What is "consolisation" and why does it exist? Or Simulated Skill v Player Skill - by SubJeff
Thirith on 11/2/2011 at 15:04
We're talking about choices along the lines of:
* If you don't leave my client in peace, we may have to take legal action.
* Leave her alone or I will break your friggin' knees!
* I will have to think about this some more. Don't go away.
Not much nuance or subtlety - and frankly, even though I've been playing RPGs and adventure games since the '80s, I don't remember many (or indeed any) games where there was any challenge in figuring out from a set response what its tone was. Can you provide any examples?
Edit: Thinking about it some more, I'd even say that the responses in such dialogues must be written so they're 100% clear. You can change the tone of any response by changing the inflection etc., making a sentence that looks aggressive come across as ironic and self-deprecating; but if a game did that, tricking you into choosing a response and then presenting it in an unexpected way, the game wouldn't be playing fair. If a response is so ambiguous that you don't know how it's meant, you have to start choosing responses at random. That's not a challenge, that's bad design.
faetal on 11/2/2011 at 15:19
Quote Posted by Thirith
We're talking about choices along the lines of:
YOU'RE talking about choices along the lines of that. I am talking more broadly. There have been plenty of games where the choices I have had to make in conversation progression were not as clear cut as those and as a second layer of complexity (which I guess remains in either system) is thinking which choice will manipulate the other character in the way you wish.
If you like both systems that same, then I'm happy for you. I personally do not find them to be equal in feel and I personally believe the language driven system to require more thought than the category drive system. I'm not sure (other than by simplifying the argument with a straw man list of choices as you did) how it could be otherwise..
Thirith on 11/2/2011 at 15:25
Okay, if you don't want a strawman list, can you give an example of a game that did this? You talk about "plenty of games", yet you haven't mentioned any when I asked for examples. (And if you've played any Bioware or Obsidian game, you would have come across dozens of conversations such as the one I've concocted.)
I don't like both systems the same - in Alpha Protocol and Mass Effect 2 I found that I sometimes chose responses that may have had the right tone but didn't say what I wanted my character to say. But that's a very different point from saying that the one system requires more thought than the other and the other is dumbed down or consolised or whatever you want to call it.
Phatose on 11/2/2011 at 15:27
The problem with the approach, at least as Alpha Protocol, is that those simple categorizations cover an awful lot of tones. Aggressive, for example, could mean anything from "God, you're being such a bitch, stop it." to "You have 3 seconds to leave my presence before I put a bullet in your head." Both are aggressive, but the difference between the two is fucking huge.
There's the nuance for you. Aggressive could mean "I'm calling you out on your bullshit" or "IWILLFUCKINGKILLYOU!" - the whole affair becomes a game of 'guess what the developers thought aggressive meant this time."
Those are the differences in tone you're looking for. I may be annoyed enough with an NPC in the game to want to be the first kind of aggressive, but not the second. If I have the full text of the response, I can tell whether this time, aggressive means "Direct and unapologetic" or "Murderous." If I don't, I'm just guessing.
The 'select tone' is therefore dumbed down simply because intelligent choices become functionally impossible. Not enough information on what "Aggressive, Suave or Professional" actually means, and thus I can't make an informed, intelligent choice. Just click and pray.
faetal on 11/2/2011 at 15:36
Phatose more or less covers a lot of it. For me it is the difference between interacting with language, requiring understanding of the language AND the situation to progress the conversation. The other just requires understanding the situation and no language skill is needed.
I can't recite specific lines, but a good example of a game which uses nuances in language and situation to drive the conversation tree is VTM:B.
Because of this, I am vexed that DX:HR is going with the "let's not bother the player with too much reading comprehension" approach.
Thirith on 11/2/2011 at 15:36
Quote Posted by Phatose
The problem with the approach, at least as Alpha Protocol, is that those simple categorizations cover an awful lot of tones. Aggressive, for example, could mean anything from "God, you're being such a bitch, stop it." to "You have 3 seconds to leave my presence before I put a bullet in your head." Both are aggressive, but the difference between the two is fucking huge.
There's the nuance for you. Aggressive could mean "I'm calling you out on your bullshit" or "IWILLFUCKINGKILLYOU!" - the whole affair becomes a game of 'guess what the developers thought aggressive meant this time."
Those are the differences in tone you're looking for. I may be annoyed enough with an NPC in the game to want to be the first kind of aggressive, but not the second. If I have the full text of the response, I can tell whether this time, aggressive means "Direct and unapologetic" or "Murderous." If I don't, I'm just guessing.
The 'select tone' is therefore dumbed down simply because intelligent choices become functionally impossible. Not enough information on what "Aggressive, Suave or Professional" actually means, and thus I can't make an informed, intelligent choice. Just click and pray.
This I agree with, except for the "dumbed down" bit. Dumbed down != stupid design choices. Dumbing something down would mean that you make it as difficult as possible for the player to make a mistake, whereas this system actually makes it quite easy to make a mistake, as you've described.
Added to which, Phatose, I don't think there are many cases of games giving us the sort of nuance you mention. Usually we have 3-4 choices and they're clearly delineated. Technically it would be possible to provide players with that sort of nuanced choice, but especially when developers/publishers think that every line of dialogue must be voiced you tend to get fewer choices rather than more. Again, not something that's console specific.
Edit: I'm actually curious why designers would go for the attitudes vs. responses approach. As I've said, I think it doesn't make sense to attribute this to "dumbing down", because it makes the player more likely to screw up, not less. Is it that people complain when a game puts words in their mouth that they wouldn't have chosen? Unlikely, because the PC still goes on to speak the lines in those cases. Do the devs think that this makes the game more exciting, because you don't know exactly what the character will say?
faetal on 11/2/2011 at 15:41
With the category approach, the ability to make a mistake is not linked with player intelligence, but opacity of the options. In my opinion, removing the link between player reading comprehension and situational analysis and the progression of game dialogue, is dumbing down as it dampens any change in experience linked with the player's mental faculties, thus making it accessible to everyone. I'm not saying this is a bad thing per se, in fact, in a normal distribution of gamers, it will probably be more popular. Just that elitist, clever types like myself would prefer to have the extra complexity than not. I'm resigned to games going this way, because developers are always going to try and make as much money as possible, which requires trying to hit the middle of that bell-curve.
Thirith on 11/2/2011 at 15:53
Hmm. If the design decision boils down to "Players don't want to read, let's give them one word rather than an entire sentence", then I can perhaps see where you're coming from.
Beyond that, I've simply never really seen the reading and interpreting of the dialogue options in games as a terribly deep or challenging activity. I'd be hard put to think of any game where you could put as much *analytical* thought into the dialogue options as e.g. analysing the environmental cues in ICO and understanding more about the world and story of the game.
I wouldn't mind if games used dialogue and dialogue options more intelligently and with more complexity, but I don't see this happening unless designers come up with a smarter way of designing dialogue gameplay. Even when the individual lines are relatively smart, the actual choice the player is given is rarely more than obvious.
faetal on 11/2/2011 at 16:02
Thirith, I've never found it that challenging either, and you probably haven't for the same reason - we're probably nearer the right side of that bell curve. I'd just prefer not to see a drop in complexity, as this would reduce the dialogue options in games to Sims-esque gesture management, just with follow-on dialogue tacked on. I almost always made the dialogue choice which gave the response I wanted in VTM:B, but a few I had to deliberate on before being too hasty, and I like that the developers spend that sort of time on the dialogue not just as a story progression or quest-giving mechanism, but also as a function of player skill in being able to read, comprehend and apply based on player personality, NPC personality and desired outcome. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed AP, but basically, you suss someone's personality out e.g. "pushy German bitch likes it rough" and then choose your "stance" for that person, switching (e.g. to suave) if you reach a point where you think you've gained extra sway with a person. It's an ok system, but unless you wrangle with semantics, I don't see how it can not be seen as a dumber version of processing dialogue choices.
Thirith on 11/2/2011 at 16:15
Look, I'm probably already boring people with all of this, but I still think that the two issues (dumbing down or not vs. phrases/attitudes options) are just barely linked. If the AP developers had replaced the Suave/Aggressive/Professional choices with the actual lines, practically everything you say would still have been true. You'd have had the minimal complexity of analysing pretty obvious phrases, but ask almost any gamer to attach the attitudinal labels to the statements that followed, and only the braindead wouldn't have got it right 99.9% of the time. The issue here is predictable characterisation tied to a mechanistic system (and any "Choose one of three options" system is very mechanistic to begin with).
I'm genuinely curious about the conversations in LA Noire, since the visual cues of the captured performances may make for more interesting conversations. Most characters in games are blatantly transparent, and as long as there isn't all that much *acting* to speak of that's going to remain the same. (The Jeanette/Therese conversation in Bloodlines is a noteworthy exception IMO.)
@Wormrat: don't you think you're overstating? Yes, there were a couple of instances in AP and ME2 where I was surprised by my character's response, but by and large both options (attitudes vs. literal responses) play out pretty much the same. In practice there simply isn't that much of a difference. AP and ME2 dialogues weren't the same as a coin toss, and picking one out of 3-4 dialogue options doesn't really require all that much strategy.
