Aug 12, 2010

BioShock Infinite Goes Beyond The Sea & Into The Skies

BioShock™

The trailer teased a return to the underwater failed Utopia of Rapture, first seen in 2007's BioShock. But last night, we saw BioShock Infinite in action, a live demo. This next big thing from Ken Levine's Irrational Games is something different.

This is the BioShock of a floating city, of America in 1912, of a helpful damsel in semi-distress and of something called the Skyline.

BioShock Infinite Goes Beyond The Sea & Into The Skies "The time for silence is over," said Ken Levine, creative director of Irrational Games to a room full of reporters at New York's Plaza Hotel on Wednesday night, seconds before the BioShock Infinite trailer began. We were a controlled audience, our laptops and cell phones confiscated before we entered a small ballroom and sat in front of the stage and screen from which Irrational would show its new project. The news vans outside the hotel had not been for BioShock Infinite but for controversial Democrat Congressman Charlie Rangel, whose birthday party was one story above and whose House ethics investigation is ongoing.

Levine's team is one of the most acclaimed and secretive in game development. Since the '07 BioShock, which they made in partnership with 2K Australia, Irrational gave no hint about what they were working on, no clue that they were making another BioShock. They were not involved in this year's BioShock 2, which was created by several sister studios and was set in that undersea city of Rapture. But Irrational, which had, for a time, been known as 2K Boston, is indeed back on the franchise and allowed Wednesday night for their new trailer tease briefly that they were back on the virtual ocean floor.

Their trailer begins with a camera swoop across what appears to be ocean bottom, past an iconic BioShock Big Daddy. But that's just a trick, a look inside the fish tank of a man on the place where BioShock Infinite is really set, the early-20th century airborne crumbling metropolis of Columbia.

A 20th Century 'Death Star'

What I saw — and what you can see in the trailer here — was the first glimpse of a game shrouded in years of secret development and now scheduled for a 2012 release on the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

The trailer signaled that Infinite is a first-person return to the style of idea-driven historical science fiction of BioShock, but set in the skies. Later, Levine would tell me that the game is thematically tied to the work he did in first BioShock in that it is another game about a strange and yet strangely familiar place as well as about expressive, variable gameplay. He doesn't call it prequel though and drew no narrative connections between the BioShocks we have played and the one his team is making. "I don't want to think about that," Levine said to me. "I don't think it's particularly constructive to have that conversation."

After the trailer unfurled Infinite's world, Levine began explaining the game to his audience. Infinite is set in the early 1910s. Its main setting is Columbia, a city that floats on balloons and drifted across an ascendant United States, showing the accomplishments of a post-Civil War American ready to express its idea of excellence.

"Something terrible happens," Levine said, establishing the stakes and the mystery. Columbia proves to be something worse than a beacon of prosperity. "This is not a floating world's fair. Columbia is a Death Star." In the lead-up to the events of Infinite, Columbia is embroiled in an international incident of unspecified horror and then disappears into the clouds. Our character, a "disgruntled former Pinkerton agent" named Booker DeWitt, is contacted by a mysterious man who knows where Columbia is. In that city, DeWitt is told, is Elizabeth, a woman who has been raised there and who the man wants rescued. DeWitt accepts the mission, which will be ours as a player: to rescue Elizabeth and, with her super-powered help, get out of the patriotic-turned-violent Columbia.

Infinite In Action

We were shown a live gameplay demo to get a sense of how Infinite will play. The demo was paced for action and was as heart-racing as a good sequence in the campaign of a Call of Duty. If you've played the BioShocks, as I have, you'd spot the potential for dynamic gameplay. Guns go in your character's right hand. Powers are on the left. The gameplay sequence began with DeWitt walking up one cobblestoned street of Columbia. A floating bell tower teetered and then collapsed in front of him. Up the street, he passed a woman sweeping in her doorway while the building behind her blazed. A dead horse was in the road, being pecked by birds. Columbia's a weird place.

Columbia looks American, particularly a style we might call, kindly, American Obnoxious, though Levine describes it more technically as an age of American Exceptionalism. It was built, in the fiction, at a time of swelling U.S. pride, when the inventions of electricity and radios and the progress of the American people could, theoretically, spawn a floating city that waves the flag and, more distressingly, exhibits imperial racism.

DeWitt walked past flags with 48 stars that flapped near posters pumping the slogans "For Faith, For Race, For Fatherland." Columbia's patriotism is off-the-rails jingoism, its citizens taking gun rights to the extreme. A man preaching politics from a gazebo stood near signs that warn "they'll take your gun" and barrels full of rifles from which, you can indeed take your gun.

When the Irrational developer controlling the Infinite demo had Dewitt take his rifle, the pontificating man in the gazebo scowled. His eyes and mouth started glowing and a fight began. For a moment, the fight pitted DeWitt's scoped rifle vs. this combative man and a swarm of crows — well, a murder of crows, to use both the proper term. Murder of Crows is also the brand name of the bottle from which DeWitt later drank in order to obtain the ability to send out his own angry birds.

We were shown other powers. Deeper into the demo, during a combat sequence in a bar, DeWitt appeared to use telekinesis to pull a shotgun out of a man's hands. The gun floated in front of the man, pointing at him, shot him, then zipped into the grip of our hero. That same power was used to stop a football-sized shell in mid-air, rotate it and fire it back at the turret from which it came.

Aside from the splendor of a floating city populated with angry patriots, the newness to the BioShock series presented by Infinite are the roles played by Elizabeth and the Skyline, the railways connecting Columbia's floating districts.

Let's take the lady first. Elizabeth is a skinny-waisted, dark-haired, cleavage-showing damsel who is sometimes in distress and sometimes the key combat support. She is not controllable by another player. She is a computer-controlled ally and she is not, Levine told me, ever supposed to feel like a nuisance, a video game "escort mission"-style hindrance. She is instead, he said, a character, one who will enable the type of in-the-midst-of-gameplay dialogue-driven storytelling seen among the characters of Valve's Left 4 Dead. She is also a power amplifier, if the player chooses to accept her assistance. And she has her limits.

In one moment of the demo, Elizabeth was placing a storm cloud over the heads of a crowd of gun-toting men; DeWitt blasting forth with electricity to ignite a storm of lightning on the crowd. In the next she was struggling to her feet, falling behind, nose bloody. "When she helps you, it takes a toll," Levine said in a canned print interview supplied by Irrational. "You're not a super hero and she's not a super hero, and you're both up against a very difficult challenge that pushes you to the extremes."

Later, there was a robot or a man in a robotic suit on a bridge menacing DeWitt and Elizabeth. The lady was able to zap an orb high on its suspension tower. DeWitt was able to bring it down on the robot-nemesis' head. The middle of the bridge collapsed. As Levine later told me of Elizabeth's gameplay significance, "She is there to enable things that are of a scale that you just couldn't do in BioShock 1." With the bridge out, a robotic bird swept in, ending the gameplay demo.

The other distinct gameplay element in the demo had been what Irrational calls the Skyline. These rails are ostensibly used for sky-trains that travel from room to room and from one city block to the next. But in the demo, they were used by people. That pontificating political man from the gazebo had grasped for one during his fight with DeWitt and zipped along it well out of reach and then back in for a melee swipe. DeWitt could grab onto one as well and zip down its line, to speedily get from one place to the next, and to, presumably, escape, dash toward or even flank his enemies.

In our interview, I asked Levine if it would be right to think of the Skyline as Infinite's Warthog, the Halo vehicle that changes the famous Xbox series on the fly from an on-foot heroic slog of a first-person shooter to a rushing driving-based war game. He liked the analogy and said that the rails in Infinite are not a mere Ratchet & Clank style mode of conveyance.

I saw a gameplay parallel between the Skyline and the rails that connect floating sectors of one of the main worlds in Retro Studios' Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. But in Infinite, the Skyline network appears to be so complex that it seems likely to function less as a limited-use means of conveyance and infrequent combat, as it was in Metroid, and more like an additional tactical option added to the already-variable arsenal of BioShock.

A Real Character

During his address to the press, Levine said that players of Infinite would feel as if they were playing a specific character. The hero of the first BioShock had an important relationship to other characters in that game, but he was, in terms of expression, a blank. Booker DeWitt won't be. He will feel like a specific guy with a specific story, Levine said. In the canned interview, Levine said of DeWitt: "He's known as a man who gets things done... for a price."

Levine still wants players to feel like they are conducting the actions in BioShock. He uses variations of the word "expressibility" many times while explaining a BioShock game's prime elements. Players will still be able to decide how to fight through each conflict in BioShock Infinite, using whichever powers, weapons and team-up moves with Elizabeth that seem best for them. But DeWitt will feel like a specific role we've played, Levine told me.

It appears that we are also going to be encouraged to think of the people of Columbia as a collection of individuals. Levine said that Infinite extends the idea shown in BioShock that not every character who you come across in these first-person shooters is a violent enemy. "We showed that idea of 'neutrality' in the demo," he said in the prepared interview, referring to the gameplay sequence we were shown. "When you walk into the bar, the guys there just look at you. They don't attack right away, which is very deliberate... [W]e thought 'wouldn't it be great if you walked into a room in this game and you didn't necessarily know the dispositions of the people in it? Are they going to sit there? Are they going to attack you? What might set them off?' We really wanted to have a notion that not everyone in the city was automatically hostile towards you. Instead it has more of that 'Wild West' feel where you walk into a bar with your hand on your pistol and you're not sure what's going to happen to you."

Of course, for the sake of presenting an action-packed demo, things got ugly in that bar quickly.

(Above: A look at BioShock Infinite swag given to attending reporters; hints about Columbia's secrets?)

The Floating Mysteries

BioShock Infinite is at least 16 months from completion. We won't be playing it until 2012, a century past the year in which the game is set. In the interim, more will be revealed. The Skyline, for example, will be a focus of a future showcase for Infinite, according to Levine. It is that important. Levine was non-committal about multiplayer, saying only that it would make sense to have some for the game if Irrational could think of something special. He would not divulge the reason for the the word "infinite" in the game's title, teasing only that it has significance. "The name has meaning," he said.

After three years we finally know what Irrational Games is doing next. And we know the future of BioShock, which is an all-new past.

BioShock Infinite manages to seem both novel and true to certain core systems and gameplay values introduced by the 2007 original. It is a potentially Final Fantasy-style sequel that may not have narrative connection to its predecessors (remember, they're not saying) but appears to be a spiritual continuation and advancement. Setting a BioShock in the sky makes the game appear to be more expansive, its gameplay possibilities broader.

A vibrant and bolder BioShock is coming, with more extraordinary action than we've seen before and more complicated storytelling, all set on a maverick construction of American ingenuity where we've never played before.

Jun 7, 2010

"You Gonna Read This, Fisher?" The Art of Enemy Taunts

Psychonauts

"You Gonna Read This, Fisher?" The Art of Enemy Taunts
I can't think of another game so destroyed by its dialogue as Splinter Cell: Conviction; not by bad lines alone (which are nothing novel in gaming) but by the way Ubisoft's designers and programmers used them.

It could live on, maybe, as a cautionary tale in design meetings: "your idea would poison our game, sure as secondary dialogue killed Conviction!" It struck me because secondary dialogue is a subject I know a little about.

Secondary dialogue, or situational dialogue, means lines shouted by the doomed, samefaced individuals who jump boldly in front of the player's gun; lines like "You just fucked with the wrong Russian!" or "You shot me right in my Russian knees!" or "I die, so far from my homeland, Russia!" (I'm not making fun of the nice Russian dude who commented on my last post; a lot of shooter villains are Russian.) The lines will stay more like 5-7 words long, because the gamer is in the shooting-people business, not the listening-to-monologues business. (The casting business?) Sandbox games offer more flexibility for the writer, but feature more NPC personas and many more lines to write. Basically, this is the low-rent dialogue, the writing done in bulk by interns, assistant writers, and whoever else steps in when the overworked lead writer doesn't have time to stare at an Excel spreadsheet that demands 5 different lines for 40 different actions for 50 different personas. And I was one of those interns*!

Two-Fisted Tales of Internship

This marginal dialogue is rarely done well. Before outlining my reasons for thinking so, a disclaimer: because the stories in this post come from my own experience, they offer an undoubtedly distorted view of games like The Punisher, which I worked on for a few months, but others worked on for years. I'm not trying to color anyone's impressions of these games by discussing their development, I'm only using them to talk about dialogue in general terms. My impression is that all people are terrible at judging the quality of their own work, or the quality of projects they've been involved in, so I'll try to avoid that.

Secondary dialogue signals AI state changes, like the transition from suspicion ("That noise...like the fascist footsteps of Frank Castle!") to aggression ("Enjoy my aimless spray of bullets, Castle!"). Strangely, these lines are thought to add atmosphere. I have no theory about the origins of this common belief; secondary dialogue is more likely to kill immersion than enhance it.

It makes no sense for your opponents to crow about how unafraid they are, when the player character is the most terrifying murder machine these poor bastards will ever encounter. Often the NPCs seem weirdly familiar with the protagonist — many sentences look better on paper if they address someone else, so you tag a name on the end of them, like "Fisher" or "Castle." (Whether these lines sound right when spoken out loud is up for debate.) It's hard to imagine the personality that would keep up a stream of wisecracks and threats while being hunted down by a remorseless, silent being, but, somehow, that personality is everywhere. In games, it's the very definition of a criminal mind.

"You Gonna Read This, Fisher?" The Art of Enemy Taunts

Most people wouldn't taunt this individual.

Resource limitations, not writers, create the framework for these lines, and that's most of the problem. You've probably heard that action creates character. And, obviously, context shapes dialogue. You can't tell a joke without context; you need a setup and a payoff. Even a non sequitur requires context, an established topic to be irrelevant to. But situational lines are defined too loosely to give you any of that. You don't know the specifics of what the player might be doing, or what exactly the persona is reacting to. (It's not doable to stream a ton of very specific conditions and separate line pools off the disc.) The persona's behavior is generic, so their character must also be generic. That's why these lines usually suck.

Picture this: you come up with one of the 5 lines that Russian #3 might say when the player gives him a non-fatal wound. He shouts defiantly: "It'll grow back!" That's not ha-ha funny, but it might work in-game. Of course, it depends on how the voice actor delivers it, which will happen months from now at a voice acting session you won't attend (unless we assume you are the lead writer). You just wrote five variations on "I'm reloading like a champ!", so this reptile joke seems like a step up. (There are far fewer ways to say "cover me while I reload" than there are to say "I love you." Besides, most of the alternate ways people list to say "I love you" either involve more than 7 words or some specific action, and we don't have the resources for that.)

But does the line really make sense? Limbs don't fly off in this game, so there's no visual to counterpoint Russian 3's bravado. If the player just shot Russian 3 in the dick, this line could be a home run, but you're not working with that level of specificity. The only lines you can imagine that would make sense in every situation where the dialogue could be triggered bore you to tears.

There's so much material, you're bound to find some redundancy. Steve Jaros, writer of the Saints Row games, once found that while working separately we had each written, virtually word-for-word, the same combat line for different Rich Guy personas: "It's come down to fisticuffs, has it?" I don't know how many lines were written for Saints Row, but there were at least, as Marcus Fenix would say, "ten shitloads." Steve showed me the master audio spreadsheet once, and it had so many columns in it that Excel had stopped letting them create more columns. Like Bubble Bobble, Excel does have an ending, but almost nobody sees it.

A lack of specificity in trigger descriptions can also muck things up: maybe when a programmer and writer hashed out the conditions for lines to play, they recorded these conditions imprecisely, there was some misunderstanding, or the AI behavior was changed later on in the project. In Saints Row, there's one line that plays for a cop persona if you shoot his partner: "He was just two days from retirement!" (Or something very like that.) At least, I think the written description said it would play when you shoot his partner. In the finished game it plays if you shoot anyone within a generous radius of the cop. If you shoot an investment banker crossing the street, the cop will yell at you about his retirement. This might be hilarious — what the hell, why did the cop know so much about that random dude? It doesn't work as intended, though.

Possible ESRB reactions are a delightful source of speculation for creators of games like The Punisher and Saints Row. The ESRB's rating committees supposedly come from a pool of individuals in different professions (no word on whether they do a better job of this than the MPAA), so maybe you'll draw a fireman, lawyer, schoolteacher, whatever. But it was pretty clear that unless The Punisher rolled a committee of 3 state executioners, it was skirting an AO rating — and of course, Wal-Mart won't sell an AO title. So I got a couple of instructions to retailor dialogue to suit anticipated demands from the ESRB. These were not explicit orders from the organization (unlike applying a black-and-white filter and changing the camera during environmental kills, which was necessary to avoid AO), but they stemmed from accumulated industry wisdom about dealing with the ESRB, so I believe there's truth to them. I also think similar concerns inform writing at other companies.

The first instruction was superficial — I was told to reduce the number of times I used "fuck" in the dialogue. Apparently, my writing had led to line pools containing an unacceptable probability that when the player entered a room, everyone in it might scream the word "fuck" at the same time. One guy might shout "Holy fucking shit, it's the Punisher!", another "Oh God, he'll fuck our eyes right out of our skulls!" and a third, "We're double fucked this time, chaps!" I happen to think this is a pretty realistic reaction if confronted by the Punisher, but I was told that it's really a problem to have so many fucks flying around at the same time. The unthinkable concentration of profanity in this possible fuck-event could send the dainty fingers of the ESRB panel straight to the big red AO buzzer. In retrospect I'm sure that trimming the fuck-count was the right call — better than Kingpin levels of cursing at least — but the reasoning behind it stayed with me.

The second directive is vastly more important, and I often remember it when I play games like Conviction. This will go a bit broader than secondary dialogue, but that's where it starts. Concern arose after I had written some of the many, many "interrogation" lines in The Punisher that play as your torture people. I would sometimes write personas who really couldn't handle the outlandish shit they were being subjected to — I'm a human being too, look into your heart, who will feed my cat when I'm gone, etc. etc. It was something that came up in the comics all the time. Bad guys beg for their lives, Castle don't care. These interrogation lines were meant to be darkly humorous, as the player would kill everyone no matter what they said.

I was told to rewrite the lines where anyone expressed a strong desire not to die. It was "sadistic" to kill people who directly asked you not to kill them. This sort of sadism is exactly the stuff that gets us a red flag from the ESRB. I felt pretty bad about this — I had written sadistic material! — before I thought about it. The thinking was, it wasn't sadistic to create elaborate torture sequences as a heavily marketed feature; it was sadistic for the people being tortured to death to raise objections. It was sadistic to suggest that the individuals you killed had resembled human beings, that they were afraid to die.

I thought I was just following through with the concept, but I learned that in games (unlike film or literature), a torture scene must be handled with care. My poorly-conceived dialogue had inadvertently crossed a line developers don't like to go near in their presentation of death. It's all fun and games even after somebody loses an eye; but if a character gets really upset about losing that eye, that might put players on edge. There are plenty of games that claim to be disturbing, but I've seen few willing to take gamers outside their comfort zone.

Don't believe me? So, how many kids did you kill during the "No Russian" mission in MW2? From what I can see, there were no kids in that entire airport...which is a little unlikely, from what I know of airports. Of course, it would be in terribly bad taste if MW2 let you to kill children; that would be awfully disturbing. And Infinity Ward didn't really want to give you pause, not like that, oh no. If they actually wanted to guilt-trip you, they would have broken the long-standing kid-killing taboo in modern games (only kinda sorta broken bloodlessly in Bioshock).

Including kids in cinematic massacres is a cheap trick dating back to that baby carriage on the Odessa steps in 1925. But games don't, or can't, take that risk. People begging for their lives, or kids being killed, likely means a straight-up AO from the ESRB no matter what the context. Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo might not even allow you to publish a game for their systems if it contains that sort of material (console manufacturers have testing departments that approve or reject every game submitted by developers for said console, and they provide a list of things to fix, organized by priority, after a game is "bounced" from this process). The "No Russian" mission is bullshit for a lot of reasons, but most amazing to me was the uproar over such a sanitized presentation.

After my original less-than-immortal prose was revised out, The Punisher replaced the sadistic suggestion in its dialogue with a masochistic element. You enter a world where people were almost eager to be killed, just waiting to be fed into wood chippers and have their hearts cut out with a jagged Aztec knife. (They do tend to hang out conveniently around these kill-zones, and they don't put up much resistance once you start feeding them in.) The bad guys sometimes dare you to do it.

Sample scenes from The Punisher**:

"You Gonna Read This, Fisher?" The Art of Enemy Taunts

"Fuck you, fish! I ate a million of you, and you'll only get one of me! Drop me in, Castle, send me straight to the big Red Lobster downstairs!"

[laughs good-naturedly as pirahnas consume his face]

"You Gonna Read This, Fisher?" The Art of Enemy Taunts

"You think I don't love bashing my forehead against glass, Castle? I eat glass for breakfast! I chew it with my eyelids!"

"You Gonna Read This, Fisher?" The Art of Enemy Taunts

"You think I'm gonna miss those legs, Castle? I hated them! I was about to get rid of 'em myself, and now you saved me the trouble!"

I'm not suggesting that this was anything but the right decision for the game Volition wanted to make. They weren't aiming to disturb players who fed characters into wood chippers; they wanted them to have a good time (the players, that is). It was not in the interest of Volition or THQ to tempt the wrath of the ESRB by making a game where the bad guy dialogue urged the player to reconsider their actions. The Punisher

is about killing people in funny ways, and the humor gets a little too black if the people being killed are less cooperative.

I don't mean any of this as criticism of Volition, which as a studio takes writing and voice acting seriously. They do most writing in-house (unlike some AAA developers who use disastrous scripts by outside writers to fill the gaps between missions). Their writers attend design meetings (believe it or not, some game companies that tout integrated writing and design do not do this). They record a huge amount of voiceover, then scrutinize it. But my short time there showed me that game narratives are unexpectedly limited by what ratings boards will accept.

At about 8:15 in this recent Eurogamer TV episode, a BBFC policy advisor mentions "dwelling on the infliction of pain and injury" as a ratings concern, then a few seconds later repeats "sadistic dwelling on pain and injury" as if that was exactly the same. As if showing the consequences of violence was more objectionable than simple gore and killing. If you're really worried about these things, isn't it worse that games present incredible scenes of slaughter without ever reminding you of the humanity of the people dying?

I have no moral objections to pretty much anything done in media, which is an imagined space. I don't care about subject matter in games, whether in Manhunt or Cunt or Six Days in Fallujah, if the game works. (But controversial games usually trumpet their own edginess, and are almost never good.) The objection I raise here isn't really about The Punisher (which I loved working on) but about the ways action games sacrifice the credibility of their worlds to keep the player comfortable.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

Enemies in Conviction are not interested in self-preservation. This is more of an issue, in my view, than many reviews considered. Yeah, a comment about bad dialogue was usually stuffed in somewhere. (Though Yahtzee did ream the game for this in his review, and Simon Parkin spends a paragraph on it.) But the bullet-point framework of criticism used by the general Metacritic review pool doesn't take into account the way different elements of a work interact with each other. In Conviction's case, enemy dialogue interacts with the rest of the game by fucking ruining it.

Whoever decided how often lines should play in this game (either programmers, writers, audio guys, or everyone together) wanted no dead air. They filled every period of silence with noise, as if they worked in radio. They weren't thinking about how to tell a story or build atmosphere. They were thinking "how can we ensure that sound plays at the times when there might not otherwise be sound?" And maybe also thinking "how can we ensure that the player knows exactly what his enemies are doing at every moment?" Their answer was to trigger dialogue constantly, so that the AI broadcasts its every inane thought at all times. It's a great example of how to approach this kind of writing backwards, allowing it to be driven by technology instead of narrative sense.

They do have a nice little trick of using dialogue unique to the current level; this probably isn't too hard, as long as the same enemy personas don't appear in different levels. Unfortunately, the implementation is blunt, and your enemies' preoccupation with setting is just strange. "You're gonna die here in this museum!" they shout, as if museums were the worst place to die. "This isn't going to be like the airfield!" someone yells, a few levels after the airfield. Why do you think it's different? Because I'm about to kill a noisy jackass at the Washington Monument rather than an airfield?

Conviction is supposedly a stealth game. It's traditional in stealth games for players to move more slowly and pay more attention to their surroundings than in a run-and-gun shooter; accordingly, those surroundings need to be crafted with great attention to detail. Stealth games need complex levels for players to sneak through and AI with sensible patrolling and searching behavior for players to observe. But even if Conviction had these things, players could hardly fail to notice that the enemy behavior made no sense.

How could bad dialogue be a minor issue, when it undermines every situation in the game? The plot loses credibility when your enemies act like morons. The combat/stealthing scenarios you find yourself in stop making sense when your opponents are eager to tell you where they are. They're all but asking you to kill them, like the guys in The Punisher. (It doesn't help that Conviction is easy — I can't remember what the Game Over screen looks like.)

I suspect that this dialogue is the result of a terrible decision rather than a terrible oversight. During development, secondary dialogue is often temp-recorded (either by high-larious office volunteers or local actors) and stuck into the game so that the team can hear it and comment on what an awful job the writer is doing. There's no chance that Conviction made it all the way through its 10 years of development (or whatever) without somebody pointing out "hey, all of our enemies are saying stupid shit and they're saying it all the time." The problem, I would guess, is that the designers had concluded it was better to provide the player with a few extra scraps of information than build environments that made sense. So they threw out credibility and narrative coherence to make an easy game a little easier.

A few games that did it right

I don't think all secondary dialogue is bad. It's necessary in sandbox games, and can be helpful in action games if designers take time to do it right. The games that do dialogue best, predictably, tend to be those that pay the most attention to every aspect of their presentation. Here's a short list of games that did interesting things:

1. GTA:SA, GTAIV, and especially RDR. Rockstar's skill at dreaming up clever pedestrian lines is unmatched, but in my opinion they really hit their stride with SA. If you look at the credits for RDR, you'll see that like 20 people are credited with "Additional Dialogue"; having a bunch of people work part-time on dialogue works better than a few full-timers, who will run out of ideas.

RDR appears to have separate line pools for individual characters, whose names are visible during duels and card games (like the racist conspiracy theorist who kept warning about "the Jews" as I played poker in Armadillo). The downside to this cool idea is that the line pools remain fairly small, so you get the same lines over and over: hearing "that old-timer done shit himself agin" over and over as I played Liars' Dice drove me nuts***.

2. Bioshock. The Splicer dialogue is creepy as hell, and benefits from being hard to understand.

3. The Uncharted series. Naughty Dog seems to script tons of lines for the protagonist(s) to shift focus away from what enemies are saying. The writer then has a very clear situation to work in, and maybe fewer lines to write in total, if they don't have to write as much random enemy chatter. This (along with the talent of their writers and actors) works to great effect in Uncharted 2, where the script is polished and well-timed. As I understand it, most developers don't do as much of this because scripters will scream bloody murder about it, as the scripting for all levels in development changes constantly and fixing every line is a time-consuming chore.

If you remember other games that did a nice job with secondary dialogue (again, fully-voiced dialogue drawn from a pool of interchangeable lines) mention it in the comments; I'm sure I missed many good examples.

Update: At the risk of making this post even more sprawling, here's a partial run-down of other games with well-done secondary dialogue that have been suggested in reddit comments and personal emails, but haven't shown up in the comments below:

4. Half-Life 2: Commenters unchow, polpi, and my friend Zack Kimble thought of the radio communications between Combine soldiers. unchow writes: "The Combine situational dialogue isn't directed at Gordon, it's radio chatter spoken to other Combine, and that female voice giving orders and information to the Combine in the field. And that's the only thing that makes sense in that context."

5. Psychonauts and Brutal Legend: Commenter watercup suggests these for "terrific" random lines, and also mentions Telltale's recent Tales of Monkey Island and The Devil's Playhouse.

6. Far Cry: On reddit, avatar00 writes that "the mercenaries would have side conversations about their lives that made them feel like they weren't actually replaceable. Also, the secondary dialogue changed from them not giving a second thought about killing the random guy to actively fearing your presence as the game progressed."

7. TF2 and L4D: Forbizzle suggests these, as does Brady in the comments below. I hadn't thought much about multiplayer games in writing this post, as I usually imagine secondary dialogue coming from NPCs and enemies. But these games' "contextual dialogue," as Forbizzle puts it, is amazing and deserves mention. In L4D, the writing works so deftly that I never mind the characters talking so much. Valve kept the contextual lines brief and functional ("Reloading!" or "Pills here!") and balanced them out with the witty scripted conversations that reveal the survivors' personalities.

*I was an assistant writer on The Punisher, Saints Row, and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Don't ask about the punctuation of "Saints Row," I had nothing to do with that. Disclosure: my father was a writer at Volition at the time, which certainly helped get my foot in the door.

**Not actual dialogue. I'm sure in trying to come up with intentionally bad lines as examples for this post, I've replicated things I once wrote with a straight face. But I'm exaggerating, obviously: not every persona will egg you on, and they will often say things like "Alright, I'll tell you whatever you want!" But they won't say "Oh God, please please don't kill me!"

***Liars' Dice wasn't really a big thing in Texas saloons in 1911, was it? Kind of expected they'd be playing faro or some other impenetrable game.

Update: Reddit commenter Forbizzle points out Idle Thumbs' hilarious improvisation on the same airfield lines in Conviction, about 3/4 of the way through their podcast "Remember The Airfield."

Republished with permission from Post Hype.

Chris Breault is a gamer and freelance writer. He writes about games at http://post-hype.blogspot.com, and replies to emails sent to post.hype@gmail.com.

Jun 2, 2010

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic

BioShock™

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic Much like telling an erotic story within a Victorian backdrop seems ever so sexy, human depravity juxtaposed against a seemingly golden age of good, moral values is darkly comic and that much more disturbing.

In the future, the ‘60s never happened. Or at least, that's what we are led to believe in the alternate history of Bethesda's Fallout 3. While set in a post-apocalyptic America in the 23rd century following the events of a devastating war in the 21st century, curiously most of the post-war artifacts of Fallout 3 look and sound an awful lot like the artifacts of a post-World War II America, as if American culture somehow became frozen in time around 1959 and maintained a seemingly cheery and idyllic image of the ‘40s and ‘50s up until that great disaster.

Of course, this notion of creating a static image of post-World War II America is not exclusive to the Fallout universe. The underwater city of Rapture in 2K's Bioshock literally finds its progress halted on New Year's Eve 1959, and the similar images of a ruined society juxtaposed against the relics of a culture of the ‘40s and ‘50s also make up the bulk of 2K's game.
Both games seem to revel in this juxtaposition of an idealized American age with the ruin of society. The soundtracks of both games jarringly counterpoint the brutal actions of scavengers in the Capital Wasteland and Rapture. Inhumanity and desperation is hauntingly accompanied by songs by songs by Billie Holiday, Cole Porter, Ella Fitzgerald, the Ink Spots, and the Andrews Sisters. That both soundtracks are comprised of songs, which almost exclusively belong to a time associated with values, decency, and decorum, is, of course, intended to be ironic and also serves as a means of emphasizing just how rotten the world has become since a time so idealized in the American imagination.

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic

The effectiveness of this kind of contrast really can't be overstated. Much like telling an erotic story within a Victorian backdrop seems ever so sexy (it is so much more fun unbuttoning something that seems to be so very buttoned up), human depravity juxtaposed against a seemingly golden age of good, moral values is darkly comic and that much more disturbing. For instance, Bioshock‘s art deco architecture and retro advertisements serve to heighten the horror of what Rapture and its citizens have become. A scene in the game in which the protagonist comes across a woman who seems sharply dressed in 50s fashion cooing over a "baby" in a perambulator is one of these moments of horror. The image of motherly concern straight out of an issue of the Saturday Evening Post is disrupted by the knowledge that something isn't right in the world of Rapture, where art deco columns crumble and the paint is peeling off the image of an enthusiastic woman selling cigarettes on a nearby poster.

Fallout 3‘s opening sequence, which begins with the flickering of cathodes on a retro seeming radio and the strains of the Ink Spots's "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire", demonstrates this commitment to suggesting the "wrongness" of the world in contrast to that which we assume must be "right". The camera pans back and reveals the interior of a bus, in which the radio and a schmaltzy bobbling, plastic hula girl are mounted. It continues to pan back to reveal that the bus lays on a heap of torn metal and glass. A crumbling Washington monument is revealed and then a gas-masked and heavily armed warrior in black emerges in the scene to complete the image of the decimation of an American mythology. This image depends on its audience's sense of the initial images representing a kinder, gentler America and doesn't simply replace that image with one of a grimmer vision of American decay. Instead, it allows the images to coexist with one another, perhaps, suggesting a commonality or a causal link that exists between these two images, ideal and decaying at once.

Which returns me to my initial observation, that it might seem that in the universe of Fallout that the 1960s never existed. One can't help but wonder though, given the lingering images of post-World War II America in the Capital Wasteland if this isn't the image of the transition between 1959 and the future. This 23rd century America with its rotting Washington D.C., full of scavengers and mutants, may be the equivalent of the ‘60s, a cartoon image drawn just as large as the cartoonish Vault Boy that represents the stasis of ‘40s and ‘50s values throughout the series.

You Say Apocalypse, I Say Retro Chic

Likewise, that Rapture is fallen as of 1959 in Bioshock‘s alternate history is seemingly appropriate. In 1959, the first wave of Baby Boomers were 13 years old, the next decade was to be theirs, the dominant years of their coming of age. The sweetness of "(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?" would give way to the melancholy and ferociousness of Joplin, Hendrix, and the Doors. Suits and ties, pencil skirts and embroidered sweaters would give way to jeans and sandals, tie dye and love beads, long hair and dirty feet. Moral certainty would give way to Vietnam and Watergate.

Truthfully, neither game fully idealizes post-World War II America fully. The plasmid advertisements of Bioshock reveal a sinister animosity between men and women of this "more moral" age as they frequently feature cartoony images of buttoned down husbands using plasmids as a way of combating their rolling pin wielding wives. Fallout 3 includes some songs on its soundtrack, which reveal a less than ideally modest vision of sexuality from that era. The thinly veiled sexuality of the lyrics of "Butcher Pete (Part 1)" (a real "lady killer" in more ways than one) or the inclusion of "Let's Go Sunning" (a song from the soundtrack of a nudist film from 1954) reveal that this age was a less prudish and genteel one than it is often imagined. However, while a dark sense of humor underlies these comic revelations of a less than innocent culture, Fallout 3 and Bioshock‘s post-1950s worlds are anything but funny. Brutal and violent, the citizens of the Capital Wasteland and Rapture are selfish, cruel, and frequently driven by unchecked desire and drug addiction.

In these futures, the world transitions into a future that looks more like the present. In that sense, Fallout 3 and Bioshock may be less forward looking than they are about critiquing the now.

Republished with permission from Pop Matters.

G. Christopher Williams is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point and the Multimedia Editor at PopMatters.

PopMatters is an international magazine of cultural criticism that reviews music, film, television, DVD, books, comic books/graphic fiction, and video games. Additional coverage of gaming culture can be found in their Multimedia section.