Narrative Theory Series

Designing Games & Interactive Stories

Dialogue plays a role in revealing your characters, especially when it comes to: what they are like on their invisible-insides (their psychological character), what motivates their actions, and their general socio-economic-cultural backgrounds (e.g. education, ethnicity, social class).

When you write dialogue, read it OUT LOUD, as actual speech, so that it doesn’t stay abstract as just writing. Speaking it verbally helps with deciding whether it’s actually good dialogue or not (believable, interesting, devoid of cliches, etc.).

Dialogue is also highly responsive to the particular situations that are occurring at the given moment when the lines are given to the audience — it connects immediately with storyworld and action.

What Can Ruin Dialogue

When it feels just functional (to move the plot alone).
Generic (we’ve heard it before).
It doesn’t reveal the personality of the character.
Makes the character feel like a type (or stereotype).
Doesn’t add anything to the overall situation.
Too plain and simple, mundane, trivial etc.
Clichés.
Can’t hear or read it (poor media rendering).
Makes all the characters seem the same.
Offensive (though sometimes this is intended).
Being unsurprising.

What Can Make Dialogue Interesting

Using unexpected turns of phrases.
Reveals the individuality of character.
Not being cliché.
Having believability & credibility.
Hilarious, or Serious/thought provoking.
Advances the plot, Comments on the action
Being literary (invoking the whole history of narrative forms).
Quality of the vocal performance, e.g. the voice has a strong affect
Pacing (it moves the story along) and rhythm.
Reveals storyworld (e.g. cool accents).
Emotion!
Establish relationships between different kinds of characters
And monologue can also be used effectively to do all of the above.

Monologue & Soliloquy

A soliloquy is a literary device in which a character speaks their thoughts aloud when they are alone or believe themselves to be alone. It is used to reveal the character’s inner thoughts and feelings to the audience. A monologue is a speech given by a single character in a play or film, which is typically directed at another character or the audience. It can be used to reveal information about the character or the plot, or to express the character’s thoughts and feelings. The main difference between a soliloquy and a monologue is that a soliloquy is a character speaking to themselves, while a monologue is a character speaking to others.

Soliloquy is usually a shorter form (or short sections of voiceover in a longer form). Typically representing the speech of a single character, historically it can be traced to Old-English ballads, e.g. My Last Duchess by Robert Browning.

There are four main types of monologue:

Dialogic: a higher order narratorial agent (shaping the POV or Focalization) edits or selects out the speech of one of the characters so that only they are heard.

Interior: represents a character’s intimate thoughts

Oration: public speeches, the One addressing the Many

Narration: the character tells a story of personal experience, e.g. confession, eye-witness report, a memory etc.

Developing Dialogue

Digital narratives provide many opportunities to use language-based technologies, like VUI (voice user interaction), chatbots and AI. Very few conversation-based programs have passed the Turing Test, though, and fail to create a fully convincing human illusion. There are some design strategies for using dialogue in an interactive narrative, such as AI chatbot (mimic human response), dialogue tree (give a list of branching dialogue response options), or attitudinal selection (tell us your mood, and we provide the dialogue line).

Synthetic characters are a special NPC beast, though, in that in addition to creating a convincing illusion of speech acts, they also have to mimic other human aspects such as gesture, facial expression, gait and so on — they have to be a completely perceived human or character stand-in in which their entire way of being visualized makes them convincing as characters.

Always with dialogue, it’s a good idea to read it aloud, and even act it aloud. Written dialogue may make sense when silent in your head, but only by reading it out loud can you get a sense as to whether it may be effective or not when actually experienced in a digital media form (unless of course that form is text-based : ) in which case, the interior voice will probably suffice).

Characters in narratives, as in real life, usually speak ‘in character,’ meaning that when I speak, sentence 1 won’t sound like my mom is talking, sentence 2 won’t sound like my boss is talking, and sentence 3 won’t sound like someone on the other side of the planet is talking. You generally, in all things art, media and design, want to preserve a certain level of coherence and unity, especially in something like character speech and action.

Be careful with Exposition (giving background information). It can become boring and tedious very easily, since it is a kind of unnatural speech. It’s often better to spread out exposition over a longer period of time in small verbal doses, rather than dump it all at once in one big load of explanation.

Generally most professional media arts narrative projects will require a script of some kind. Not always, but there are many forms that scripts can take. In documentaries, for example, scripts are often put together after all the dialogue has been recorded, because the nature of documentary is that you are capturing and organizing ‘reality’ which shouldn’t be pre-scripted!

But what happens is that all verbal elements are put into a transcript (note the word ‘script’ in that word : ) and that transcript is then edited into something like a regular film script. You take what people said in interviews, what people say in video clips you’re going to use from archival material, what the producer’s voiceover wants to say and so on, and put these into a massive master transcript (which has notes as to what the original video file and source is, for the editors to cut together), out of which you put together a much shorter script that becomes the basis of your main edit. So even documentaries can be said to be largely scripted.

A typical film script contains more than dialogue. There are Scene Headings (e.g. INT. OFFICE — DAY), a short summary of the main action, the character’s NAME (ALL CAPS, like Scene Headings). You may have Parenthetical Notes about the Dialogue (e.g. ‘breathing heavily’), and then the DIALOGUE proper (the spoken words). There might also be notes about Camera Moves (e.g. pan left) and with interactive media, there might be notes about specific user interactions or game mechanics that trigger dialogue events.

With all of these kinds of information contained in a script, they are a kind of bare bones skeleton pre-realization or prefiguring of the eventual audiovisual experience.

Working Scripts are interesting. These are preliminary versions that actors use to read their lines aloud to see if they are good lines to begin with! With scripts, there will be a strong tendency to read and write them in total silence, which is a problem because the point is that the lines should be compelling when spoken by an actor. When I lived in Chicago, a lot of theater companies had their working script readings open to the public. You could go into a theater and watch actors read out loud versions of a play as it was being written, to see if they made sense as ‘real’ dialogue (versus just looking good on a page).

By ‘dialogue’ we typically mean the representation of character speech. If you’ve ever seen the film version of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is a prop that has a kind of dialogue moment, the sighing door, which also counts as a dialogue element.

But usually, it’s people, not props, doing the dialoguing!

Like action, dialogue reveals characters. Unlike action, it gives a bit better perspective on some of the interior workings of characters (their thoughts, beliefs, motivations etc.). Like character design in general, there’s a spectrum between Mimetic (e.g. realistic) and Non-Mimetic (abstract, stylized) speech.

Generally your dialogue is going to match the overall storyworld of the characters in the same way the props, costumes and settings do. If you’re shooting in rural Alabama, your dialogue shouldn’t sound like conversation in a food court in Singapore (unless you found a Singaporean neighborhood in Alabama!).

Dialogue is also interesting to read many years after it’s been written. What may have seemed ‘mimetic’ or naturalistic or realistic a few decades ago to our ears may actually seem very stylized and artificial. This means that even a Mimetic approach is still going to have very stylized components to it, which we may not be aware of at the time it is new.

For example, here is some dialogue from Romeo and Juliet. This would have seemed like perfectly natural dialogue in Shakespeare’s time, but wow does it sound strange to our 21st Century ears:

ROMEO [To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

If we jump forward to the 19th Century, with Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven, the speech is still clearly stylized (it is a poem, after all), but it seems less foreign compared to Romeo and Juliet.

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil! — prophet still, if bird or devil! —

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted —

On this home by Horror haunted — tell me truly, I implore —

Is there — is there balm in Gilead? — tell me — tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Now here is some 20th Century dialogue from the novelist Ernest Hemmingway, which starts to meet more of our contemporary expectations regarding more mimetic sounding dialogue.

“The beer’s nice and cool,” the man said.

“It’s lovely,” the girl said.

“It’s really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said.

“It’s not really an operation at all.”

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

“I know you wouldn’t mind it, Jig. It’s really not anything. It’s just to let the air in.”

The girl did not say anything.

One of Mikhail Bakhtin’s arguments was that all language was essentially ‘dialogic.’ What he meant is that all acts of language are oriented to previous and subsequent (past and future) acts of language. Also, all language presumes an audience of some kind who is the recipient of the language act.

If someone is speaking, who are they speaking to? And how is what they are saying relate to the last things they said, and the next things they will say? This applies to any language, from novels and comics and perhaps even to restaurant menus and window signs (since all language for him has this ‘dialogic’ quality). All speech implies other speech.

Dialogism refers to the idea that language is a social and interactive process, and that it is shaped and influenced by the context in which it is used. According to Bakhtin, language is not a neutral tool for conveying meaning, but rather a dynamic and open-ended system that is constantly changing and evolving.

Bakhtin argued that language is inherently dialogic, meaning that it is always in conversation with other languages, dialects, and forms of communication. He argued that meaning is not fixed or static, but is instead shaped by the context in which it is used, and that language is constantly influenced and shaped by the social, cultural, and historical forces that surround it.

Narration in the form of voiceover — the narrator’s direct speech in the soundtrack — will also feature this general quality of dialogism since it can be understood as having a conversation with the audience. The Stanley Parable features a particularly rich narratorial voiceover.

He seems to be older than Stanley and knows a lot more than him.

He oscillates between being sympathetic and cruel to Stanley.

He has a great voice! He’s probably a well-paid voiceover actor, with great inflections in his storyteller’s voice.

He translates, in a sense, an interactive navigable/exploratory storyworld into more of a linear narrative feel with his constant stream of words.

He uses lots of interesting cadences, pauses, emphases, and dynamic variations in his voice.

His tone often has a lot of higher class connotations, full of irony and often patronizing.

He is sometimes sarcastic, and mocks the overall events unfolding.

He is a self-reflexive narrator. That means he references the mediation of the narrative, and is aware that the story is a story, and that the events are not entirely real.

All of these elements help to make his voiceover compelling.

Novels and films tend to favor forms of duologue which means that there is a bias against group talk and a general tendency to privilege or focus on conversation between two people, or focus on the solo voice of a character as it focalized on them one at a time, capturing their inner voice and thoughts, so even a person talking to themselves can be a form of duologues.

Have you ever noticed how real life speech is nowhere near as organized as it is in media? If you go to a coffee shop and listen to people talk, you find that they are constantly interrupting each other, for example, or that three or four people might be talking at the same time!

Sometimes media makers play with this (but not often, because it can be hard to follow) and produce what is called variously Heteroglossia or Polyphony to capture a simultaneous diversity of voices that is a bit more like real world dialogue (though this doesn’t mean a polyphonic speech can’t be non-mimetic). Both heteroglossia and polyphony are concepts in narrative theory that refer to the way that language and communication are used in a narrative to increase overall complexity or even simultaneity of intersecting meanings.

Heteroglossia refers to the idea that a single text or narrative can contain multiple languages, dialects, and forms of communication, and that these different forms of communication can interact and influence one another. This creates a sense of diversity and complexity within the narrative, as different voices and perspectives are brought together.

Polyphony, on the other hand, refers to the way that different voices and perspectives are allowed to coexist and interact within a single narrative. Polyphony suggests that a single text or narrative can contain multiple, conflicting viewpoints and perspectives, and that these viewpoints can coexist without one necessarily being dominant over the others.

As a medium, comics often plays with heteroglossia and polyphony by piling up and contrasting word balloons and thought bubbles which can create a visual cacophony that disrupts any sense of who is talking or thinking, or which order you’re supposed to process all of the crowded together verbal and mental dialogue elements.

Related Articles

Bibliography & Further Reading

• A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark
• A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
• Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers
• An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra
• Basics of Game Design by Michael Moore
• Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
• Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World vol 1 by Gabe Barrett
• Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: an Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev
• Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon
• Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford
• Clockwork Game Design by Keith Burgun
• Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek
• Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
• Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams
• Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design by Ernest Adams
• Game Design Foundations by Brenda Romero
• Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton
• Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans
• Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames edited by Chris Bateman
• Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
• Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, by Kelly McErlean
• Introduction to Game Systems Design by Dax Gazaway
• Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker, David Howell, et al
• Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding edited by Janna Silverstein
• Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 2nd Edition by Scott Rogers
• Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, et al.
• Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction by Kent Puckett
• Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan, et al.
• Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition by Mieke Bal
• Practical Game Design by Adam Kramarzewski and Ennio De Nucci
• Procedural Storytelling in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
• Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing by Wendy Despain
• Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman
• Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon, et al
• Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers by Ethan Ham
• The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition by Jesse Schell
• The Board Game Designer’s Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can’t Stop Playing by Joe Slack
• The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott
• The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits
• The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, by by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson
• The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf
• The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory by David Herman
• The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
• Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja
• Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques by Evan Skolnick
• Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG edited by Wendy Despain
• Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince
• 100 Principles of Game Design by DESPAIN

Acknowledgement

This online courseware was co-authored with OpenAI technology in order to produce a clear, succinct writing style that will be accessible to the widest range of readers from a variety of backgrounds.

Dialogue was originally published in Sound & Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.