Girl Meets Geekdom

Have you ever wondered why most game dialogue has to be so cheesy? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’re given a lot of time to think about the dialogue. I was reading Roger Ebert’s essay on the 1977 movie Annie Hall today and his brief note on average shot lengths got be thinking. Woody Allen, who is a champion of witty dialogue, has long average shot lengths, with Annie Hall at ~14 seconds, and a film like Armageddon having something around 2 seconds, which Ebert argues is too short for intelligent dialogue. Now any game writer will tell you that they aim to make game dialogue short and snappy—more to the Armageddon model, which begs the question: is game dialogue stupid and cheesy by nature? Unlike movies, games tend not to compensate for the pace, giving us more time to meditate on the cheesy nature of snappy dialogue. If you take an average game that actually has cutting in their cut scene, I’m sure you will find incredibly long “shot length” if you were to play it out at a reasonable pace. The visuals are not snappy. We don’t move on fast enough. All there is for us to absorb at any piece of dialogue are the words itself. You know why the dialogue in Armageddon works? We move on from the dialogue fast, they know to keep our attention off the words.

Sure, we can argue, lots of games have real time facial expressions now to compensate for the lack of activity in cut scenes—but lets face it, they fail to capture the depth of emotions as a real person. In movies, we can fixate on certain actors and read something out of that, in games, you have to try a lot harder. During gameplay, cuts has to make sense for the game play, but are there specific things that can be done to make the camera more dynamic? The cinematic dynamics in cut scene have certainly gone up, but so far, I haven’t seen anything that pushed any limits. Film theorist David Bordwell once noted that average shot length of Hollywood films decreased dramatically over the years. Thus, pace has increased in films over the years and audience attention span has decreased and games are generally fast-paced in everywhere where there is not a lot of dialogue. I think it’s about time exposition got more dynamic — up the pace, and cheesy lines will become far more acceptable.