66 min readJust now

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unless otherwise specified, all screencaps are ones i took, llike this screencap of aviary attorney

think of this as me trying to find out what parts of dialogue choices are load bearing game design and what else can be done with dialogue.

So, the other day, inspired by Planescape Torment, a game I am struggling with, because I think it is terrible, I posted a thread with some assorted thoughts on dialogue choices in games, and whether or not I like them.

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here is a sample of that, but woe be unto you if you think it doesn’t keep going

As I was sifting through various implementations of dialogue systems in my head, I thought about how common it was to play a game where you often had options that looked like this:

1. Let’s continue this mission.
2. Tell me about yourself.
3. What is this place?
4. I must be going.

And that kind of thing got me to say “I think nearly all choice-based dialogue is actually bad storytelling that mostly exists as a way to get lore dumps about the world and is often bad, repetitive writing.”

This is, of course, the introduction to a much lengthier exploration of dialogue and what it is and does, as I think about its use in games, how I’d like to employ it, or whether I’d like to employ it at all.

You can read that very disorganized (I was operating on only a couple hours of sleep due to my severely undertreated chronic pain issues) thread here.

I thought about making a joke here where I say that XKCD coined the idea that if you get something wrong on the internet, someone will correct you, thus having someone correct me with the actual source (which is not XKCD): Cunningham’s Law, which states: the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

You can also get feedback by asking people to talk about themselves and what they like, or by starting to just work through your thoughts on the internet. I tend to prefer these methods, but I’ve been wrong before too.

Still, for this one, I began the thread with some clarity: I *personally *don’t like dialogue trees in games all that much. This is like me saying I like the color blue and pink in combination a whole heck of a lot. No one in their right mind would argue with me on it, because they understand it to be my preference.

However, this is a much longer article, and I think people might get a bit lost in the weeds and think this article is prescriptive, rather than an exploration of my own individual tastes, so, I want to be super up front about this: I Am Trying To Figure Some Shit Out and thought maybe avid readers of mine might want to see how I think.

Some of you may actually really resonate with what I’m doing here, and if so, great, happy to have you along, but, yeah, this is all personal preference. This is more of a way to get to know the inner workings of my brain than anything else, which may be helpful to you in understanding my other writing.

aside: It’s immensely stupid and a clear sign of Terminal Forum Poster Brain when someone reads an opinion piece — which all my essays are — and screeches “wahhh, this guy is acting like he knows everything!”

Over the years, I’ve had enough people confuse “writing a persuasive essay” over the years with “Laying Down The Law that I feel the need to mention it here.

For the Terminal Forum Posters, the perception is something like “It Is Morally Wrong For Doc Not Doing The Work of Arguing Against Doc On My Behalf And Doing So With a Thoroughness That Debunks Doc’s Own Point,” at which point I have to say: why would I write an essay holding position A if I felt that position B were so true that I could effectively argue it? Why not just cut out the stuff I don’t believe and only advocate for what I do? It’s not a mark of good essay writing that one attempts to persuasively argue for both sides of a discussion. You only need to argue, persuasively, for what you believe to be true.

Look, I’m not the New York Times. I’m not here to argue that “critics say” or “some say” by pretending to be fair. I am just telling you what I believe and why I believe it.

No amount of “I think” or “I feel” or “in my opinion” will matter to the Terminal Forum Posters; their desire is to ‘win,’ and they view winning as simply yelling loudly and often enough. They are incapable of anything more than that. But still, this shining, bold neon light is for them; may they look all the stupider when they inevitably ignore it.

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Weird tangent, I know, but it’s always weird to encounter these types, and, given the nature of this particular essay, I am going to put this up front, and then I am going to tell you exactly what this essay is, so if you’re sitting here wanting to be a fuckin weirdo about it, well, you can either get into my DMs and have a discussion, or you can just, you know, ignore the article.

I realize it’s an odd thing to say, this whole “I don’t really like dialogue systems” thing, when I’m in the credits of Disco Elysium *specifically. *Disco Elysium is, in my mind, one of the greatest video games of all time, but, again, I’m in the credits. I hope this isn’t a conflict of interest to bring it up, especially favorably.

That said, the reason I am in the credits is that I was one of the earliest voices boosting the game. I told everyone who’d listen about it. I was fucking crazy for No Truce With The Furies, which is, I think, still a better title. ZA/UM were kind enough to send me an early build, which I played and offered some light feedback on.

I hope this is making it clear: I did not actually work on the game. I take no credit for its genius. I just played an early build and offered some notes. The people there were extremely kind to include me in the special thanks for doing something so minimal. However, it is always funny to respond to “have you heard of Disco Elysium?” with “yeah, I’m in the credits.” I’ve heard of Disco Elysium so hard that my name was literally in the game.

Now, a lot of my essays start with me thinking about a problem like this and mulling over it.

The really good pieces are when I’m able to answer why you think something is irritating or weird. Take my piece on wholesome games. I started that one going “I want to talk about this game I like, but I am struggling, because I often feel a sense of ick when dealing with games like this. Is this a me problem or is this a problem others have?”

So I did some looking around, asked people what they thought, and browsed various search terms and forum posts and reviews and articles and the like to get a sense of what was going on. From there, I started my serious research, like I always do.

Then, to make the piece relatable, I thought of the times I myself had dealt with, or heard of, similar instances where people felt similar ick. One example I led with was the infamous example(s) of the time(s) that the Steven Universe Fandom, which was very Aggressively Wholesome, rejected its ostensible wholesomeness to chase some artists off the internet.

That was a good in. By “good,” I mean that it is one of my most successful articles ever, and nearly all the feedback I got was people going “yes! I feel this too, and I’ve always wondered why!” People who had themselves dealt with truly awful people masquerading as friendly, kind, wholesome people suddenly had an answer to the questions they’d had. So I peppered the piece with personal anecdotes and the audience, who shared those same experiences, responded favorably. They had lived the same struggles I had.

Many of my pieces do that because, well, if a piece is just about me and my own personal weird hangups, no one really cares, right? So often, people say “your essay put into words what I’ve been trying to understand.” That’s good, because that’s literally what I am doing. I have a question, I try to find an answer, and if I think other people might benefit from the answer (meaning, they don’t have the answer yet), then it’s probably worth posting.

This is why I write in first person; you are meant to hear my voice in your head (or on your speakers, if I ever get around to reading these aloud for people who would prefer to listen along). I am a human, speaking in a jocular tone of voice, carrying on about a subject like an excited friend.

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Since this is text, of course, you are free to take any off-ramps, such as this one, if it is not for you. This article, I am doing for me. I write essays deliberately in first person because cold, stuffy third-person academic essays have a tendency of sounding authoritative, and I want to impress upon you that I am a person, with all the fallibility and foibles that possesses. The entire point of writing in first person is to impress upon you the absolute subjectivity of everything I say.

Yes, I will try to convince you, Yes, I want to be personable, Yes, the intended tone is to speak to you how I speak to human beings about games when I’m excited to share what I’ve learned. But I’m often doing that with you in mind. This one… I have no fucking idea what any of you think about dialogue choices in games, and I’m really only interested in trying to understand *how I think *about dialogue in games.

I like to bring up things I don’t think is common knowledge but something you yourself might want to learn (if I wrote something everyone knew, the piece would not be interesting).

I wouldn’t write about auteur theory if I thought everyone knew it was about one guy getting super mad about cuckolds, and one abusive woman trying to ruin a man’s career by outing him as gay in the 1960s just because she was jealous of his popularity. I think that history is interesting, and Andrew Sarris and his version of auteur theory deserve some level of understanding, while Pauline Kael rightfully deserves being raked over the coals for attempting to sabotage the careers of everyone she couldn’t control.

I wouldn’t have examined Cyberpunk’s relationship to policing (and the history of copaganda and why it’s so fucking insidiously pervasive) if I thought everyone already knew that.

I, deliberately, seek to answer the questions I find interesting and think other people are asking too.

I am not going to do that for this one.

This one is just for me.

Why do I think most dialogue options are boring and most games that have them would be better off without?

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This is me giving you several outs before I get started on an article that is really more about me thinking about stuff for my own sake. I’m going to explore a topic so that I can understand what I feel about it. It’ll be great if some of you feel the same way — it’d be amazing to learn my feelings are universally held — but I literally do not care, because at the end of the day, I think Planescape Torment fucking sucks, and I think most dialogue systems suck.

What I actually want to do is talk through the problem and see if I can’t figure out how to write dialogue trees in ways I would A) enjoy writing them, and B) enjoy playing them. Because I do want to make a complex, interesting RPG with dialogue choices and stat-influenced dialogue.

There are people who are way way way more sophisticated at this than me, actual computer scientist types who can do all sorts of crazy shit with dialogue and procedural stuff, and that’s super cool. I had a conversation back when I was planning out Adios, where I asked one of these way-smarter-than-me types how these kinds of systems handled subtext — that is, were there narrative engines that could create dramatic tension by having characters speak about things instead of what they were actually talking about.

Why? I’m a dramatist. I got trained by the beat writer David Ohle (who was one of William S. Burroughs’ pals — I thought he was Burroughs’ assistant, but he recently corrected me on this, my bad) and the Oscar winning screenwriter Kevin Willmott (who won for Blackkklansman). My instincts, history, and understanding of storytelling is built entirely around the idea of dramatics, and I think entirely in this context.

How can I make a video game dramatically compelling?

Before we continue:

I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.

I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.

So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.

paypal.me/stompsite* (this is the best way to help me out right now)*

@forgetamnesia on venmo (this is the second-best way to help me out right now)

ko-fi.com/stompsite* (this is the slowest way to help, but it works. i sometimes forget to send thanks on ko-fi so if you want a thank you, venmo is the easiest and i generally always try to get to paypal)*

$docseuss on cashapp (this works pretty quick, but the only thanks I can send is an emoji)

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So, to me, all stories are character. People do things because of who they are. A good story is one where characters make interesting decisions at the right time. A great story is one that maintains some level of tension — not necessarily “oh no, the bad guy has a gun and wants to shoot me” tension, but “Where did my keys go?” or “My kid is struggling to understand the death of his father and I don’t know how to tell him when I can’t even process those feelings myself.”

That’s what interests me. If I can tie that to a rip-roaring plot about a bunch of misfit fuckups trying to save the world while giant monsters and robots battle in the background, hell yeah, I’ve written a blockbuster with heart, and that’s awesome.

Well, my acquaintance’s answer was basically that no, procedural subtext wasn’t really something people had been working on, and since I am a dramatist and not some kind of genius programmer (got sick, brain inflammation got bad, lost the ability to program, read, and write, only got reading and writing back. oops. disability sucks), I went “oh, okay,” and decided to stop looking for a solution there. I wrote Adios instead.

Adios is rated 95% positive on Steam and is considered by many of its players to be one of the best-written indie games out there, so I think that is a good argument that I did a great job, but… I also wrote a mostly linear game. When we’re not being linear in Adios, we’re still trying to be linear. The level design of the farm, for instance, is something I asked my team to follow, essentially, a spiral outwards during the day. You can go in any direction to begin the scenes available to you, but nearly everybody plays in the way I intended.

It’s a path of least resistance sort of thing; it’s natural to go in the way its been designed, but robust enough to handle anything.

Before Adios, I’d worked on a game where my goal had been to tell a nonlinear story in emotional order, which is to say, every scene’s ending and beginning is explicitly tied to the emotional state the audience is in, and if you put the game in linear order, the emotion wouldn’t hit as hard.

For Adios, what I wanted to do was see if I could make something that was dramatically robust while having some level of nonlinearity to it. Could I do various chores around the farm, creating a sense that the emotions were building to a head purely in the writing? No alternate takes, no increasingly intense line reads depending on which scene was played in which order, our budget was less than the cost of a house, for fuck’s sakes, just… could I write something engaging, giving you the sense of encroaching doom, making you feel it… and do so in any order?

Here’s how I did it: every scene is structured the same, dramatically. Hitman ‘resets’ the drama at the end of the scene, and then you start the next one in exactly the same emotional state as the previous one, then they build up up up… until blam, across the horseshoes and shit-shoveling and discussions of grief and the Vietnam war, you find yourself holding a shotgun, knowing you are going to die, and the man who’s gonna do it has his back to you.

If you point the gun at him, which I know some of you will, because gamers Want To Have Control in a game about relinquishing it, you’ll get the achievement “Nice Try.” You won’t be able to kill him.

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adios

An earlier version of the game, which we couldn’t afford to make, was planned to have several sequences where you can kill Hitman, but then time rewinds and you realize that you were thinking about it, thinking about escaping your fate… but you choose not to. Sometimes I think about doing that. I wonder what it would be like for strangers to play, a game about a man thinking about killing his friend.

I didn’t really want the entire game to be nonlinear — since I already knew the conceit (I’d read a news article about a woman eaten by her own pigs and that sense of melancholy I felt thinking about them eating her was the emotional seed for the story), but I did want to at least spend some time seeing if I could do something like that. Every game I make is structured this way, including the three I’m working on right now. There’s always a “I wonder if I can…” that I try to build the game around.

So yeah, Adios is split up into two nonlinear halves, with a few linear funnels (like any other game). The first half is trying to achieve that with two actors talking back and forth. The second is

If I were writing Adios like a movie, I wouldn’t put the phone calls side by side; I’d have one, and then I’d do some other stuff, and then I’d have the other. That would make for better filmic pacing.

Adios would be difficult to adapt to begin with, since the afternoon sequence is literally a man, alone, just doing things with no dialogue. One way I thought about adapting it would be that you’re actually viewing Hitman listening to the phone calls over the wiretap, wondering if he’s gonna have to kill Bill or Edie, so that we’re not just seeing farmer, alone and melancholic.

(Adios is, by the way, a ‘melancholy game.’ I told my team “if a horror game is one where the art team makes a grandfather clock in Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion or something like that look spooky, then Adios, would need assets that convey a different emotion: melancholy)

As you can see, a lot of how I’m thinking about storytelling is in terms of the player experience and player emotions. I put the scenes in various order to create an overall emotional experience. You feel this here, you feel this there, and so on. The mechanics are the storytelling, in the same way a movie’s cinematography is storytelling. Generally, when it comes to filmmaking people don’t film a bunch of scenes that look nice, and then goes “okay, how do I turn this into a movie,” unless they’re an exec who doesn’t know storytelling and just wants to make a movie in post, which is widely considered a very bad practice and something only execs who have no business telling stories seem to like. We learned about that style of filmmaking; it’s called dump truck editing, cause you load a dump truck up with a bunch of takes.

You know super mismanaged movies that have crazy bloated budgets and it seems like nobody knows what they’re doing? Go check and see just how many of them started without a script. Hint: it’s most of them.

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one of the options you can select in adios is to make curry as your final meal

I don’t want to mismanage stuff like that, and I want to tell stories that are as affecting as humanly possible. I am trying to figure out how to do that, because I think the game I like most are often games with stories that hit me the hardest, and I think great gameplay that tells a great story is how you take advantage of the medium.

Some people think this means that dialogue has to have choices in it, or it’s not really a game. I know this, because many, many people have explicitly told this to me over the years.

Nah. One of my favorite story moments in a video game is the introduction of The Flood from Halo: Combat Evolved. If you ask people what their favorite moments in a game are, you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear how many of them will tell you about a story moment, whether that’s the cutscene where Aerith dies or the cutscene where you hear the phrase “would you kindly” and realize what it entails, or the cutscene where you realize you’ve just died in a nuclear explosion in Call of Duty 4, or…

Well, just look at IGN’s list of best moments in a video game.

Games don’t have to be a storytelling medium, but damn if games-as-a-storytelling-medium isn’t fucking cool. Sure, I could probably make a Very Fun Vampire Survivors, but that’s not really where my heart is. If I’m making a Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, you best believe I’m making a game where all that gameplay is telling that fuckin’ story.

And, if I do it right, people remember it fondly.

But it doesn’t mean I need dialogue choices, y’know? Like, I think if you added dialogue to Max Payne 2, you’d make a game that is less interesting. Max Payne 2 is structured as a linear cinematic/comic book adventure story, playing like a love letter to Johnnie To and John Woo. You don’t want to bog that down with Max going:

1. Mona, wait!
2. Fuck off, Mona.
3. Where is Captain Baseball Bat Boy?

It just wouldn’t be all that fun, I think. There are plenty of games where dialogue choices are the wrong move, and that’s what got me to writing this essay in the first place.

Fuck, well, if you wanted to see what the inside of my head looks like, it’s basically this but with way more sentences that trail off. Take this essay, print it out, put it through a paper shredder, and try to read it. That’s what the inside of my brain looks like half the time. Somehow I end up knowing where all the shreds are and what they contain, though. That’s the power of ADHD, baybee!

…remember what I said about me doing this for me? Here I am walking through how I thought through Adios while trying to clarify my ideas on what makes for an interesting video game story. I’m sure that’ll be of some use to some people, but it’s certainly more in the weeds than I usually get about this stuff. One day, I was thinking of just posting all of Adios’ development, full of logs, in the hopes that people who are huge nerds like me and love seeing how creative projects come together — I literally have a folder that’s just special features from movies about how they were made, I’m that kind of nerd.

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So, where were we?

There are plenty of great games with great stories that entirely linear, possessing absolutely zero need for dialogue trees, so it’s an entirely uncontroversial thing to claim that dialogue trees are not necessary when making a video game!

BUT!

Because it is very very fun to think about systems and what we can do with them, how we can get inventive with them and try things that may surprise and delight our players, I do find myself thinking about dialogue trees, even though I don’t particularly enjoy them.

There’s a bit in Adios where someone asks “what are we doing?” Farrmer’s reply has four distinct euphemisms for shoveling pig manure to put in the garden. That’s me taking the piss out of dialogue trees. In a previous game, it was “<lie> I do not like giant balls of twine.” Pushing against the commonly accepted implementation of game mechanics has always been in my blood.

Sure, I hate Planescape: Torment, not just because it’s such a weirdly, aggressively misogynistic game, and that’s apparently been baked in since the game’s original pitch deck, or because — so far (I am not finished with the game yet) — the writing is often really fuckin’ bad (and I’m a sucker for novelty! but my god, if I read a book with prose like this, I wouldn’t have lasted ten pages), but because I don’t like how the dialogue is implemented.

That’s a personal thing. Plenty of people do like it. Some say it’s a “you had to be there” moment. Others say “yeah, well, I was 12. It doesn’t hold up now.” Others point out that the actual worldbuilding (from the tabletop RPG on which Planescape Torment is based) is excellent — it’s just most of the actual text that doesn’t really… age… well. Seriously, how many women breasting boobily in the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts do I need to read about?

So again: I’m doing this for me.

I want to take a single mechanic — “dialogue trees” — and ask “what can they do?” and “is that worth doing?”

I’m showing you my thought process much earlier than I normally do. My articles often take months or years to ferment into something readable, and I’m breaking my rule of “I don’t know that anyone else will care about this, so kill it,” for this one. This one is purely for me. I cannot reiterate that enough. You might find it boring. You might not care. You might be really really really into the Twine games scene and have Way More Advanced Knowledge of This, in which case, you fucking nerd, wanna chat about it? :)

I’d love to learn more.

So, where to start…

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another choice you can make is steak, a baked potato, and peas. does this choice do anything? no, but you choosing your last meal requires there to be a choice for it to feel like you’re choosing. interestingly, a lot of people said this really stuck with them

What Do Choices Do?

A lot of people I’ve known over the years start with Bioware, and that’s a fine introduction. For many people, a Bioware game was their first story-driven game. That all kinda came to a screeching halt after EA and Bioware leadership kept trying to kill Dragon Age, Bioware’s most popular series, because, apparently, the dudebros running Bioware considered the much-less-popular Mass Effect series to be more interesting (because it appealed to men, you see, and while Dragon Age appealed to men, it also appealed to women and queer people, and the dudebros, apparently, weren’t too fond of their best-selling series appealing to those demographics).

But before the one-two punch of Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, which damaged Bioware’s reputation significantly, a lot of people liked Bioware games a great deal. For the console crowd, that started with Knights of the Old Republic and took off with Dragon Age: Origins (KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect were all notably Xbox exclusives; as I recall, Dragon Age: Origins was the first Bioware game to release on PlayStation), but they’d been known in PC circles for the Baldur’s Gate series — crazy, but there were two other Baldur’s Gate games before Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3, and Bioware made them both).

The Baldur’s Gate games were typical computer RPGs.

They looked like this.

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this is a screenshot of baldur’s gate, which I got from the Steam store page. I usually take screenshots myself, but I haven’t played Baldur’s Gate yet, in part because I am SUFFERING THROUGH PLANESCAPE TORMENT AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

When you talk to a character, you are presented with a list of phrases, and you, the player, can click those phrases. The character you are speaking with will respond accordingly, and the conversation will continue.

In Planescape: Torment, sometimes the list is so long that you have to tell it to load more dialogue options. If you’re a quantity over quality person, this probably makes you very happy.

Now, the developer sees something a little different, which will change depending on the tool. Once, I was contracted to write all the sidequests for a game in about two weeks — 60-some quests — where I could edit the _text and add lines but not change characters, portraits, or order of lines that were already in the game, and I had to do it all in excel. Yes, it was a nightmare. Other times, you get something that looks a bit like this:

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i found this on a blog post for something callled paradigm island in a google image search

What are you looking at?

Well, it’s basically a big ol’ series of nodes. The NPC has a line, like “Hi, I’m Blender,” and you can reply with “Blender Blending Rodriguez!” or “Hello, nice to meet you,” or whatever. Sometimes, that changes things — a friendly response leads to a friendly node, an unfriendly response leads to an unfriendly node.

Other times, you’re getting the illusion of choice. In Adios, when you can pick “poop, shit, crap, manure,” or whatever, those all feed back into the same node.

Basically, at its simplest, it looks like this. The NPC says “hey,” you get to go “Bob’s dead,” “did you hear Bob died?” “hey, Bob died!” and then the NPC responds “Fuck!”

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Now, in a game like Planescape: Torment, you can get a fuckload of responses. If your character has a really high stat in something, like intelligence, maybe you’re like “forsooth, fair NPC, Bob hath perished!” whereas you won’t get that option at all (or maybe you can’t even talk to the character yet) if your character hasn’t found out that Bob died.

Sometimes you’ll get a situation that requires a check, like so:

Now, this thing can spiral out of control really quickly. You’ll notice that in this particular case, there are basically three endings: the dialogue closes when you realize you don’t have the key, the dialogue closes when you choose to attack, and the dialogue progresses through your options.

If you have the “intimidate” skill, as many games do (such as Rise of the Ronin, which I have been playing lately), then you can either use it (most games have some stat checking to determine if you can succeed at intimidation or not).

Most games are built around the idea that you can either:

A) Progress if You Have The Right Stat

or

B) Come Back When You Have The Key

This can be a literal key, it can be a document, it can be “first, you have to meet Throgmorton the Effete Barbarian, who will tell you a Secret Phrase to enter the base.” Functionally, they’re all keys to unlock a gate.

Buuuuuuuuut… either way, the general idea is that if the content exists, you, the player, should be able to experience it. You can talk your way through anything, *do *anything, get anything done. And… I dunno, something about the self-centered solipsism of that bothered me.

(some of you are going to go “wait, that’s not self-centered solipsism!” bear with me, because you’re right too)

Remember Deus Ex: Human Revolution? When it first came out, a lot of people who did the whole “play your way” thing about games like the original Deus Ex, really hated it because it had some boss fights they took issue with.

See, Deus Ex is an RPG/Immersive sim hybrid, according to series co-creator Warren Spector — and before you post the following image, note that’s a load-bearing ‘co-’.

also, warren spector didn’t even create thief

Modern immersive sims get a lot of their design from Thief and Deus Ex. From Thief, they get the idea that literally every one of these games has to be a stealth game, which is super weird (Looking Glass created the immersive sim with Ultima Underworld, then System Shock, and Terra Nova, none of which were stealth games!). Then they pile on a heaping helping of Deus Ex, which Warren Spector explicitly said was a hybrid of immersive sim and RPG.

The immersive sim elements are the idea that you can approach problems from a simulation-driven perspective. They’re holodeck adventures — the idea is that you’re a person in a situation, like a rogue in a fantasy world committing theft, for instance. Then the whole game exists to simulate that reality, which is why physics and AI are so crucial to what makes a game an immersive sim; the idea is that you play, not by following explicit rules, but by pretending to be the character you are being and treating the game as logically as you might treat a real world.

The RPG elements, of course, come from Spector (and co-creator Harvey Smith’s) love of tabletop roleplaying games, as I recall. A roleplaying game is a kind of game that comes from the HG Wells style war games, and later the Gary Gygax game Dungeons and Dragons. This stuff’s also way easier for a computer to calculate, because you’re taking an action, then ‘simulating’ if it succeeds or fails and by how much, usually through a calculation of dice rolls and the stats on a character sheet. There’s a million systems out there, but basically, if your stat sheet says you have 10 accuracy, and there’s 20 possible accuracy, and you roll two dice and get 6 accuracy, then you rolled a 16/20, and if the enemy ended up with like, an 8/20 dodge, well, you win.

(Look, I don’t play TTRPGs and I don’t like them, so I’m not intending to accurately reflect any real systems here).

Both game types are about you trying to express yourself though. In an RPG, if you build a character who can talk through problems, you’re probably going to lean into a lot of talking.

In an immersive sim, you have a bunch of verbs — talk, shoot, sneak, whatever. So if you want to talk your way into a base or shoot your way into a base, you can just do that, and the AI responds accordingly.

These two systems aren’t always the best complements, but they can often work well together because both are going for the whole “let the player choose to do things” situation.

But… that just meant that players got really mad when Deus Ex Human Revolution put them in situations where enemy characters ambushed them, locking them in rooms and making the player fight on their terms.

A player who went in metagaming — “I want to be an elite hacker so I’m gonna put all my points into hacking and solve all the problems the hacking way” — found themselves having to fight a guy with a robot body that looked like a flensed human who tried to blend in with a bunch of similar-looking figures and then jumped out at you when you got close, ambushing you throughout the fight.

But a lot of players hated it because they wanted the entire game to bend itself to their specific character builds at all times, and they wanted the game to provide them with their playstyle the entire time. So the studio updated the fights; I went back and replayed the new fights. I vaguely remember that one was in a warehouse, and that’s about it.

You know what I thought about that? I thought it made the game less immersive. Flattening every boss fight by making it do whatever you, the player, expect of it turns the game into… not you being there doing cool shit, not you being protagonist Adam Jensen, taking a curveball and having to deal with it, responding to the choices of other characters, but a game where you explicitly set rules and make the entire world bow to your whims. If the world throws a curveball at you, well, “how dare this entertainment product not exist to serve me, the player!”

I think that’s solipsistic.

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you can shoot this motherfucker with goat milk in this scene. i shit you not. buy adios and find out for yourself

In a truly interesting immersive world, the player *should *have to deal with enemies who don’t want to cooperate — because, hey, the enemies don’t want to cooperate. It’s one thing I love about Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain; if you start eliminating enemies with headshots, the enemies will start wearing helmets to counteract your strategy. They seem aware of your decisions and will react accordingly.

This is the game acknowledging you exist; this is the game *truly *respecting your playstyle — by trying to counteract it, not by pretending to be stealthy and then having fifty different ways to sneak into a base. In fact, in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it’s quite literally optimal to talk your way into a base, hack every computer anyways, and then sneak through the ducts to get all the tasty XP for doing every single different kind of encounter there is. This process of optimization kills the immersion, because it’s foolish not to do everything you can to get the most experience points, regardless of how much sense it makes.

This is why I believe that what makes a game truly immersive is when you you *can’t *make everything go your way; otherwise, the artifice becomes readily apparent.

As you can guess, this is an issue I have with dialogue in games; if I’m seeing, at all times, every possible option for how to deal with a solution, and I think to myself “well, I can just sip this alcohol, which, for some reason, makes my character more persuasive (I want to say that’s in New Vegas) by raising my Charisma stat,” then I’m not really existing in the world, I’m doing math to try to get past a challenge.

A character should make choices because of who they are; that means sometimes, stat checks just aren’t gonna work, and getting players into the mindset that every conversation can be beaten makes me feel like games are treating people as if they can be beaten. There’s a narcissism to that I find uncomfortable. People are people! You don’t go into conversations going I Am The Person Who Always Wins With Intelligence unless you’re a redditor who thinks too highly of themselves; you go into conversations based on how you’re feeling, you read the other person’s body language, you think about them and what they’re doing, what they might want or need. You are one of *two people *in that conversation; they are not merely An Obstacle To Be Defeated So I Can Progress, and yet… so often, that’s what game dialogue is.

If I’m going “hmm, I’ll come back to this scenario when my character’s intimidate is higher,” or “if I piss off this faction, I can’t get this reward,” which is why guides like this are all over the internet.

You aren’t making choices to be somebody, do something, exist in the moment, or even participate in the story. You are just doing the math to achieve an optimal outcome. You are trying to make the entire world bend to your will through the power of math.

It… completely takes you out of the story. When I see a list of dialogue options that’s like “here’s the intelligence option you can pick, here’s the dumbass option you can pick, here’s the option you can pick for being an orphan and having an orphan background…” I just… I’m not actually involved in a story at all at that point.

I literally cannot do anything but start thinking through every possible outcome in my head. Like, you give me the stimulus, my brain immediately thinks about the consequences. That is how my brain functions.

So hey, this… doesn’t work for me at all. I’m sitting there, and the game is killing any tension, any pacing, any drama by taking a conversation from a natural flow into a start stop situation.

If I had any acting chops, this is where I’d make a video called “POV, you’re an NPC and talking to a player,” and the camera would be watching the player stop for seconds at a time between dialogue, zone out, look like he’s thinking… then snap back in, chug a beer, and go NOW THAT I AM MORE CHARISMATIC, YOU’LL GIVE ME WHAT I WANT, RIGHT?

You know how silly that would look.

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i can’t remember which one of us came up with this pun, but it’s a good one.

Remember, this article is me thinking through it all for my own self. I’m posting this on the off chance you may find it useful, but this is also me just… working through it how I work through it.

I am a player that literally dragged a dead guy’s corpse to try to give him a burial just cause I felt bad for killing him. If I’m really into a game, I make decisions all the time like choosing to close a door I’ve just walked through because it’s rude to leave a door open like that and it’s cold outside and I don’t want to make the person I’m speaking with uncomfortable in their own home, even though this is a video game and they are not a real person.

This is how I play; I take plenty of non-optional actions in a game because I get into the character’s headspace and I want to try to play the part of their character. Seeing a list of dialogue options to parse through so I can pick the most stat-optimal way to play or deliberately bring about a desired option… yeah, it’s gameplay, but it’s choking the life out of the story. It’s not an interesting or memorable conversation; I think Choose Your Own Adventure books are boring and forgettable, and I can’t help but feel the same way about a lot of games for the exact same reason.

Because of my frustration with solipsism in games, I took a few jabs at the idea in Adios. First, I approached this with lines you think but can’t say. I’ve heard other games have done something similar, but I came to the conclusion from first principles, and I’ve never played a game that did anything like it; judging by the feedback I’ve gotten on Adios, it’s not all that common, but people thought we did it really well in Adios.

How’d I get there? Essentially, I thought of the game where you were playing a single character, already defined, and the dialogue is entirely what he is thinking. Farmer wants to tell his son he loves him, wants to explain everything, but he knows his phone is tapped, so he can’t ever say that. So all the dialogue options aren’t so much “who do you want to be?” but “here are all the things he is thinking.”

A few people still post on the Steam forums going “how do I unlock dialog choice” because they want to escape and ‘beat’ the game. A friend of mine even shared the game with a Bioware writer he knew, who played it and apparently quite liked it, but as I recall, they struggled because they were so used to choices being A Method of Roleplay and A Thing You Game.

I’m not using dialogue for that.

This is a game about facing your own mortality — there is no way out. The decision was made in the first line of the game. Farmer, not you, says “I can’t do this anymore.” That’s that. Farmer is going to die. You are living as him, you are not defining him. I’m trying to get you to give up your ego and try living as another person — I’m trying to get you to play empathetically, rather than solipsistically.

Everything else is about situating you in Farmer’s head. So you get lines where you can make choices — but when Farmer chooses between four different ways to refer to manure, he’s just having that momentary question for himself of “what’s the funniest way to say this?” I often know what I’m going to say as I’m saying it; my mind never works by going “well I could be the asshole here, or I could be nice,” because no, I’m me, I talk how I talk.

If I need to consider my words very carefully, then either I’m trying to put together something I feel but haven’t thought about enough to fully articulate — I am in the middle of figuring something out, in which case I am telling the other party that I am doing this and trying to make sure I communicate my thought correctly — or I’m paying extremely close attention to the other person.

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the nice try achievement screenshot. honestly, we should’ve lit him differently

Sure, when I’m writing I’m very thoughtful, and when I’m writing dialogue I’m extremely thoughtful, but… how often do you actually think in a real conversation with real people the way people sit there and metagame a conversation, trying to have the right item or determine the optimal outcome.

…okay, maybe that’s why I always know what my order is when I get to the drive thru and other people take way… too… goddamn… long…

I leisurely think through my order on the way to the drive thru, so when I drive up, I have the order in mind. It takes me a couple seconds to recalibrate when they tell me that they’re out of marinara sauce or whatever, but seriously, just listen to people having conversations some time. Listen to how fast they are. We think very quickly, we rarely consider a casual conversation to have ten or twenty second breaks between every line (seriously, I’ve watched some people play these games and the decision-time is sloooow).

In Adios, the dialogue system is designed to get you in the guy’s head. Every single line is meant to help shape your headspace. You can make a few choices here and there, and those result in entire conversations, but they are conversations, meticulously timed to deliver the dialogue in as natural a way as I could. Seriously, I went in and manually timed the line delivery myself for flow. It’s not perfect, but it was also really hard with the circumstances I was under.

This is what I love about Disco Elysium; that’s a game where most of the dialogue is internal monologue. You are literally wrestling with yourself. Some of your thoughts are intrusive, the decisions you make getting baked into your personality and popping up because that’s how you think now. Wrestling with yourself is the perfect backdrop for actually having to make those kinds of choices.

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a very stupid post about disco elysium, in part because the writer is claiming that the writing is incredible but they also think the player character, the person who talks the most in the game, is ‘generic’. which is it? also, harry’s a beloved character precisely because he’s so absolutely fucking distinct as a character despite how malleable he is as the person you’re playing as! there are five hundred different harrier du bois’ and they’re all fucking rich characters! the OP here clearly wants a different fantasy entirely, which is just… sure, I’m going to tell everyone I hate Battlefield 6 because it’s a generic war game and I really want it to be about collecting weird creatures on an alien planet and ordering them to kill bugs for me. Pikmin.

If Adios is about being one specific guy, Disco Elysium is about defining one specific guy. The reason the whole game works is that it’s about a person choosing what kind of person to be. A young witch trying to solve the disappearance of a cat is a mystery, like Disco Elysium, sure, but that’s not the point. That Disco Elysium is starting with the same premise as Akira Kurosawa’s movie Stray Dog isn’t the reason it works; the grimy detective story about a (far from generic) middle-aged white man is because it’s a game about a guy who is a massive fuckup trying not to be, and it is the story about how he figures out who he is. The gameplay is about figuring out who you are as a person.

The witch premise is not about figuring that out. It’s about solving a mystery. You don’t need Disco Elysium’s dialogue system for that, unless you make it a story that’s about a witch trying to deal with her fucking sense of self; the cat is the MacGuffin, not the story.

Disco Elysium’s dialogue system is for a hypothetical game scene w