WHAT MAKES A GOOD DIALOGUE?

bahleted

I disagree with minimizing exposition. Dialogue is there to spew exposition at staggering rates. However I DO think that you can always cut back on the exposition because you don't need endless amounts of it. Just give the bare minimums.

For example instead of giving the whole history of the world in a dialogue you just give enough to keep the player going. If things are going well the player will fill in the blanks himself or better yet it will be hinted at as time goes on.

I don't like lots of useless banter. Taking a conversation you're having with a friend, recording and transcribing it will suck in terms of dialogue. Usually it will have no direction, it will be filled with senseless stuff and thought jumps and so on. "yeah" "huh" "okay" shouldn't be in.

But frankly I suck at dialogue. Usually I want an idea told but I'll have no idea how to put it forth. Following my own examples of "less is more" and "no redundancy" the characters usually end up saying either nothing or saying things in a stilted way.

It is never time for words time. Make it concise instead of verbose.
Don't have "Don't forget about me!" dialog; Characters that say something just because they haven't said anything for a while.
Listen to how real people talk and try to replicate it. Reading dialog out loud should help with this.

bahleted

I'm not very good at dialogue imho. But I try to avoid the protagonist saying "Let's go!" or something similar at the end of every cutscene.

In my pseudo-medieval project, I'm trying to get my characters speak as if they were living in the 21st century. It sounds really funny, because they've got names like ZEPHYR MAELSTROM and the people talking to them are like "Good luck, Zephyr, buddy!"

I predict the end result is going to look extremely tacky, but it's still a neat little idea I plan on working on till the very end...

EDIT: If you're making a game in a modern setting, just try and remember the speech-patterns of people in your day-to-day life, and implement those in your game.

Good dialogue, to me, should have the following criteria:

- Flow with the character's personality and speech (so if someone is always in a bad mood, then make the dialogue contain negative vocabulary. If the character always speaks poetically or with large words, make him/or her poetically and with large words).

- Be about the matter at hand, or topic. (Basically by this, I mean that the dialogue/text should stay on topic, and not stray away from it (or at least not stray away for too long!). So, if someone has been killed, then the dialogue that follows should be about the character's death, not on what they are going to eat for dinner).

-Be quick and concise. (The dialogue/text should be fairly quick, as the player does not want to be dredging through hours of dialogue (if this is a game that is!), and should get right to the point. There is no use in drawing out).
Hopefully that helps someone :-\.

Let me try to boil down four years of experience in a high mucketty muck creative writing program into one off the cuff forum post, 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.

Dialogue 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. Look at aprilschild's example, I'm too lazy to provide a better one.

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.

BTW, I just submitted this post as an article on RMN as one of my released somethings, because I thought some people might find it useful.

This may be a personal preference thing, but I kinda like it when the written dialogue reflects the pronunciation spelling-wise - taking into account accents, and the like. Might get messy at times though.

Having beaten Crisis Core and very likely to agree with you, can you name some examples so I can giggle like a schoolgirl next time I hear them?