#dialogue trees

[rosykims]

does anybody want to hear my unhinged rant about matthas and evander's character questlines if they were veilguard companions

[ashestoashesjc]

One day I'll play a Bioware game all the way through without reloading every fifteen seconds to test out all the conversation options. Today is not that day.

[commandercoriandersalamander]

My problem with video game dialogue trees is I’m too trusting that everyone involved has good communication skills and wants everything to work out.

Option: don’t tell him

My interpretation: I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not comfortable talking about this- it’s not my secret to share and I need to respect my employer.

Character’s: You’re an untrustworthy bastard and you won’t get anything from me!

And then I have to kill all the NPCs because everyone got angry and three quest zones later I’m trying to talk to the mayor but he won’t see me because I killed his goons that one time and I’m just shouting at the screen “no I didn’t mean to I meant to use I Statements it’s not my fault Geralt never read a Buzzfeed article about successful conflict resolution please don’t stab me nooooo”

[hyacinthnil]

It’s dialogue tree week

We’re hoping to get a good chunk of the dialogue in this week while I continue to art and code it out.

[spewagepipe]

I wish I could place the first time I heard this argument: dialogue trees make for a poor simulation of romance. That they imply, by their very structure, that romantic interaction is nothing more than a matter of giving the right set of inputs; of pulling the correct levers. That, therefore, dialogue trees are only capable of presenting romance as coercive or manipulative in nature. Dante Douglas burns about 1500 words reiterating the idea here, but it still reads as exactly as half-baked as every other time I’ve heard it.

Dialogue trees present conversations (and, by extension, interpersonal interactions, including romances) in the form of a pre-written flow-chart. They are to conversations what choose-your-own-adventure books are to entire stories, and they are as good at simulating conversations as CYOA books are at simulating universes. That is to say: flow-charts don’t really simulate anything at all – rather they summarize key options, and then deliver corresponding consequences as decided by the author. They eschew systemic simulations for what Douglas would call “bespoke” content; tailored scripts that more elaborate sims usually struggle to generate.

In the extreme abstraction of a flowchart, romantic interaction (like everything else) is about giving the right set of inputs – if you say the right things, at the right times, you can get a person to like you more, love you, and, yes, even have sex with you. Unfortunately, there’s no way to say that without it sounding as gross as that, so, for clarity: the flowchart model is functionally useless as far as a simulation of real-world dating, but it is not intrinsically false or coercive.

The problem – Mass Effect’s problem, the problem of a thousand other dating simulators, and the problem of a multitude of authored romances from non-game media – is with content and presentation, not with form. Mass Effect is written in a way that implies that romance amounts to repeatedly saying a nice thing as opposed to a neutral or rude thing, culminating in sex. It could be written with more varied inputs and responses so as to imply that the NPC has their own shit going on and such that the player has to actually engage with the character in order to build a relationship, with or without sex being at all significant to that relationship.

Nothing about dialogue trees requires the writing to say one thing or another, and there’s no reason to assume that not-dialogue-trees would solve the issue. Suppose we put together some simulation of romance with a variety of freeform inputs and an elaborate model to track the emotional states, reactions, and opinions of potential romantic partners. No matter how elaborate or realistic we made it, it would still be possible to superficially describe that system as “match inputs; get sex”. One could even deliberately design the sim such that generic, bland niceness inevitably seduces every possible romantic partner into having sex – simply avoiding dialogue trees does not prevent a designer from producing an ill-conceived system, because just like writing, systems can be made to imply whatever the creator wishes.

[literary-potato]

Anyone know a good tool for writing dialogue trees?