Dialog in Games

Let's face it. Most writing in games is terrible. Dialog is the portion of the writing that is observed by players, and so it is usually considered the most important part of writing. This is untrue. If the writing of a game is like a car, then the dialog is the shiny (or not so shiny) exterior which is seen by everyone when you drive past. However, dialog is only the symptom, not the cause of bad writing. A bad engine will ruin the car no matter how much paint is on the outside. Have a good engine, and you'll be able to go wherever you want, no matter what the condition of your paint is. The "engine" of game writing is having interesting characters who are placed in interesting locations. If you have boring characters talking in an equally boring location, nobody is going to care about the dialog because they're rapidly hitting the A button to skip over it!

Now, besides just interesting characters and locations, what makes dialog sound good? Perhaps... realism? No. Wrong. Have another guess? I humbly insinuate that it is the appearance of realism. Take a moment and think about it: in real life, most conversations are very unfocused. They wonder around. People speak in sentence fragments and say "um" a lot. In a game, dialog needs to be focused. It has to communicate a point to your audience. It could tell the player information about the world, or it might demonstrate characterization. You shouldn't just throw in some dialog because it's easy. You need to be as concise as possible, so that you stay focused and don't lose your over-caffeinated players.

Despite this, realism still plays a part in dialog. Great authors, like Dickens or Shakespeare do an incredible thing with their dialog. They give just about every character a unique and identifiable way of speaking an acting. You can often times identify a character just by hearing a few lines of dialog from that person. Even if you can't guess the specific character, you can usually identify the social class which they belong to. For example, take this line from Chapter 3 of Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens.

"I'll eat my breakfast afore they're the death of me," said he. "I'd do that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is over there, directly afterwards. I'll beat the shivers so far, I'll bet you."


From the character's manner of speaking, the language he uses, his bad grammar, that he belongs to the working or lower class (the character in question is actually a convict). Now, try contrasting that example to this one:

"It seems to me that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our gift-horse's mouth with a magnifying-glass. Likewise, it seems to me that, concentrating our attention on the examination, we altogether overlook one of the best points of the animal. "

This person uses much more flowery language and has the decency to use correct grammar. He is certainly of the upper class, or at least a rich member of the middle class. All this from only a couple lines of dialog! A good author can uses dialog to indirectly characterize characters by exploring their manner of speech, a lesson which many writers should take note of.

That's it for now. See you next time.