magerette
Hedgewitch
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- October 18, 2006
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Kieron Gillen at Rock,Paper,Shotgun has written an article on the use of text--words and dialogue--in game design. It includes some explorations of the pivotal role of words in various games and genres, including adventure games, roleplaying games such as Planescape:Torment, text adventures and others, and why text can be as effective as visuals or even more so. Here he quotes Sheldon Pacotti, writer on Deus Ex:
Here's Chris Avellone on how text was used to supplement or even replace visual storytelling in Planescape:Torment:Words remain one of the more enigmatic yet efficient tools available to a professional game designer, and certainly one of the most overlooked. And its efficiency cannot really be overestimated – both in terms of player and development time. “Language (and prose in particular) remains an important tool for game designers because it’s malleable,” notes Sheldon Pacotti, writer on Deus Ex and now at Spector’s Junction Point, “One sentence can go from the Bronze Age to 21st-century Shanghai to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Imagine the development budget to represent that last sentence visually. Especially in adventure games, language is critical for conveying history, prophecy, and the multiplicity of a gameworld/society. Consider the dwarves’ song about Smaug at the start of the Hobbit. It moves from legends about the dragon to a prophecy of its doom in a matter of seconds, and for me this is where the book suddenly becomes not just a story but a complete world.”
More information.“We just thought that there was so much you could do with written description – facial expressions, motions of the hand, etc, that we didn’t have the art resources to represent,” remembers Chris Avellone, lead designer on Planescape: Torment, and now at Obsidian, “To do all the cinematics, animations, and movies to capture the memory sequences, companion expressions, and other moments just would have been impossible.” It also went against the occasional stated wisdom that text is just too much work. “I don’t think text is any harder to produce than building tilesets, models or doing anmations,” Chris, whose fellow designer Colin McComb credits as having written literally half of Planescape, adds “if you love doing it, it’s no work at all.”
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