A BRIEF GUIDE TO GOOD DIALOGUE (IN VIDEO GAMES)

Let me try to boil down four years of experience in a high mucketty muck creative writing program into one article of less than a thousand words, like it's easy or something.

The most important thing is that good dialog is a tool, and ideally it is a tool that should do several things at once, kind of like when you have a really well grenade throw in Call of Duty: World At War and it kills SEVERAL Nazi bastards, and not just one.

Dialogu can do all of the following. The more of these things it's doing at once, the better, as long as it still makes sense. These are in no particular order:

1. Characterize the speaker. Should be self-explanatory, but there are examples above. This is called 'voice' in a technical sense.

2. Characterize the person, place, or thing being talked about. Very self-explanatory.

3. If necessary, provide camouflaged exposition. I.e. fill the player in without letting the player know you are filling the player in. Necessary for in media res introductions, helped by the overdone amnesia device.

4. Create immersion either through versimilitude OR atmosphere/style. See also: setting the mood. Everyone here has recommended realistic dialog, but probably the most famous and important and most-praised for his dialog writer ever, a guy called William Shakespeare, wrote dialog that was NOTHING like the way people talk.

5. Foreshadowing. The inverse of exposition; exposition is telling what came before, foreshadowing is hinting at what is to come,. Foreshadowing sets up the cool AH-HAH moments in a beautiful way. Also, foreshadowing is especially important in video games where these hints can have pragmatic/tactical applications.

6. Advance the plot Cousin to foreshadowing and exposition. This is when what is said ACTIVELY CAUSES THINGS TO HAPPEN. This happens in movies quite often, and I think of it as DIALOGUE SPURS ACTIONS. This is closely related to...

7. Facilitate and demonstrate character change. Does your character have an arc? If so, how is what people say to your character causing it? And how is what your character says and what is said ABOUT your character showing it?

8. Finally, and most importantly: entertain. In all seriousness, the cool and or badass factor CANNOT be underestimated. A fancy word for this kind of dialog is epigrammatic. This means, simply: quotable. See also: memorable.

I believe you can improve dialog by reading and listening to good dialog, as well as practicing and listening to conversations.

While much maligned, I happen to think Quentin Tarantino writes FANTASTIC dialog.

Other favorites are comic book auteur Brian Michael Bendis, during his crime/noir era and before he went all commercial. As far as video games go, Fallout 2's dialogue options are generally entertaining (and surprisingly diverse), most of the Legacy of Kain games have fantastically Shakespearian dialog, and Vagrant Story is perhaps the only jRPG in the world with decent English language dialogue.

Be aware that some writers are absolutely TERRIBLE at dialog (see H.P. Lovecraft) and that these writers, if wise, will try to avoid using it whenever possible. (Also see H.P. Lovecraft.)

Finally, in video games, dialog has at least one additional special purpose: dialog must convey crucial (meta)game information to players. Similar to exposition, but even more annoying, making dialog both entertain and tell players where and how to FIND THE WIDGET is quite a challenge indeed.