After having a conversation a few days ago with an acquaintance that works as a private investigator, I began imagining how one would implement a "gumshoe" mechanic in a game.
The closest thing that I've ever seen to get "legwork" modeled is in the Shadowrun games, and then it's quite unimaginative. You buy contacts at start of play, role-play interaction with the GM and then roll a few dice. This is because the concept is open-ended and so could not work in any other way. Let's say we're designing an adventure game though. Usually in games conversation with NPCs is modeled as a form of repetitive interaction that plays out in a very unnatural fashion. The most advanced models use conversation trees with some numerical disposition thrown in.
And, you can talk to a person for however long you'd like and as many times as you'd like without the actual actions of your character being interpreted as weird or strange. If we wanted to model realistic conversation then this clearly would not be the case.
Using a topic based-system, say being able to walk up to a person and "asking them about things" is/was rather common in both point-and-click and text adventure games. But again, the unnaturalness of this is rather stark. Walking up to Mrs. Old-lady and randomly asking her what she thinks of the rope in my backpack should have more lasting effects on the future simulated interaction than a neutral and repeated “good heavens, I have no idea” or whatever the scenario designer thought appropriate for an old lady to say in such an awkward situation.
What you could do is have two separate models - disposition (not a numerical value, more a state machine label like "is one wrong word from starting a bar fight with you" or "considers you an acquaintance" - you don't even need to share them between NPCs - and "social exhaustion" being a numerical value that determines how much, in terms of volume, you can talk to an NPC at all, with certain topics being more invasive. The label is static and determines the static, scripted part of the conversation - ask the heiress about her dead father’s murky affairs and she radically changes her behavior - and the exhaustion is dynamic inside the scope of that behavior.
This would allow you to stick to a conversation track that's "safe" or try to be more invasive and risk exhausting your "boundary points" with the NPC too fast so that you don't get the info you need.
If you combined labels, an open-ended topic-based conversation system and "boundary modeling" I think you could reasonably approximate casual conversation inside e.g. a game about being a gumshoe or a journalist or similar, without having to resort to hand-scripting the course of every single conversation in the game, a technique that often makes “legwork” feel absolutely nothing like “legwork” whatsoever.
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
theartofmadeline
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