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I find that with the quantity of dialogue, I tend to observe the opposite trend in a lot of story-driven videogames: many lines will be devoted to elaborating o

I find that with the quantity of dialogue, I tend to observe the opposite trend in a lot of story-driven videogames: many lines will be devoted to elaborating on needless backstory, reducing characters down to walking encyclopedias. Many of these games have a hard time taking advantage of their medium as far as their story goes. Her touching on the loss of quality in dialogue, not just quantity, seems like the more important problem. To me, meaningful and good dialogue is important - whereas dialogue for the sake of dialogue tends to suck. I'm not saying that everything that comes out of a character's lips needs to be important plot points, but writers and producers should think more about what they're trying to accomplish in their work when a character needs to say something. I think a piece of bad dialogue hurts more than if that character were to say nothing.

zubat 10y ago
Game dialogue definitely has an weak point in defaulting to an expository mode, and when this happens it's usually in tandem with a lot of other kitchen-sink elements that are "immersive" or "world-building" but don't respect the player's time or attention. Games that gun for interactive story remain in a perpetual struggle for maximizing the agency of both players and authors, and the compromise is frequently to distort the timeline and social situation as needed, on command, so that instead of cutting down on quantity, players can sample the experience à la carte and then cut short or resume any scenario when they're bored. But it's still a problem if you're like me and feel obligated to view all the content no matter what. There are known patterns now, but it's still a work-in-progress field. Movies, on the other hand, have a definite limit to how much they can cram in, and so they're more inclined to use time efficiently. As in games, dialogue is extremely convenient as a way to do exposition, but the medium holds many other possibilities. Since there isn't conflict over agency, it's easier to make more elements in a film "inevitable" by design. For a game to present many of the set-pieces shown in movies, it has to carefully coax the player to move in the right direction and look in the right place at the right time.

zubat 10y ago

Game dialogue definitely has an weak point in defaulting to an expository mode, and when this happens it's usually in tandem with a lot of other kitchen-sink elements that are "immersive" or "world-building" but don't respect the player's time or attention. Games that gun for interactive story remain in a perpetual struggle for maximizing the agency of both players and authors, and the compromise is frequently to distort the timeline and social situation as needed, on command, so that instead of cutting down on quantity, players can sample the experience à la carte and then cut short or resume any scenario when they're bored. But it's still a problem if you're like me and feel obligated to view all the content no matter what. There are known patterns now, but it's still a work-in-progress field. Movies, on the other hand, have a definite limit to how much they can cram in, and so they're more inclined to use time efficiently. As in games, dialogue is extremely convenient as a way to do exposition, but the medium holds many other possibilities. Since there isn't conflict over agency, it's easier to make more elements in a film "inevitable" by design. For a game to present many of the set-pieces shown in movies, it has to carefully coax the player to move in the right direction and look in the right place at the right time.