Sylvius the Mad wrote...
This is why I find dialogue wheels difficult:
In a more passive medium, like movies or television, plot back story generally needs to be filled in directly, but character sketches can be deepened through the ways the characters act and speak.
Just before mentioning anything, some things I say here could reasonably overlap with what we discussed in the 3rd person narrative thread, but I am going back to that now to reply to you, so I think it is better that we do not directly reference things from there simply for the sake of brevity.
The problem with this argument is that it pressupposes what it is that makes the medium passive. You take for granted that it is the absence of the full degree of mental manipulation you would like to have in regard to the non-visible action of the player as active, whereas something that happens on screen is passive, because of the perspective yout take.
But you have to grant that for others, it is entirely possible that the game allows for the same amount of internal perspective on character that they have always used, but then allows for more direct and visible action in the game itself, so for the opportunity to visibly exact greater change with choice, hence being more active.
Which is to say that arguing whether or not the medium is active or passie depends very strongly on which presuppositions about video games you have, and these pressupositions are incommensurate.
It goes right back to reading versus watching a book. My experience is that they are equally passive. It is impossible to convice me otherwise because there is simply no case where I read for please or watch TV where I am exerting greater energy in the former case. The opposite is true for others.
Since we are not using the same terms to represent the same meaning, it would be far better to abandom them and speak directly about the medium.
So instead of saying, in a massive medium like, you can simply make the point in absence.
In a game, however, the way characters act and speak are ostensibly directed by the player, and as such either the player cannot learn anything about the character from that behaviour (because the player was its source), or the player is ill-equipped to make those choices that direct action by vritue of not knowing the very things which would otherwise form the basis for those actions.
It is not a matter of learning from the behaviour; it is a matter of directing the behaviour. Simply put, you have to appreciate that for some people, if the behaviour is not visibly happening, then it is not happening. So VO provides for the ability to direct behaviour in a way that was not possible previously.
All of this is to say that yes, were one to presume that dialogue and the game-world is as you believe it, VO is restrictive and passive. But as you often tell me when we debate, there is no reason to pressupose this. So telling someone who assumes the opposite than the thing they have direct as true from some premises is in fact false from some different set of premises is, well, not really meaningful.
The dialogue wheel (as implemented in ME and ME2) hides the character's words and actions from the player, thus producing the narrative structure common to movies I described above. But in doing so, a reasonable player can easily be paralysed with indecision when asked to choose between alternatives on the wheel, as the player lacks the information necessary to reach a conclusion. I both don't know the character well enough to decide what he would do here, and I don't know what these options even entail, so even if I knew what to select I wouldn't be able to do so with any confidence.
I agree with that the dialogue wheel, insofar as ME is concerned, occasionally fails to properly convey information to the player. But the question of relevance is whether or not that is a matter of course of using the dialogue wheel (which is what you think) or whether it is a failure of the writer, in the same way that happens in a purely text-based RPG (as I happen to think).
It always comes back to this: insofar as you grant that people will take a different starting point about what an RPG is from you, it is just not possible to say these things as if they are true. So the wheel could be poor implentation (this we agree on) but for it to
hide information from the player as a matter of course requires more fundamental presumptions about what is going on.
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