling in a Material World (Stamford, Conn: Ablex Pub, 2000), 57. 109 Crowther, William. 1994. Interview with William Crowther. Interview by Katie Hafner. Retrieved from http://www.archive.org/details/WillCrowtherInterview .
53 emulations to GM-player relations find a disconnect. To understand this, a brief description of the programming behind Adventure is required.
After a player submits an action, the game software deploys a function called text parsing. In doing so, it receives the typed input (referred to as a string) and simplifies it by removing unneeded words (‘a’, or ‘the’) or substituting types of words for a common equivalent
(replacing instances for ‘could’ and ‘can’ for ‘able’). This substitution is implemented manually by programmers and in a simplified form is phrased as the following logic: if the string contains words from this list [word1, word2, word3, word4], replace any instance of those words with
[word5]; if the string contains [word6], remove that word from the string. After the string is appropriately condensed and simplified, the program searches an internal database, containing pairs of possible player input strings and appropriate responses, to see if what the player typed in has a prepared response. If there is no such direct match, the computer has a fallback phrase that it returns, such as “I don’t understand that”. As Barton points out, “the scope of possible actions is greatly reduced when a gamer is playing with a program rather than a creative and deft
Dungeon Master, who can find ways to deal with unexpected developments.”110
The use of the fallback phrase in text parsing makes the limitation in text adventure games apparent. While players can indeed type absolutely anything as input, only certain phrases receive a response relevant to the game.111 These phrases are selected by the programmers beforehand, and could be changed after the game’s release. Furthermore, the pioneering nature of
Adventure meant that its text parsing strategies faced limitations that later games did not. My description of text parsing suggests that phrases are cleaned up before used as a search query, but
110 Barton, Dungeons and Desktops, 23. 111 Ibid., 27.
54 this is only the case for later text adventure games; Adventure simply searches for whatever is written, typos and all. This makes the possibility of having a response matching your actions far less likely. Correct answers are organized in a two word, verb-noun phrase. “Get Lamp”, “Throw
Bear”, and “Cross Bridge”, are some of the possible actions that the game could perceive as appropriate. Any other phrasing, such as “Grab Lamp” or “Get Light”, while with similar intent, would return a fallback response.
The game’s text, while driving the narrative, serves a dual purpose then, of also establishing the level of syntax and vocabulary expected from players. The narration is luckily written in conversational English rather than the same two word phrases the game expects from players, a narrative choice that would have undoubtedly led to a rough experience. But the lamp object is always referred to as a lamp, so the expected name for that particular object is clear.
However, there are several types of verbs used in correct phrases and a transcript of the game’s text reveals 193 different words.112 Therefore, if players have an idea of what kind of action they want to perform, they may have to endure some trial-and-error in determining the correct verb that the software accepts; I observed this in my previously recounted experiences with
Spellbreaker. In cases where a puzzle’s expected answer has obscure phrasing, the player feels frustrated; for at least one person, this must have been the case in a room where the only way to bypass a locked grate was to enter “blast”, trigging an explosion of unknown origins.
In this sense, text adventure games mimic the player-GM dynamic, but without the sense of social and theatrical improvisation that can establish the player’s presence in a fictional world.
They cannot ask for more details about a room unless the programmer found it to be significant
112 Don Wood, "Colossal Cave Adventure Source Code," Index of /~don/jerz, http://www.icynic.com/~don/jerz/.
55 enough to include in the game, as an answer to a specifically-worded phrase. Furthermore, players cannot roleplay in the sense that they cannot be a stylized character with their own jargon and speech patterns.
Crowther, a developer working solo on an unknown project, was aware of his text parsing’s limitations. He described the text input mechanics of Adventure as "a thing that gave you the illusion anyway that you'd typed in English commands and it did what you said."113 The player faces this illusion, that they have a freedom of choice in entering any text as input, but it lacks the feeling of direct consequence and response. Furthermore, in the overarching game narrative, the player does not receive a reason why they cannot respond in a way that is natural to their typing style. This is a critical reason why the face-to-face interaction in D&D is so important. Early text adventure games inspired by this activity, but the limitations of their computer platforms prevent the mechanic from being a faithfully-implemented metaphor for authentic dialogue.
Some may criticize text input as an inaccurate or immersive representation of a conversation; communicating through typing is common today with the abundance of texting, emailing, and social media, but such platforms were not commonly available in the 1970s. To suggest that Adventure’s text parsing narrator possesses good game feel should be true in today’s analysis as well as views contemporary to its release. To argue that Adventure’s narrator was a step in the right direction towards a diegetic and believable metaphor, I want to briefly return to
ELIZA. As discussed, the format of this program is similar to that of playing a text adventure in that the user receives prompts from a “narrator” via text displayed on a screen and responds appropriately in a continuous loop. To better visualize the experience, McCorduck provides a
113 Montfort, Twisty Little Passages, 91-92.
56 helpful account of witnessing someone speaking to ELIZA when the program asked to hear about their family:
And it was here that the conversation suddenly became intimate. Our visitor, …who knew
very well that there was a computer at the other end of the line and not a human being,
nevertheless began to disclose his worries about his wife, his children, his distance …
from them. … Something about that impartial machine had evoked a response from the
visitor that the norms of polite human conduct forbade. If a sophisticated computer
scientist could be lured into participating in such a conversation so that he became
nearly oblivious to the spectators about him, what effect might such a conversation ma-
chine have on a less sophisticated person?114
While older than Adventure, ELIZA offers an immersive experience that feels conversational and without such an obvious disconnect or perceived communication barrier. The experience of speaking to this program still accurately represents the metaphor of dialogue, despite users having little other experience in typing through computers to have real-time discussions. From this, we can make some observations towards differences between ELIZA and Adventure, and metaphor-as-metric within game feel concepts.
Most prominently, these two experiences require different roles from the player. In
ELIZA, the narrator asks open-ended questions that lead the user; by motivating the user to talk about themselves in often long passages of text, it is easier for the program to detect certain keywords that can then be used to ask follow up questions. The goal, akin to that of therapy, is for the user to speak about themselves. There is less opportunity for ELIZA to reveal itself as a program and so the metaphor is believable. Adventure differs in that the parser must make sense
114 McCorduck, Machines Who Think, 295.
57 of what the player types, often in very short phrases. The given input is a straightforward action that must be understood, and the parser listens for an exact, correct answer in order to progress the game.
Considering measurements of good game feel, it becomes clear that ELIZA provides a more immersive experience because it better meets the player’s expectations for the metaphor of a dialogue mechanic. After typing in a long passage and essentially pouring their heart out to
ELIZA, the user never receives a response saying that the program does not understand what is said; similarly, a psychologist might ask continuing leading questions than to state that they do not understand. Such a result would certainly sever the sense of immersion. If Adventure’s narrator is truly a proxy for the player and can perform actions for them based on what is typed, there should be a reason why they cannot understand certain words. If there is a narrative cause for the narrator to not have an accurate response, then the act of conversation seems more natural. Even if the reason is silly, with the narrator responding “Sorry, it’s really windy in here which makes it hard to hear – can you say that more simply?”, the player feels like an attempt was made in listening to their input. This problem solving is further explored in chapter 4.
Evolution of the Genre
Following Adventure’s initial release in 1975, the software spread across ARPANET and was ported to other operating systems.115 Programmers and scientists “built ever more intricate and challenging versions of the game” in terms of limiting the number of actions a character could perform.116 It’s popularity inspired many other interactive fiction games, such as Zork, The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Planetfall, which took this basis and improved it across
115 Barton, Dungeons and Desktops, 25. 116 Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan, "Something to Imagine: Literature, Composition, and Interactive Fiction," Computers and Composition 9, no. 1 (1991): 12.
58 several different values, establishing the genre beyond a small-scale experimentation.117 These text adventure games built on the success and structuring of Adventure to offer more and complex text parsing functions. The 1982 text adventure game The Hobbit (based on the J.R.R.
Tolkien book) let players include adverbs in their actions (“drink delicious beer”), using an advanced parser called Inglish.118 Zork, known for its clever humour and wordplay, let players perform commands with specific items (“hit troll with the sword”). If we were to consider aspects of game feel within these later text adventure games and compare them with the more rudimentary parsing seen in Adventure, the differences are significant.
From this, it follows that the late seventies saw the launch of a strong commercial market for text adventures, other interactive fiction games, and video games in general. In order to enhance the experience of text adventures, several companies offered physical props, called
“feelies”.119 These objects provide supplemental information to players, such as maps or photos that cannot be included with the software itself. Furthermore, they represent a tangible part of the game world brought to life, and echoes the use of maps and small human figurines that TRPG players use to situate themselves on a grid-like map representing an area such as a town or dungeon.
An improvement in the quality of the software itself was apparent alongside its commercial popularity. In Adventure, there are no images, as the platform capabilities could not accommodate such advanced graphics display. Later text adventure games, such as Mystery
117 Infocom, Zork I; Infocom, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Apple II (Infocom, 1984); Infocom, Planetfall, Apple II (Infocom, 1983). 118 Beam Software, The Hobbit. 119 Daniel Keller, "Reading and Playing: What Makes Interactive Fiction Unique," in The Players Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and Gaming, by J. Patrick Williams and Jonas Heide Smith (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2007), 281.
59 House for the Apple II utilize ASCII art to help illustrate described scenes.120 In both of these examples, the text-only nature presents great performance benefits which aided the boom of text adventure games from the late 1970s to early 1980s. Different computer platforms function with specific graphics architectures, but the textual quality of these games ensured that they were easily ported across all popular platforms at the time.
However, when video game consoles emerged, this mechanic of text parsing did not follow; in fact, the dialogue systems of games changed dramatically. The aforementioned influence of TRPGs remained, but in a completely different direction from text adventure games and their idealized sociality. With a focus on action through their platform’s controllers, video games offered environments where players performed short (albeit usually violent) actions.
Console roleplaying games as a genre heavily drew from TRPGs. When looking at some of the popular roleplaying video games released before 1990, The Bard’s Tale, Dragon Warrior,
Ultima I, Final Fantasy, and Wizard’s Crown, many of them incorporate fantasy elements present in popular D&D official campaigns.121 Heroes would band together in parties of three or four and save the world from an all-menacing evil, often with magical elements tossed in for flair. The actual mechanics show similarities as well, but only in terms of combat. Players of these games also pit their party against monsters in battles, where they take turns attacking monsters. Like in TRPGs, characters have their own individual statistics, however these are often tied to a character’s strength, defense, or magical abilities; the more social characteristics of
120 On-Line Systems, Mystery House, Apple II (On-Line Systems, 1980). 121 Interplay Productions, The Bard’s Tale, Commodore 64 (Electronic Arts, 1985).; Chunsoft, Dragon Warrior, Nintendo Entertainment System (Enix, 1986).; Origin Systems, Ultima I, MSX2 (Pony Canyon, 1981).; Square, Final Fantasy, Nintendo Entertainment System (Square, 1987).; Strategic Simulations, Inc., Wizard’s Crown, Atari ST (Strategic Simulations, Inc., 1987).
60 charisma and intelligence are missing from these games. A significant reason for this shift is the aforementioned limitations and disconnect with player input, but there are broader factors concerning the hardware platforms of early console video games. This requires a departure from the software underbelly of the games and more towards the design and use of their platforms.
Conclusion
I have examined the historical foundations of dialogue systems in games, and the influences Adventure received from natural language processing in ELIZA, as well as collaborative storytelling in TRPGs. Text parsing in games aspires to portray authentic conversations intended to carry on a game’s narrative. Its successful application as a mechanic has the potential of aligning with good game feel under a metaphor metric, however its implementation has its own shortcomings, preventing it from becoming an accurate metaphor for dialogue. As game platforms increase in capabilities, they affect the design of these mechanics, and alter the player’s responsibilities in being social within a game world. Following this, approaches in what a game dialogue system should look are questioned, and as future chapters show, designers contend with several aspects of platform capabilities in addition to maintaining good game feel.
61 Chapter 3 – Evaluating Contemporary Dialogue Systems
In this chapter, I consider the medium specificity of video games through their platforms such as computers or dedicated consoles, and their influence on video game design. In observing shifts in dialogue’s treatment in gameplay as the result of handheld controllers, I give an overview of the current status quo of branching dialogue systems; their differences with qualities of text parsing become clear through an analysis of their characteristics according to Steve
Swink’s metrics of game feel, particularly that of metaphors. While ubiquitous in most RPGs, I argue that little innovation is been observed in dialogue systems, a mechanic that should receive far more attention considering its impact on the player’s experience within a game world.
Design in the Console Era
The large scale introduction of video game consoles to the consumer market in the early
1980s was a huge departure from prior forms of video games played on computers, or in arcades where games had seen booming popularity. Raiford Guins notes the Oxford English Dictionary’s
1976 definition for a “game console” as: “a new variety of electronic game that can be hooked up to the family TV set. Most recent development is a small console with replaceable cartridges to provide a large number of game selections.”122 Consoles have their own hardware specifications that all respective games must adhere to. However, a critical component of game consoles not included in this definition is the method of input, or the controller for the console; a game “hooked up” to a television cannot do anything unless one can actually play it. In the current popularities of motion controls and touch screens enjoyable across several different
122 A. C. Deger, Raiford Guins, and Henry Lowood, Debugging Game history: A Critical Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 64.
62 consoles, there are endless forms that a controller can take.123 Controllers are a vital part of the playing experience because, other than manually turning off a console, they are the sole way of interacting with the software. Prior to the standard handheld controllers enjoyed today, its hardware found a few different forms. Of course, the personal computer as a game platform offers the standard keyboard and mouse, but there are also configurations of paddle controllers, and joysticks, which often limit themselves to specific types of play.124 But for consoles dedicated to many games such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), controller design has to be open to a variety of mechanics and playing styles. The design of such devices must offer a variety of different types of input, all the while still having an intuitive layout to the novice player holding it; natural mapping of controls for a game makes the experience of playing feel like second-nature and therefore more enjoyable.125
The brick-like NES controller did just that, pushing aside the 1977 joystick controller of the Atari 2600 as a “more universally applicable device.”126 With two main action buttons, a directional pad (“d-pad”), as well as “Start” and “Select” buttons in the middle, the controller is comfortably held in two hands while the thumbs reach over and press any button without strain, even if held by a child.127 However, game developers have to work within these input constraints
123 This stands true beyond controllers made for the most popular games consoles. The alternative controller development scene has thrived with the popularity of microcontrollers such as Arduinos. This comes from personal experience; I created my own small video games and accompanying handmade controller, based around a zoetrope animation device, which I went on to showcase at San Francisco’s international Game Developer’s Conference in 2016. 124 Deger et al, Debugging Game History, 82. 125 Paul Skalski et al., "Mapping the Road to Fun: Natural Video Game Controllers, Presence, and Game Enjoyment," New Media Society 13, no. 2 (2011): 224-242. 126 Steven L. Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games (New York: Random House International, 2002), 279. 127 Erik F. Strommen, Setareh Razavi, and Lisa M. Medoff, "This Button Makes You Go Up: Three-Year-Olds and the Nintendo Controller," Applied Ergonomics 23, no. 6 (1992): 413.
63 to decide what actions should be performed by the player and with which buttons they should use. By pressing the same configuration of buttons, one can be an adventurer slaying monsters and conquering dungeons with a sword and shield at hand like in The Legend of Zelda, or become a doctor to eradicate viruses in Tetris-like gameplay in Dr. Mario.128
How ever many of the variety of settings a video game can incorporate, there is one type of gameplay that is difficult to perform well with the NES controller. While the controller features buttons entitled A and B, they certainly do not have buttons C, D, E, F, or any other letters from the alphabet. Compared to the 64-button layouts of computer keyboards, the 4 buttons on the controller cannot compete when it comes to text input. Some console RPG games do permit the player to enter text, but only at the start of a game to name the main characters. In this, the letters of the alphabet along with a delete key and confirm command appear on the screen. Using the directional pad, players control a cursor and scroll through the letters, manually typing out a string one letter at a time in a far more arduous process than simply using a keyboard. The act is long and feels unnatural with a game controller. As such, playing an entire text adventure game in this way would not be enjoyable, especially with the possibility of having to retype answers in different ways to get around aforementioned text parsing constraints.
However, the ability to type was a defining feature of this genre and was key to achieving a sense of presence in a largely text-based world.
Admittedly, the NES does offer different types of peripherals that can either be used for specific games or across all titles in odd configurations. Among these include the Ray Gun, the
128 Nintendo R&D4, The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo Entertainment System (Nintendo, 1987); Nintendo R&D1, Dr. Mario, Nintendo Entertainment System (Nintendo, 1990).
64 NES Power Pad and the Roll ‘n Rocker, the later of which is controlled by one’s feet.129 In all of these, the same concepts of design are observed, however their use is not as common as the standard controller that comes packaged with the console. As such, these controllers were quite niche within consumer markets. A keyboard-type input device was not released, but as for its impact on the lack of text adventure games on the NES, it is a chicken-or-egg type scenario. Did developers avoid this genre for consoles because of the lack of appropriate controllers, or did companies not build these controllers due to the scarcity of games requiring them?
It is with these input-based struggles that a shift in dialogue system mechanics occurs in console game design. As previously mentioned, the late 1980s and the popularity of home consoles saw a new type of RPG based more around the combat aspect of TRPGs. When the player fights an enemy, they do not press one button to jump and another one to swing a weapon to deal damage, typical of arcade side-scrolling games at the time. Instead, the player sees an enemy on the screen as well as a small box with a list of different actions to perform. As an example, consider Dragon Warrior.130 When the player begins a battle sequence, they read an onscreen message identifying the enemy; with a pixelated blue orb-like monster with eyes, they would be told “A slime draws near! Command?” (fig. 3). Then, they have the option to attack, cast a magical spell, use an item, or run away. Moving the directional input on the controller (up, down, left, and right), they select the option they wish to perform and press a button to confirm.
The action is carried out, and then the enemy is able to perform actions. The process, similar to battles in Dungeons & Dragons, is continued until one party is defeated. This turn-based combat
129 Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort, "New Media as Material Constraint: An Introduction to Platform Studies," in Proceedings of First International HASTAC Conference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 187. 130 Chunsoft, Dragon Warrior, Famicom (Enix, 1986).
65 was common in other RPG games at the time, although it is most evocative of text adventures in that Dragon Warrior specifically prompts the player’s choice by asking them the command they wish to perform. Hints of the narrator remain, in being told the scene’s description and the list of commands representing the possible “correct” actions a player can perform.
Knowing this, the most identifiable link between text adventure games and the current status quo of dialogue systems in games is found in a small subset of NES games with this selection mechanic, made compatible for the platform’s controllers. Of these, Princess Tomato, an extremely niche puzzle game featuring anthropomorphic vegetables, is the only one of these titles to be exported to western audiences, however the structure of these games are all similar.131
In the center of the screen is a small image displaying the area or scene of the game that the player can engage, with a short text passage describing the scene below (fig. 4). On either side of this is a column of 14 possible actions that the player can perform; Princess Tomato allows the player to ‘move’, ‘give’, ‘praise’, and ‘fight’, to name a few possibilities. None of these commands change during gameplay, and the player must scroll through the options using the d- pad on the controller, and determine the correct action in the proper situation. From these types of games, there is a progression in iterative design: from typing in words (Adventure) to typing in phrases (Zork) to selecting prewritten words (Princess Tomato). By planning out phrases that the player can ask, there is no need to fight with the game controller’s limited capabilities in text input. This is the general basis that today’s dialogue trees have grown from.
Perhaps this explains why game narratives during these times focus more on action and combat as a way of progression instead of more introspective journeys. Players can quickly
131 Hudson Soft, Princess Tomato, version Nintendo Entertainment System (Tokyo: Hudson Soft, 1991).
66 communicate in the game world with doing, rather than saying. Furthermore, the low resolution of the NES, at 256 by 240 pixels, is not compatible with large text passages appearing on the screen. In basic menu texts such as “start” and “pause”, it is hard to enhance letters with a font style other than blocky. While manageable for small user interface elements, entire passages of text can be interpreted as muddled and crowded.
This is not to suggest that these games are without stories and rich characterization, but that the player’s choice in communicating with NPCs is heavily reduced. In the act of roleplaying a specific character, the player cannot decide for themselves what they should say, and instead must choose from predetermined actions.132 Dialogue choices are more functional than emotional, such as choosing “yes” or “no” to prompts to sell items in a shop, for example.
There are certainly other factors in why parsing was abandoned as a dialogue system beyond those mentioned, such as marketing priorities and consumer demand, but this shift to a selection- based mechanic is the basis of what we see in current games.
Metrics of Contemporary Dialogue Systems
Dialogue systems have grown in structure across succeeding games and advancing platforms, offering complexity and depth in communicating with NPCs. Dialogue trees as game mechanics are commonly used in both basic and advanced RPGs since their introduction, and draw their name from the branching options players have as a conversation progresses, similar in appearance to a genealogical tree. When the player interacts with an NPC, they receive choices of prewritten phrases to say. Player movement is temporarily locked for the encounter’s duration as the buttons for choosing phrases are typically the same. Upon selection, the NPC responds and subsequent choices in accordance with the prior dialogue option are provided. The player is then
132 Penny Sweetser, Emergence in Games (Boston: Charles River Media, 2008), 336.
67 prompted to make another choice of options (fig. 5). This cycle continues until the conversation ends, either when the player selects a farewell message, the NPC has nothing else to say, or when the player makes a bad choice and prompts the NPC to leave the conversation. As with interactions with NPCs in TRPGs, dialogue trees give players the opportunity to unlock sidequests, progress the game’s central plotline, or enrich the game world with supplemental exposition. Variations in dialogue tree systems can incorporate selectable moods, alter relationships with NPCs, or timed responses which can all alter potential dialogue options, however the main structure of interactions is consistent across most games.133
To illustrate, consider The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as an example.134 While this game is a more recent title compared to those discussed thus far, it stands to show how little the mechanic has evolved over the past 25 years. Skyrim is a vast 3D open-world RPG in which players create their own character by choosing their race, gender and skill specialization (through a leveling system). While there is an overarching narrative involving magic, dragons, and becoming a hero destined to save the world, players can explore towns and interact with hundreds of NPCs at their leisure. A common building staple within the province of Skyrim is the tavern where players buy food, sleep in a warm bed, and listen around for rumours from barkeeps and other patrons. The tavern in the stronghold of Whiterun, The Bannered Mare, features an NPC bard named Mikael, an aspiring Casanova-type who spends his evening singing folk songs about Skyrim’s lore.
When the player approaches and talks to him, several dialogue options appear, each with their own voice-acted reactions (fig. 6). For example, the player can request a song, or ask about
133 James Ryan, Michael Mateas, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, "A Lightweight Videogame Dialogue Manager," in Proceedings of 1st International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG (Dundee, 2016), 1. 134 Bethesda Game Studios, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Microsoft Windows (Bethesda Softworks, 2011).
68 where he learned to play. Furthermore, if the player has unlocked a sidequest by talking to
Carlotta, a nearby NPC tired of rejecting Mikael’s amorous advances, they can ask that he stay away from her. Typical of Mikael’s overtly confident personality, he replies by dismissing such concerns. In response, the dialogue tree continues, providing the player with several options to convince him to leave Carlotta alone, through persuasion, bribery, or even fighting. When
Mikael finally agrees to the player’s terms, that dialogue option is removed as the quest is complete. Both the dialogue options and results provide opportunity for rich characterization. By controlling what the player can say to NPCs, writers not only provide responses to each line of player dialogue, but they better guide the narrative and the player’s experience of it.
I argue that branching dialogue systems in RPGs are, by and large, the status quo for
NPC dialogue in games for one of two options. On the one hand, it indicates that this system is designed optimally and cannot be improved in any way. The sheer number of titles that incorporate it reflects its widespread application and suggests that is the most efficient way to incorporate communication in a game. But does this also suggest that all games that use branching dialogue have good game feel by virtue of using this mechanic? On the other hand, its ubiquity over the past three decades is representative of the dismissals that narrative and, by extension, dialogue receive in games today. In this, I suggest that branching dialogue systems are the status quo in games because any innovation in design takes place in more action-related gameplay elements. Dialogue systems are seldom cutting-edge in games, they merely exist in the background as they are rarely a defining gameplay feature.
This design of branching dialogues contrasts with features of text adventure games, in terms of structural rules and the responsibility of the player. It is not my intention to declare that one is better than the other, as they both have different paradigms in narrative flow. In designing
69 dialogue systems in games, there are many different elements that combine to create a cohesive experience with a strong metaphoric representation of communication. Following Swink’s metrics in measuring game feel, it is important to compare the successful interactivity of different games and their mechanics. Simply stating that playing something is fun is not a good qualifier for whether it possesses good game design, and so Swink’s methods are helpfully applied here in order for us to understand ways that game dialogue is improved. The following sections apply said metrics of input, response, context, polish, metaphor, and rules to this foundational model of branching dialogue systems. My aim in this is to demonstrate the potentials of experimentation that could be explored, with a particular focus, once again, on the metaphor metric; this analysis carries on to the next chapter as I demonstrate various cases of game design problem-solving.
Input
Designing modes of input in a game is a critical task as it incorporates the physical hardware of controllers in conjunction with “the player’s origin of expression in the game world.”135 Conventional console controllers have buttons, thumbsticks, triggers, and all sorts of options for communicating with game software. It is important for the layout of buttons used in
NPC dialogue to be arranged in a way that feels natural and ergonomic to the player holding the controller. They should not have to press several buttons simultaneously on different sides of the controller just to perform one action; this is why movement and other controls are locked during dialogue, so the same basic gameplay controls are reutilized. As mentioned, it is because of this button-based input that there is a shift from text parsing to branching dialogue. As dialogue
135 Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Boca Raton: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2014), 246.
70 options are arranged as a list on screen, players need a way to cycle through said lines (usually via directional input) and a confirmation button once the dialogue option is decided. Dialogue systems in PC games, which use a keyboard and mouse, may use the same input with the caveat of a mouse option to simply click on the desired option. As many PC games are ported to consoles and vice versa, the input style remains accessible to both types of platforms, which is why keyboard-based input is not a mandatory input method in contemporary games. There is rarely variation in this type of input across different dialogue systems.
Response
Measuring the response in a game is to examine the real-time control of the game or system, and the game output resulting from a player’s actions. As such, much of the response metric works in tandem with that of the input metric. Dialogue with NPCs is a back-and-forth experience, with the NPC volleying back instant responses to the player’s dialogue selections.
While a game hypothetically can force the player to wait the equivalent length of time it would take for a person to conversationally say the player’s chosen phrase, this would be boring to watch. The reason for this is tied to my earlier explanation of violent gameplay offering more satisfaction to the player because they receive instant feedback from their actions.
There are usually options to exit NPC dialogue before the conversation is over (by pressing a button dedicated to “canceling” or going “back” in menu options), or to speed up the rate that the NPC speaks at (by holding down a button). This is done for two reasons. First, a player in their exploration of a town can repeatedly talk to a NPC without recognizing them at first. Upon reading the same dialogue from them, they can instead exit the conversation to avoid the monotony of speaking to them as there is nothing else to be gained. Interrupting an NPC in this way rarely has consequences and is seen as a choice from the player outside the game, rather
71 than the character they are controlling within that encounter.
In controlling a teenager named Alex, the supernatural mystery game Oxenfree lets the player engage in conversation with her fellow friends as they explore a mysterious island.136 As the voice-acted conversations progress, the player sees speech bubbles emerge from her head, indicating the different dialogue options they can use to interrupt NPCs (fig. 7); these are optional and the player can choose to remain silent and let the NPC finish their sentence.
Otherwise, they cut off what is being said, sometimes to the benefit or peril of personal relationships that build over the game. The response is instant and the pacing of the conversations feel natural, realistically accounting for sometimes awkward beats that can occur in real life situations. As lead designer Sean Krankel explains, "We thought, why not let you move freely while communicating, interacting, and exploring a branching narrative?”137 The player’s decisions have drastic effects on the ending of the game, and so the game can be replayed multiple time to observe the results of the different narrative paths.
Polish
Engaging with an NPC requires a of visual presence, to know that there is a character and that the player is speaking to them. The most obvious element of dialogue systems is their appearance on the screen as a user interface. Most dialogue appears as text that overlays the visible gameplay. Often times it appears with a light coloured box behind it, resembling a speech bubble commonly associated with comic books. The 2017 narrative-heavy game Night in the
Woods uses black speech bubbles against white text with an animated affect that subtly warps in
136 Night School Studios, Oxenfree, Microsoft Windows (Night School Studios, 2016). 137 Bryant Francis, "Road to the IGF: Night School Studio's Oxenfree," Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games, February 4, 2016, accessed April 23, 2017, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/264900/Road_to_the_IGF_Night_School_Studios_Oxenf ree.php.
72 shape, giving dialogue a more dynamic appearance (fig. 8).138 Text that appears on screen is enhanced or juiced with the use of bold characters to emphasize key words, or decorative effects
(such a different colour) to convey the personality of the character. Individual text characters are usually sequentially revealed so that a phrase is unveiled across the speech bubble over a few seconds; this is a small but meaningful tweak that gives the impression that dialogue is said in linear time, much like how a sentence is spoken.
Beyond visual appearance, games polish dialogue systems in different ways. With the increased technological capabilities of consoles came more advanced soundcards and larger storage space, permitting voice recorded lines that play alongside text dialogue as it is said.139
This is a great opportunity for rich voice acting that enhances the gameplay experience, but it comes with drawbacks best understood from a development perspective. Voice acting is expensive and it can easily eat up a game’s budget unless writers are economical. Writing scripts for the voice actors to perform from must be written well in advance so that they can prepare before the recording day. Long monologues are rarely seen for this reason and calling voice actors to return to rerecord lines that change is not a common practice.
Context
Context as a metric refers to the interaction between objects. In this case, it is between the player and the dialogue system itself, and how the the player selects dialogue options. Dialogue options that the player chooses from appear in a list that is possible to scroll through with a controller’s directional input. From this, there are more recent titles that experiment with how the player selects options. Some variations in their design include a radial approach, like that in the
138 Infinite Fall, Night in the Woods, Microsoft Windows (Finji, 2017). 139 Games with voice acting almost always at least include options for text subtitles for accessibility reasons.
73 Mass Effect series, which maps with the joystick of an Xbox or PlayStation controller for quick selection; this simple method of input is made necessary by a timer that counts down the time that players have to choose (fig. 9). Enforcing a time limit on dialogue choices is an interesting option as it offers a mimicry of social conventions in conversations; one cannot mull between what to say to a simple question for several minutes. Players must go with their instincts and choose what first comes to mind, rather than what may necessarily be an answer deemed correct or desirable by the game.
Rules
Swink describes a rule as “an arbitrary, designed relationship between parameters or objects in a game.”140 Dialogue systems have multiple layers of rules that are followed in their implementation. On a base level, in order to fit dialogue options within the UI, they are short and concise. This also adheres to the player’s attention span, as they may not wish to read multiple sentences for each dialogue options. As seen with Skyrim, certain dialogue options may only become available in conversation with NPCs if the player has unlocked the ability to do so. This can require the player to embark on a sidequest in relation to that NPC, but there can also be more nuanced causes. The the first two titles in the RPG series Fallout, by the same developer of
The Elder Scrolls series, also lets players customize their characters and their personality attributes.141 With a limited number of points, players can delegate them to an intelligence modifier to indicate their proficiency. This greatly affects dialogue options, as an intelligent character can use more persuasive options to convince an NPC of something, while one with no points in intelligence is dismissed or treated rudely by NPCs (fig. 10). Small variables like this
140 Swink, Game Feel, 179. 141 Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design, 466.
74 come to have a large impact on how a player perceives game feel. Players witness the long term results of decisions made in the beginning of the game, and witness their character’s improvement and increasing options in conversations as they increase certain skills and abilities.
Metaphor
Returning once again to the metaphor metric, an overarching question asked is whether the aforementioned metrics and elements contribute to a believable representation of a conversation. The most prominent characteristic of dialogue trees is their prewritten nature. As such, players have limited choice and cannot ask their own questions. This technique avoids the challenge of text parsing in game dialogue, however there are narrative shortcomings in its integration within a game world. In order for a dialogue tree system to be believable in a game, there should be narrative reasons why the player has a limited number of options of what they can say. As the player is typically represented through their game’s avatar and controls their actions, there is a disconnect in potential interactivity; why can they control every physical step of their avatar, but have to navigate social interactions between a multiple choice-like system?
Conclusion
This chapter has considered the relationship between platforms and their influence on a game’s design. The introduction of handheld controllers, while a versatile form of input for many action-based games, guides the development of more linear choices for the player when interacting with NPCs. Branching dialogue systems are now the status quo in RPGs, which come with their own benefits and drawbacks. A game’s narrative becomes easily directed, as writers control every possible outcome in NPC an encounter with responsive results; a NPC always understands what a player selects as a dialogue option.
75 As I argue however, if compared to mechanics in text adventure games, or even TRPGs, there is less emphasis on the player’s responsibility in experiential storytelling. Recalling ludology and narratology debates then, I question if such arguments against game narrative would be lessened if there is more emphasis on dialogue and storytelling as gameplay, with more choice for the player to communicate. As game designer Aaron Reed pointed out at the Game
Developers Conference in 2016, “branching stories look like a maze, and mazes are static. You can never do anything that will surprise the author. It’s all fake, it’s a trap.”142 I am not so interested in positioning one approach as better than the other, I am instead critical of why this mechanic remains mostly unchanged since the genre’s blossoming on video game consoles. Up against the hardware limitations of controllers, dialogue systems settle into a specific framework.
However, the number of ways one communicates shows that there is potential for boundless experimentation. This is ultimately a game design issue, and so looking towards other examples of problem solving may reveal an application to innovating dialogue in games.
142 Colin Campbell, "Branching dialogue trees poorly serve narrative games, says GDC panel," Polygon, March 14, 2016, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.polygon.com/2016/3/14/11223458/gdc-2016-panel-narrative-innovation-showcase- storytelling.
76 Chapter 4 – Designing Around Hardware Limitations
The previous chapter outlined the foundational elements of conventional branching dialogue systems seen in most contemporary RPGs. Comparing conversations in text adventure games to the more linear selection of dialogue lines, it is clear that a large shift occurred due to hardware limitations, most notably due to controller layouts. This arguably has an effect on narrative design, as NPC interaction becomes a storytelling device rather than a potential form of gameplay. Experiences like Colossal Cave Adventure let players tell the story alongside the narrator, feeling like actual dialogue with a freedom of textual input. In contrast, branching dialogue systems, despite their multi-forked structure, usually end up in the same resolution despite all their options for narrative choice.143 As Szilas and Illea argue, the variability of choices in narrative experiences increase immersion, engagement, as well as a feeling of excitement.144 Branching dialogue is a perfectly acceptable form of storytelling, however there has been much criticism on storytelling and writing quality in games to the point where this specific formulation of dialogue does not necessarily boost a game’s narrative. While design of this mechanic has remained similar over the years, there is no reason why experimentation cannot be done, especially with growing numbers of independent game creators.
This chapter is dedicated to the experimental design of game mechanics and approaches in problem-solving in the face of hardware limitations. By underscoring the importance of narrative and worldbuilding within video games, we can see their importance in creating a believable space despite technological boundaries. In supporting this claim, I present two game
143 See Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive processing: digital fictions, computer games, and software studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 144 Nicolas Szilas and Ioana Ilea, "Objective Metrics for Interactive Narrative," in Interactive Storytelling. 7th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, proceedings (Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2014), 100.
77 case studies that illustrate the benefits that cohesive narratives in game design provide in order to create a believable and immersive world. From this, I question if this approach in storytelling can be applied to other areas of game design with the intention of focusing on dialogue systems that use constructed language as a narrative trope. I close the chapter by looking at current games that make steps in innovating ways we examine communicating in games, as well as highlighting small game prototypes of my own that attempt to introduce new forms of dialogue systems.
My research focus is on dialogue systems, as they are one of the most common but forgotten game mechanics in RPGs. However, the issues in hardware capabilities that these systems face are not unique to dialogue in games. There are plenty of other features in games that are designed with lofty ambitions in achieving good game feel that jut up against strict limitations on what is or is not possible. Console hardware is constantly marketed with a claim of advanced technological capabilities, offering far more immersive gameplay experiences than their predecessor (due to advanced video cards or more memory). However, platform limitations and continual innovations get in the way of achieving any sort of ultimate perfection in fidelity.145 As Bogost and Montfort point out, “platforms are layered - from hardware through operating system and into other software layers”, and different layers can dictate the design of specific game features.146 Textures (the “skin” applied to 3D models) are only so detailed, file sizes are only so large, and gameplay is only so faithful from an original vision. When a platform is designed, specific technical specifications critically impact how it reaches its target demographic.147 In return, when a company chooses a platform to develop a game for, they make
145 See Thomas H. Apperley and Darshana Jayemane, "Game Studies' Material Turn," Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 9, no. 1 (October 2012): 5-25. 146 Montfort and Bogost, Racing the beam, 3. 147 An overview of the production of the Sega Dreamcast, and its difficulties within the console market is found in Nick Montfort and Mia Consalvo, "The Dreamcast, Console of the Avant-
78 judgments on what aspects of a game are prioritized, as well as the audiences that they think would enjoy it most. Certain games are better enjoyed on mobile platforms such as cell phones, offering gameplay that is enjoyed in short bursts as someone rides their daily subway commutes.
Other games require intensive 3D rendering only available for custom-built, high-powered personal computers; this is currently observed with emerging virtual reality headset consoles, which enjoy a niche but enthusiastic audience.
But while games cannot always achieve good game feel due to hardware limitations, they still must present themselves as being able to “have it all”. This creates disharmony in determining what is highlighted in the game. Some games have good graphics while others focus on UI design, or online capabilities. By organizing design features in particular ways, developers prioritize particular conceptions of the video game industry and the player. Game development then becomes a juggling act of creating a piece of media that maintains an illusion of storytelling and worldbuilding while also working within hardware limitations that prevent an imagined concept from being executed exactly as planned. To combat this, game designers use tricks inspired by other media forms, and narrative strategies in order to combat these perceived limitations and I argue dialogue systems should receive similar management. To support this, I offer two different examples of video games in which this treatment is applied, across game platforms and generations.
Metal Gear
To start, we can look back to the mid-1980s with the MSX2 home computer, popular mostly in Japan despite the American Microsoft’s involvement in development. Before the
Garde," Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association 6, no. 9 (2012): 86- 87.
79 release of Nintendo’s Family Computer (Famicom), the MSX series was the platform for most major Japanese game studios such as Konami and Hudson Soft. One of the first game series offered by Konami, which enjoys continued success today, was Metal Gear, originally on the
MSX (fig 3).148 The Metal Gear franchise is a series of games (later localized for western audiences) which features Solid Snake, a spy that infiltrates bases and sneaks past enemies while the player controls him in a third-person perspective. The game series has released eleven titles across five game consoles and nearly three decades. Highly praised for its tension in gameplay, its unconventional mechanics based around stealth, and use of the console itself, the game is identified as a proper boundary-pusher for medium specificity in games. In the original 1987 game, the player navigates Solid Snake through various locations, while avoiding visual contact and direct confrontation with patrolling guards. If the player is seen, the game enters the "Alert
Mode" and they must first escape from enemy's sight in order to resume infiltration.
As mentioned, open discussions of game development are hard to come by due to non- disclosure agreements. It is then fortunate that Hideo Kojima, the designer and director for the series, gave a keynote presentation at the Game Developers Conference in 2009 about his experiences in developing Metal Gear.149 Kojima describes his developing of the levels with the intention of creating an action-packed shooter game that featured modern military combat.
Inspired by various action films during the 1980s, one can imagine bullets flying with enemies coming from all edges of the screen while the player tries to fight them all. However, when it came to implementing this vision, he found out that the hardware limitations of the MSX2 could not handle the fast-paced scenes he envisioned. At any given point, the game can only handle
148 Konami, Metal Gear, MSX2 (Konami, 1987). 149 Hideo Kojima, "Solid Game Design: Making the ‘Impossible’ Possible" (lecture, Game Developers Conference, San Francisco, March 26, 2009).
80 Snake, two enemies, and no more than two bullets rendered on the screen. Such gameplay, framed within an action genre, is not fulfilling to players who enter the gameplay experience with preconceived standards of what an action game is.
To accommodate this limitation in the platform, Kojima drastically changed the narrative of Metal Gear, making it believable to the player that limited enemies could be on-screen simultaneously. Instead of storming the enemy base and shooting everyone on sight (a noisy procession sure to catch the attention of other foes), Solid Snake was reimagined as a spy that would instead infiltrate bases. Sneaking around enemies requires strategy and patience, contrasting with a traditionally bullets-blazing playing style. By changing the game objective and plot to one based around stealth and evasion, the player wanted to avoid fighting and enemies, accommodating a gameplay mechanic that avoided placing any stress on the processing power of the MSX2. This all made sense within the game world, as sneaking past enemies would require no bullets to be rendered.
As a result, the hardware limitation is integrated into the game by using a narrative device to obscure its ability to break the sense of presence and believability for the player. The narrative of a spy using strategy instead of bullets is now integral to the game world of Metal
Gear, not only for narrative cohesion but because this design strategy of using a narrative to define gameplay allows for less strain on future consoles’ memory capabilities.
Silent Hill
My second example concerns how shortcomings in the graphics of a game is obscured by narrative. In rendering objects in a 3D world space, there is a limit to how far away objects are seen by the game’s camera. The term draw distance is used to describe this, the distance of
81 objects in a 3D scene “drawn” by the rendering engine.150 Objects or polygons of an object beyond this boundary are not seen, but as soon as it enters the draw distance, as the player-and- camera moves forward, it suddenly pops into view. As complex rendering engines are very processing-heavy, this can cause issues in presenting a realistic world space. If a player is in a field with a short draw distance, they can spot a mountain in the distance suddenly pop into view, which is startling and not natural to the game world. A very common way of combatting this pop-in effect is through adding a fog-like visual effect. While objects still pop into sight, it is covered up by this fog effect which hides the edge of the engine’s draw distance. However, in many games that try to emulate natural environments, it does not make sense for fog to be present; this is doubly so for games with a very short draw distance, which causes confusion for the player when there is an unexplainable thick fog around them.
One of the most prominent original game titles to use this effect to great success, in which a fog is believable to the game world and narrative, is in the 1999 title Silent Hill for the
Sony PlayStation.151 The game follows Harry Mason as he searches for his missing daughter in the fictional American town Silent Hill, encountering monsters and puzzles obstructing his objective. While there are many earlier horror games, Silent Hill stands out as a pioneer in the survival horror genre, largely due its handling of the PlayStation’s hardware limitations. Other games use protagonists with combat training, but Harry Mason is a “ludological anomaly who lacks [these] extravagant powers”; he is an average citizen, with unsteady aim that hinders the
150 Ellery Connell, 3D for Graphic Designers (San Francisco: Wiley, 2011), 8. 151 Team Silent, Silent Hill, Sony Playstation (Konami, 1999).
82 player at times, and who gasps for breath after sprinting.152 He is a character who, like the player controlling him, is an uncertain outsider in this game world.
In Silent Hill, the player explores a supernatural world full of monsters they must defend themselves from. The atmosphere feels isolating and the player is vulnerable as they wander through a seemingly abandoned town. As the original PlayStation was part of the first generation of video game consoles to utilize real-time 3D environments, it has limited capabilities in what could be rendered, and a lot to learn about its potentials. Using a fog effect to cover up Silent
Hill’s limited draw distance hides the clipping and pop-in effects of character models and scenery as the player moved through the space (fig. 11).153 Darkness and fog play a large factor in the game’s mood, and while the player uncovers a flashlight early in the game, using the tool only illuminates a few feet in front of them.
The heavy fog and limited visual field utilizes environmental storytelling to indicate that the player is in a dangerous, supernatural space; the fog also increases the anxiety of enemies hiding in the fog, which aids a game based around horror and suspense. Masashi Tsuboyama of
Konami confirms this in saying that “the existence of fog and darkness and the real and alternate world is an important element in creating feel.”154 The resulting aesthetic effect was highly praised after the game’s release, to the point where resources were dedicated in order to improve the fog graphically in Silent Hill 2.155 This fog becomes a type of mechanic as metaphor, and it hides a hardware problem through a narrative limitation that makes sense within the game world.
152 Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 175. 153 Bernard Perron, Silent Hill: The Terror Engine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 27. 154 Ibid., 29. 155 Ibid., 27.; Ibid., 70.
83 As Swink describes, in measuring context metrics within game feel, “constraints define sensation.”156 This technique helps solidify the game world as a supernatural space that isolates the player and creates tension even when walking down a linear street, as the player is unable to see what is more than a few feet ahead of them. Facing the hardware limitations of the
PlayStation was an important starting point in developing a psychological style of horror in video games, moving away from earlier cliché elements.
Experimental Approaches
These two examples reflect that a detailed sense of world building and narrative cohesion is effective in obscuring hardware limitations that affect both graphics and gameplay. It is able to work within the framework of a game, while at the same time creating a stronger connection between gameplay and narrative, with benefits for the player in terms of creating an intriguing space to explore, as well as establishing a presence in said space. While there are countless features in game development that are limited by their hardware, dialogue systems are interesting to me because of their importance as a method of world building, despite their limitations by hardware and lack of significant evolution within the past few decades. Dialogue in games are a type of narrative, yet their delivery strategies beg for further innovation.
The previous chapter detailed the standard conventions for branching dialogue systems, using Skyrim and several other games as examples. As more diversity enters the game development community through independent creators and a wider accessibility to industry-level tools, further experimentation in dialogue systems is made possible. The remainder of this
156 Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Boca Raton: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2014), 248.
84 chapter samples some unique examples of dialogue systems in games, as well as experimentation that I have performed, inspired by text parsing systems in aforementioned text adventure games.
Following the game design problem solving seen in Silent Hill and Metal Gear, narrative and worldbuilding is critical to maintaining good game feel, especially within RPGs where the player must feel connected to the world they explore. Silent Hill’s use of fog and Metal Gear’s stealth gameplay fit into their respective game worlds, and so in order to use the same type of metaphor problem solving in developing believable dialogue systems, a similar method of narrative grounding is useful. In considering the drawbacks of previous dialogue systems, a question must be asked: in what way would it makes sense for the player to have limitations in what they can say, or for NPCs to not understand what the player is saying?
Conlangs
The use of language as a mechanic offers the player the illusion that the game’s world is bigger than themselves. Conventions in RPGs create obstacles through combat and puzzles in dungeons, and not more social aspects. Talking to NPCs is typically a straightforward task in simply gathering information. But by having NPCs speak a language unknown to the player, the world is not strictly tailored around the player’s convenience. In the massively multiplayer role playing game World of Warcraft, players can choose between the Horde and Alliance factions to pledge allegiance to.157 Battles often are staged between the two groups, and strategizing is done within the factions via a text chat to determine the proper course of action. As the public chat in
World of Warcraft is activated from proximity, with messages popping up from characters around them, members of one faction can see what the other is saying. To prevent rival factions
157 Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft.
85 from snooping on each other, the game uses a “scrambling algorithm” on messages.158 Members of the same faction read messages without any issue, but the opposition sees scrambled nonsense.
Probably the most popular uses of conlangs drifts into the background of the game’s other content. One of the best selling video game series of all time, The Sims, as a life simulation video game, offers so much for the player to do that its dialogue system is forgettable.159 This is perhaps due to the game’s single user interface that is used for every action, including conversations. The Sims has seen several iterations across many different platforms, but its core gameplay remains the same. The player creates a family of human “Sims”, designing their visual appearances as well as personalities, and controls their lives in a neighbourhood of other simulated “Sims”. This type of gameplay, with no discernable goal but plenty of interactivity is often referred to as a “sandbox” game, although “dollhouse” is more appropriate in this case.
Players control every move of individual family members in order to fulfill their daily needs (by feeding themselves, showering, cleaning, going to work, etc.). A relationship system is also integrated where Sims interact with other Sims in order to become friends, enemies, or even lovers.
The manner of dialogue in The Sims is similar to performing any other action in the game. If the player wants to interact with a NPC, they simply click on them. Several different interactions that the player’s character can perform to the NPC then pop up around their head.
These options change depending on the relationship status with the NPC; those who are enemies perform antagonistic actions like teasing, while friends tell jokes and offer positive interactions.
158 Megan Condis, "Building Languages, Building Worlds: An Interview with Jessica Sams," Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4, no. 1 (2016): 150. 159 Maxis, The Sims, Microsoft Windows (Electronic Arts, 2000).
86 The familiarity and intimacy in actions escalates from flirting to kissing and beyond, and a heart appearing over the respective Sims’ heads indicates that the proposal option is not too far off.
While similar in structure to branching dialogue, the design communication feels more organic. Players observe the conversing Sims waving their arms, gesturing, and slumping their shoulders, with distinct animations reflecting the Sims’ moods; telling a joke to an annoyed Sim in order to brighten their spirits may backfire, resulting in them turning their back to you and sighing. This body language animation is important, as the Sim language is deliberately indecipherable. Inspired by the Navajo code speakers, The Sims creator Will Wright developed
Simlish, a constructed language that uses the same inflections and vocalization tones as English but is ultimately jibberish.160 Stephen Kearin, co-creator of Simlish, states “the heart of Simlish is a sound, rather than actual words.”161 By using an angry Simlish vocal clip as a surrogate for a contextually-specific line that either would not make sense or would get repetitive over time, previously mentioned struggles with voice acting are negated. Conversations in The Sims evolve based on the familiarity between the participants, and they look and sound natural based on this trick. The use of Simlish and tone-specific lines also stands out because of its clever benefit of bypassing the intense resources usually required to incorporate voice acting into a video game.
The player does not need to translate Simlish to understand Sim characters, but that challenge exists in other games through conlang translation sidequests. A recent contributor to this mechanic is No Man’s Sky, an action-adventure game developed for the PlayStation 4 and
PC in 2016.162 In it, the player is a lone explorer in vast, open universe. Using procedural
160 Tanja Sihvonen, Players Unleashed!: Modding the Sims and the Culture of Gaming (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 210. 161 Michael Thornton. Wyman, Making Great Games: An Insiders Guide to Designing and Developing the World’s Greatest Video Games (Oxford UK: Focal Press, 2011), 138. 162 Hello Games, No Man’s Sky, Microsoft Windows (Hello Games, 2016).
87 generation, or the use of complex algorithms to produce a near-infinite number of design combinations, the game contains over 18 quintillion planets with unique flora, atmospheres, and creatures. Players fly to planets in their upgradable spaceship, collect resources, and name discovered life forms, all while avoiding danger from hostile environments and their inhabitants.
Each star system in the game has a space station where the player can interact with aliens from one of three different races. The dialogue user interface is the same across all encounters.
On the left is the alien with their dialogue below them; the aliens speak their own language, initially unknown and incomprehensible to the player (fig. 11). The left side of the screen shows the different possible options a player can say in return.
The process of translating is straightforward, albeit not logical in a worldbuilding sense.
In doing so, the player travels across the galaxy to discover monoliths which, when activated, provide a small boost in the player’s ability to read the language. No Man’s Sky offers a word- for-word substitution system that is somewhat faithful to the process of learning a Latin language; an A in German is the same as an A in French, but the words themselves provide the significance and create a vocabulary.
While the player, when engaging with these aliens, cannot completely understand what is said, they are eventually able to grasp the general idea. Keywords stick out, and the player can respond appropriately. As Sean Murray, founder of Hello Games, summarizes, “With NPCs in
No Man’s Sky, you actually have to learn their language; they speak to you in their native tongue.
The more you travel around the universe, the more you learn their language, and the more you can communicate with them.”163 In this, there are consequences to how the player responds to
163 Fred Dutton, "No Man’s Sky: A Universe Filled with Lore and Language," PlayStation Blog, March 03, 2016, accessed April 02, 2017, https://blog.us.playstation.com/2016/03/03/no-mans- sky-a-universe-filled-with-lore-and-language/.
88 alien NPCs. If they wildly guess at a possibly helpful phrase, they risk angering their new-found alien friend, prompting possible attack. But understanding some keywords like “treasure” or
“enemy” aids in roughly understanding the alien languages. This use of a rough and primitive understanding of a vocabulary to navigate situations is evocative of a Ludwig Wittenstein’s concept of language-games.164 As a worldbuilding device, this mechanic supports the player’s own narrative of being in an unknown place. In searching galaxies in order to translate the different languages, deciphering alien text becomes a type of gameplay in itself.
Even without voice acting and just in a read form, conlangs provide great opportunities to experimental dialogue. They deliver a sense of immersion by making the player feel insignificant in a world much larger than them, with elements that they do not understand. Game conlangs in this sense are normally delegated to a sidequest within a small area in a game world. The main premise commonly seen in these games involves the player confronted with a language they do not understand, whether through signs or books they cannot read, or from NPCs speaking to them in what looks like gibberish.165 Final Fantasy X offers a similar sidequest in translating the
Al Bhed language, in that the player discovers items that universally translate one letter at a time in a standard substitution cipher (fig. 12).166 Twenty-six discoveries later, the player is perfectly fluent, which is not the most accurate interpretation of language-learning.
While one cannot fault development teams for not taking the (mind-numbingly extensive) time to build an entire conlang and grammatical rules, it is disappointing that game conlangs are one-sided. In the above cases, “unlocking” a language is utilized in order to understand text, and
164 Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. E. M. Anscombe, Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition (New York: Prentice Hall, 1968). 165 See Michael Adams, "Gaming Languages and Language Games," in From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented languages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 166 Square, Final Fantasy X, PlayStation 2 (Square, 2001).
89 players never proactively use this language, using learned phrases to do the asking. The use of constructed languages in this way, within a more comprehensive give-and-take dialogue system, is compelling to me because it represents the same type of problem-solving and bypassing of platform limitations that Metal Gear and Silent Hill demonstrate. These approaches acknowledge that true perfect fidelity of a certain mechanic is not implemented; instead, considering the game world that the mechanic exists in, of the broader narrative that encompasses the game, helps guide solutions.
Further Experimentations
Using a dialogue system with an unknown language offers many options in terms of fulfilling a metaphor metric because it accounts for the player not being able to say anything they want. While the technological capabilities of computers and video game consoles have burgeoned dramatically since the initial popularity of text adventure games, the same limitations in implementing a conversational dialogue experience are still present. It is difficult to predict the type of syntax or structure a player might input, and so developers can either spend the time and labour thinking of as many different ways of wording a certain phrase and program it into the game, or simply stick to one “correct” answer. I am currently developing small prototypes that explore such game design issues, that use conlangs to emulate a disconnect in dialogue systems that accommodates hardware limitations. In describing their inspiration and basic structure (as they exist in early, experimental states), I am using design research and critical making methodologies to critically investigate these issues of parsing and player input in text adventure games.
Recalling the language-learning seen in No Man’s Sky, I question if there is a way to incorporate player text input, in the style of text adventure games, into such a mechanic.
90 Essentially, imagine if No Man’s Sky let you respond to NPCs using the words you were able to translate along your journey. Unlike in Adventure, the player is limited in what can be said in a way that is faithful to real life dialogue as a metaphor. Parsing complicated phrases is not an issue because there are very limited number of possible inputs that a player could give in a situation where they are learning a language; someone struggling in stringing together a basic phrase does not worry about synonyms or informal phrasing. Player input is limited, but there is a narrative reason for there to be a limitation; the mechanic thus exists inside of the game world and provides a strengthened sense of presence for the player.
However, if we were to follow No Man’s Sky as a model, the act of learning vocabulary words to say would feel a bit immersion breaking; players learn words from discovered monoliths, but there’s no real narrative reason for this, or any connection between the words learned and the area the monolith is discovered in. This randomness can point to the procedurally generated underbelly of the game, which creates a bit of a disconnect with any nuanced narrative. In response, I suggest a different design in this hypothetical language-learning dialogue system. In order to add words to their vocabulary, players perform tasks in context- specific situations that would be an appropriate learning environment for particular words, within a typical RPG fantasy world. For example, they learn numbers and commerce-related words when buying or selling items in a shop. Unlike other games using unknown languages, that involve the player finding an unrelated cipher item, it makes sense within the game world for the player to develop certain words in certain situations. As the player learns these words, not only are they appropriately translated within the game world, but they also have them at their disposal to use in constructed phrases. Phrases that players say to NPCs are modular in their structure; in this, the player is allotted a certain number of slots that they select vocabulary words to fit into.
91 Upon starting the game, the player is extremely limited in what they could say to NPCs and would only be able to string two words together at a time. As the game progresses, the player’s number of slots increases and they can ask NPCs more complicated phrases. This aims to mimic the growing confidence in a previously unknown language. This also functions to dramatically limit the number of phrases the player can ask, but in a way that would make sense within the game world.
Under the hood, this design approach facilitates an easy way to streamline NPC responses to specific phrases via a parsing database similar to that of text adventure games. Admittedly, as this is avoiding natural language processing, it requires labour in writing responses to individual phrases, demonstrating the very pitfalls that text adventure games face. However, by severely limiting the number of possible words and thus the number of conceivable and logical combinations of coherent phrases, the prediction of conceivable player input is much easier to implement, as it avoids user-specific jargon and slang, as well as typos. If the player enters in nonsense, the NPC’s fallback phrase would be one of confusion, as would be realistic in such a situation. This limitation is adequately layered through the use of language learning, as it would make sense for a novice in a language to have a limited vocabulary.
Conclusion
When confronted with platform limitations, there are many approaches in designing game mechanics that do not press against these limits. As seen in this chapter, it is even possible to use these limitations as part of a narrative, aiding game feel by making the player feel more immersed when they play. Graphical limitations can be covered up with environmental effects that become part of the story, like in Silent Hill; similarly, gameplay limitations can be obscured by making the limitation part of the gameplay itself, as seen in Metal Gear. In exploring different
92 avenues for experimentation with conlangs in dialogue systems, I discuss only one possible avenue for furthering the mechanic within a very narrow scope. This is not championing the next best thing in dialogue systems. Instead, it is an intervention within the existing status quo that permeates game design. People communicate in all sorts of ways and it is impossible to guess how dialogue systems progress in the next ten years; maybe face-scanning technology will be integrated into games consoles so the player can smile or frown in response to an NPC’s actions.
When faced with a hardware limitation, development teams utilize specific game design strategies to accommodate both the creative vision of the game and platform specificity. The importance of a believable narrative and strong world building is key to the above examples.
In examining a game system, it is certainly useful to take the player’s position and direct attention to the end product. This is the approach that most academic work in video games takes because this side of games, the finished experience, is all that a general audience sees. Even within the field of game studies, this is likely the case, as the field tends to not include many game developers in terms of academic contributors as well as the readership. However, if we see from the game designer’s perspective, and execute similar strategies in understanding a system, much is revealed about successful game mechanics and how they are appropriated in new ways.
To put it simply, the issues I examine are game design issues, and so they are answered through the practice of game design.
93 Conclusion
Considering how dialogue systems have evolved across platforms and design tastes, will text parsing ever be revisited? It is hard to imagine that console games by major companies will ever shift from the foundations of branching dialogue, but there are smaller experiments that suggest how the mechanic advances with contemporary technologies. Parsing finds itself part of the larger artificial intelligence field of natural language processing (NLP), which is aimed towards exactly what its name entails; an example of NLP is the aforementioned ELIZA, and contemporary digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri. Façade, a 2005 game designed by Michael
Mateas and Andrew Stern, uses NLP to simulate an uncomfortable social experience.167 The player roleplays as a friend to Grace and Trip, a couple who invites them over for cocktails. In a
3D-modeled apartment complex, the game begins by prompting the player to knock on their door from the hallway. The apartment door opens to Trip warmly greeting the player and welcoming them inside. However, tensions rise as the player takes note of small social cues throughout the evening.
Façade’s gameplay functions similarly to text adventure games, as the player speaks to these NPCs by typing in lines to say. They also walk around the apartment to look at clues to help spark conversation, and the player’s proximity to another character influences if Grace or
Trip responds (fig.13). Complimenting a painting on a wall delights Grace, an aspiring interior designer, but she may include a small jab at Trip in her response, accusing him of not caring about her interests. It quickly becomes clear that this is not a calm and carefree get-together, as
Trip and Grace are in the midst of a significant conflict. The player, only through dialogue, acts as a mediator in this fight, but they must be cautious as the couple’s argument quickly spirals out
167 Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Façade, Microsoft Windows (2005).
94 of control. Each experience of Façade is guided by the player’s unique choices, and players receive a text transcript of their game experience in their game files, akin to a theatrical script.168
While there are countless possibilities in how the dialogue between the player, Trip, and Grace evolves, it results in one of two options: resolution in the couple’s conflict, or the decision to divorce.
The situation is naturally awkward for the player as a third wheel in a couple’s quarrel.
For a game about communication, it takes great strides in making the experience as interactive as possible. Far gone are the limited, two word phrases that Adventure offers the player to use.
Instead, Façade considers the context of when the player says a certain phrase, and remembers previous actions that took place. Full sentences are said, as statements or questions, and actions like “kiss” are even recognized (although perhaps not advised considering the situational context). Random shifts in the characters’ moods also occur, so a singular input yields multiple results across different experiences.
This is not to say that the parsing in Façade is perfect; in the years since its development in 2005, NLP has improved immensely but is still not wholly unreliable. The iPhone’s Siri still struggles with receiving contextual voice input, and experimentations with chatbots on Twitter have lead to complex negotiations on how much the public should influence AI speech patterns.169 Façade’s parser does not recognize every phrase the player throws at it, and the
168 Petri Lankoski, Character-Driven Game Design: A Design Approach and its Foundations in Character Engagement (Helsinki: Aalto University, 2010), 148. 169 In this, I refer to Microsoft’s Twitter AI bot Tay, who in mere hours after her introduction, had been manipulated by trollish behaviours to tweet out offensive messages to her followers. For more information, see Abby Ohlheiser, "Trolls Turned Tay, Microsoft’s Fun Millennial AI Bot, Into a Genocidal Maniac," The Washington Post, March 25, 2016, accessed May 13, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/03/24/the-internet-turned-tay- microsofts-fun-millennial-ai-bot-into-a-genocidal-maniac/.
95 responses that characters give are sometimes repetitive.170 This is exacerbated by the voice acting responses by the two characters: an expensive and time-intensive endeavor that is often limited, as previously explained.
As seen through Façade, while NLP and text parsing abilities have improved dramatically since Adventure, it is questionable if there will ever be a game that perfectly and authentically responds to a player’s typed input. The believability of metaphors within games must contend with platform limitations, while functioning within a game world and narrative established by designers. If the vulnerability of a game’s mechanic shines through, it breaks the illusion (or façade) for the player and removes them from the experience.
Closing Thoughts
In this thesis, I argue for more experimentation in dialogue systems, using problem- solving strategies in other aspects of game design that obscure limitations through thoughtful worldbuilding. Using the metrics of game feel to assess games and specific mechanics can help us understand why some elements can feel a bit off. Games are a nuanced, layered construction of both hardware and software, code and art, creative and logical, and narrative and ludological aspects. But most critical is how the player chooses to engage with a game and respond to the fantastical world they are immersed in. Games are meaningful to players beyond critical evaluation, and they can serve as escapism methods from mundane life, or an inspiration to seek out new adventures. Narrative and storytelling is what accomplishes this motivational drive, and how games tell stories is critical to their reception and feel.
170 Jenny Brusk and Staffan Björk, "Gameplay Design Patterns for Game Dialogues," in Proceedings of DiGRA 2009, proceedings of Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory (2009).
96 Despite all the possible directions for the future of video games, the design of enjoyable and immersive experiences follows the same principles. Games want to be fun and draw the player in. Classic text adventure games, Dungeons & Dragons, branching dialogue games, and every variant in the roleplaying genre aim for the same ideals in storytelling and communication through speech, making the player feel enriched by the fictional world around them. Ideals of game feel is imperative to game design no matter the era or popular platform.
From only a glazing over the vast number of video games and their dialogue systems, it is clear that there is potential to further explore this mechanic. It is difficult to imagine how games, and specifically dialogue systems will evolve in the future. As seen through the previous chapters, there are many variables in the design of games and their mechanics that could all vary within the next few years to dramatic effect. Moving forward, one of the most critical aspects of how dialogue systems can evolve comes from the one aspect of game development that has only been briefly mentioned, but it remains an element of games that is controllable by everyday players: the diversity of the game development industry itself.
Over the past decade, the creation of games has grown in unexpected ways. Most notably, the practice of game making is no longer a pursuit of a single demographic working towards a typical consumer-friendly title. Game development used to be an interior practice, at least compared to current practices. It was difficult for an outsider to determine how a singular person impacted a game’s development when studios were usually large teams with varied-but narrow roles. As well, complicated coding structures of games make it difficult to follow how the game fit together. The past ten years has seen the strong presence of independent developers
(casually referred to as indie devs) who produce and publish games in small teams, if not
97 completely solo.171 These games, like Façade, are often more experimental, without large managerial overhead or the pressure to work in conjunction with large teams across different apartments typical of a major game studio. Open source or low cost tools, game engines, or plug- ins, now industry standard, make it possible for developers to even create a game without a knowledge of computer programming. With smaller teams and fewer resources than a large multi-million dollar studio, independent games regularly contend with development limitations, like those discussed in previous chapters. What is important is not advanced proficiency in coding, but creativity and the drive to produce a completed, polish end product through experimentation and problem-solving.
The diversity of voices in game development, in terms of gender, race, class, orientation, and countless other definers, can only prove to better serve the continuous experimentation and pushing of boundaries within existing design models. While this work has examined specific metrics in measuring the enjoyment levels of a game, as Jessie Schell states, “game design is not a set of principles, it is an activity.”172 Whether through verbal language, written word, gestures or body language and beyond, dialogue occurs on levels that have not even been touched in this work. Communication and sociality are personal experiences, and it is through others’ interpretations of what dialogue means in terms of storytelling and immersion that dialogue is understood as both narrative and gameplay.
171 For an in-depth overview of the structures of independent game development, see Chase Bowen Martin and Mark Deuze, "The Independent Production of Culture: A Digital Games Case Study," Games and Culture 4, no. 3 (2009):276-295. 172 Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2015), xliii.
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110 Figures
I am reproducing the below images from copyrighted games under fair use. All copyrighted material belongs to the copyright holder. Each video game appearing here is cited above in the Works Cited section with reference to its copyright holder. All screenshots are from my own recorded gameplay.
Figure 1. Colossal Cave Adventure: In-progress gameplay.
111
Figure 2. Final Fantasy IX: Player dialogue options and speech bubble.
112
Figure 3. Dragon Warrior: Battle screen with an enemy Slime.
113
Figure 4. Princess Tomato: Gameplay screenshot.
114
Figure 5. Example branching dialogue diagram.
115
Figure 6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Dialogue with NPC Mikael.
Figure 7. Oxenfree: Player dialogue choices.
116
Figure 8. Night in the Woods: Speech bubble design.
117
Figure 9. Fallout 2: NPC response to a low intelligence character.
118
Figure 10. Silent Hill: Fog effect that obscures draw distance.
119
Figure 11. No Man’s Sky: Translation mechanic and resulting dialogue options.
Figure 12. Final Fantasy X: Al bhed dialogue with partial translation.
120
Figure 13. Façade: Gameplay screenshot.
121