I just watched Chris Avellone playing Arcanum...

...and this is what the man says:

“If you guys were ever curious one of the pipeline rules we use at Obsidian is, because people can generally read faster than a voice actor can speak, we try to break up large chunks of text like this (meaning Virgil’s initial dialogue in Arcanum) and do separate notes of no more than two sentences, because that usually ends up keeping pace with the voice acting work, and then you don’t end up losing as much (cost?) at being in the studio when players will just skip through the rest of the conversation.” - Chris Avellone

Hearing this brought back an old memory. My family used to have a peculiar old man as a neighbour. He collected old car parts (Saab) and wrote books about his ideas and observations, which he printed himself. One of these ideas were that young people nowadays suffer from the "Donald Duck Syndrome", or DDS. His idea was that people suffering from this syndrome were unable to read more text than what could fit into a speech bubble in comic books. I laughed at him then, being a frequent reader of books, but this got me thinking. Are people really that lazy/dumb/intolerant that developers have made the DDS a standard for producing games? If so, we live in dark times indeed. My hope is that voice actors today simply are too crappy for people to want to care about what they've got to say.

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's great that Obsidian can save money and time in the studio by cutting down dialogue lines. Maybe.

 

It's more than likely true, in this age of Twitter. If it can't be said in 140 characters, it's probably not worth reading/hearing.

 

From what I gathered the idea was that if you present people with a large amount of text they will have read it all before the voice actor has finished talking and still progess with the conversation - thereby wasting the money the developer used to hire that voice actor. By making the on-screen text synced with the voice acting, players have to wait until the character is done speaking to decide how they will progress.

In other words, I don't think it's a case of people being unwilling to read too much text but actually the complete opposite - people read ahead and so waste voice acting by progressing the dialogue prematurely. Dialogue is still the same length, but the on screen amount you can read has just been broken into smaller chunks to prevent this trend and also to make it more true to the pacing of the audio. At least, that's what I thought he was driving at.

I know I'm guilty of skipping dialogue, especially if I'm pushed for time and have to go somewhere soon or I've played the game so many times I don't care to hear what a particular character is saying anymore. Virgil's dialogue at the Crash Site is just a series of clicks to me now for this very reason.

 

I think he meant segmenting separate audio files with subtitles rather than a large amount of dialogue all put into subtitles because it means you can skim through the text rather than listening to the voice actor. If you segment it up you can listen to the voice actor without becoming impatient.

 

Problem these days is games and anime etc only ever use the same three fucking voice actors. Getting tired of that one chick and those two guy's voices I hear in everything.

 

Re:

Ever considered visiting a psychologist?

 

Seeing one on Monday.

 

Re:

This.

Err, I mean, "That."

 

I wasn't really paying attention to Wolfsbane's post or the quote in it enough to make my contribution matter. In light of what the quote actually says;

It makes sense. Though, is this a recent development, or have people always known it's faster to read dialogue than hear it? Certainly they would save money by having very fast speakers read lines of dialogue, unless you consider learning how to speak at 190 wpm difficult to a degree that it rarely comes naturally, meaning they'd pay extra for talent.

I know they're considering that the player isn't hearing all the money they spent on talent if they don't break up the dialogue, but here's a thought - what if they hire voice talent that people want to hear? Because in the long run, if you know all the possible things a character will say, how many times are you going to keep listening to the dialogue?

As Jojo mentioned, Virgil's dialogue at the start of the game is a bunch of clicks because he knows what's going to be said and which choices he'll make in response. That's how each game I've replayed a few times ends up for me. However, when I first play a game with interesting dialogue and decent characterizations, I tend to read at a pace even with the speaker. I can even relate this to the attack cinematics for Eidolons in FF8 - the first time is awesome, and the second is pretty cool. However, the novelty wears off pretty quickly after that, considering it's the same damn thing. Did they factor in how many times people will listen to the dialogue after that first playthrough, or how deaf people are essentially blowing their entire audio budget out the window?

What I'm seeing indirectly described by Chris is that Obsidian doesn't necessarily want to pay for decent voice actors, but they definitely want you to listen to the money they actually did drop on the talent they hired. If the acting is well done, the gamer is more likely to read each word at pace with the speaker. If it's bad, you can bet your ass they'll read faster than any speaking occurs.

 

tl;dr

 

Where is this "chris aply arcanum" thingie?

 

In the Arcanum section.

 

This is true enough, in games with good voice acting (Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines I find particularly good) I stop to listen to it (well, most of the time) because it's enjoyable to hear. I still tend to read at a faster pace than the delivery, but then I'll wait rather than make my choice to hear their intonation. I guess I don't enjoy some of the Arcanum dialogue anymore as much as other games.

 

I think it's always been the case that listening to someone else read aloud can be tedious. As a fully equipped human living in the information age, I have the ability to process lots of information at once, and, frankly, if you understimulate me I'm going to be bored. That's why modern films don't have long stretches where the characters stand around making speeches - there's always something else going on - the editor shows reaction shots of other characters, or there are two speakers arguing with each other, or they're doing something else at the same time (pew pew pew!) or you're hearing the speech overlaid on a separate illustrative action sequence.

The problem that games have is that avatars are lousy actors and in-game cutscenes are limited by the engine, so there isn't much scope for making anything interesting to watch and the characters end up standing around reading aloud the in-game text. Hopefully this will improve as production values approach those of film.

Note that this is a separate problem from Donald Duck syndrome, or attention deficit disorder. I have no problem devoting my attention to a single thing for hours on end. I can read an entire book cover to cover with no interruptions - but I'm processing the information at 500 words per minute. If I were listening to the same text in a typical computer game with voice actors reading it aloud, with a pause between each speaker, they would struggle to deliver it to me at more than 100 words per minute. That's a fifth of my available bandwidth, so yeah, it's boring to listen to. Chris Avellone's trick is to break it up so I don't get as far ahead of the speaker, but that's treating the symptom rather than the cause - he should be trying to make the cut scenes more interesting to watch - then I wouldn't want to skip ahead in the first place.

 

I think you hit it on the head - it's another side of the "make it more worthwhile" issue.

I'm in my late twenties, so I think I can say I've got a reasonable amount of gaming experience. I've played a lot of games where the voice acting is done well, but the scenes are somewhat boring - and vise versa. Both scenarios catch my attention well enough, but it's very rare that any one game does both to a degree where I'm totally invested in the scene. Obviously the writing has to be done well enough for the whole thing to work anyway.

It's possible for something to be appealing enough that it'll remain watchable several times over, but it looks like the entertainment industry (in this case, gaming) has been reduced to gimmicks rather than engaging media.