Player and Character Intent in Dialogue Options

I read this post from the inimitable Thaliarchus whilst like two drinks in and a bunch of thoughts came bubbling up. You should read it yourself, and also the rest of their work. Thaliarchus rules. This is not intended to be a takedown in any way whatsoever in case you clicked on this hoping for random internet drama, this is more of a Cohost-thread-style continuation post where I go "ooh, ooh, I can ramble about this topic!" I've kinda already done so before anyway.

I am not a game designer so take anything I say with a shaker of salt, but this concept comes up sometimes when talking about games with dialogue options (so mostly RPGs, but also many visual novels or adventure games, or really just "narrative" games).

Thaliarchus writes:
"But here's a question: when a game with VN-style presentation throws a set of dialogue options at the player, do those options represent:

1. possibilities outside the protagonist's mind, so that when you select one the protagonist will think and then say it; or
2. possibilities held together as conscious options inside the protagonist's mind, so that they, as a character, consider all of the options and then select one?"

The cheap and fast and meaningless answer is, of course, both, or possibly either, or possibly neither. I think the 1st is broadly the like, conceptual intent of having multiple dialogue options. I think the 2nd option above is how a player views the options. By which I mean: another angle by which one could tackle this question is by asking, "What does the player's input represent?"

Let us assume, briefly, and this is kind of a weird and somewhat complex and arguably misguided assumption, that the world/narrative within a given game exists without player input. The player character, presented with a given situation, presumably would give an answer without the player intervening, if time were still moving forward. One presumes it would be one of the options available to the player.

As Thaliarchus notes, even if you the player can only choose one, the existence of the variations creates a sense of personality that's not fully within the player's input. That is, all available dialogue options are within the realm of possibility for the protagonist to say. The player, with their semi-omniscient oversight, is in charge of choosing which option best fits the situation (according to their personal judgement). If one is operating in a particular mindset, this means whichever response gives the greatest mechanical benefit via relationship values or social scores. But the point is that each option still feels consistent with the character. I, the player, am just an invisible hand moving the needle.

Example: Commander Shepard in Mass Effect has within them at all times the potential to make a Paragon or Renegade answer. The locks on Charm/Intimidate checks represent how if, say, Shepard is mostly Paragon, the more extreme Renegade options are no longer within the boundaries of their character. I think I prefer this kind of model, which enforces a certain amount of, let's say, narrative consistency. The downside is that sometimes Shepard will end up doing something that could potentially be extrapolated from the option but was not explicitly intended by the player. I guess they fought against our ghostly possession that time.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution gets cited sometimes re: broad vs specific options. In that game, the occasional dialogue boss fight lets you choose from loose categories/genres of response but makes sure to lay out the specific things that Adam Jensen says aloud to the other person to avoid the "I didn't think picking that option would do that" effect. Adam Jensen is morally/mentally/materially capable of speaking any of the available choices, but the player is determining the tone and gets to muse on the specifics before committing.

In games of a certain ilk, choice points are often simply false. The "wrong" options either immediately circle back to the same question or directly lead to game overs / Bad Ends, prompting a reload. Choices that do matter are usually an "add relationship points until a threshold is met" situation, which itself still rarely affects the plot. This is often referred to as the "But thou must!" effect, and sort of brings up the question of why even have dialogue options in games when the story's already scripted to play out a certain way.

Tim Rogers discussed some of this in his FF7 Remake video, positing that game-like actions such as hunting for treasure chests, managing equipment, or stopping to heal all constitute the player's failure to adequately "play the role" in a "role-playing game," undercutting any narrative urgency. Ideally, the player's priorities and the character's priorities line up as closely as possible to provide, I guess, ludonarrative resonance?

I'm reminded of the second Paranormasight game. The main characters in that game run in pairs, and the narrative makes sure to position the player-controlled half of each pair as more flighty and capricious, narratively justifying the player-led impulse to click on everything in any given scene, narrative momentum be damned. It is in fact in-character for Arnav "Avi" Barnum to poke and prod at random shit for ten minutes before progressing the plot, and this feels appropriate both when possessing him and when speaking to him from another POV.

Thaliarchus brings up Baldur's Gate 3 in comparison, which is going for a different goal where the player character generally has as little identity as possible, despite Larian's whole Origin Character system. If a player wants (PFFFF) character consistency (lol), simply brainlessly click on every option that says [ELF] or [MONK] in front regardless of situation or context. More charitably, whenever BG3 has like, eight available dialogue options the idea is it's allowing the player to flag to the game that they want it to acknowledge they are playing a specific class or took a specific background, simulating the possibility space of a human dungeon master. The "reactivity" is the point, rather than any sort of actual character consistency.

This is why I picked The Dark Urge, and why multiple people have told me they refused to pick The Dark Urge. It's the one protagonist choice in BG3 where the game forces certain actions without player input, because they're already a certain type of person who's done certain things in the world. The player gets to define who they are within that slightly narrower framework. If one prefers to Assume Direct Control, that can be an unappealing prospect.

But most of the time in BG3, the player is almost just directly puppeting the player character. In other games, you're more like... the angel/devil on the shoulder, I guess? The conscience? The semi-omniscient ghost that can view all of the enemy's abilites and parameters with mathematical precision and then silently relay that information into the character's brain, allowing you to influence their actions in the most numerically optimal fashion?

In some of the most highly regarded CRPGs, the text within the options doesn't serve merely as a list of responses, but as player-facing exposition or narrative in itself. KOTOR 2 has a lot of this, where the player isn't aware of the same information that the player character is. Ideally, you're reading all of the options, interpreting what kind of seed could potentially lead to all of them, then choosing the one you decided fits best with the version of the character you're controlling in your playthrough. Everyone in-story knows what happened, but you get to decide how and why it did.

There's a Gamespot interview with Robert Kurvitz where he talks about how, in Disco Elysium, he wanted to depict/explore a layer in-between the body and the mind that translates intent into action. This is of course the beauty of the "skills talk to you" and Thought Cabinet systems. In general, Disco Elysium often plays with this on a meta level, including jokes based on the assumption a player will read each dialogue option, in order, before choosing one. There's a certain tabletop-inspired vibe here, like designer asides in a Player's Handbook.

Alas, bridging the space between (as Thaliarchus puts it) 'options in one defined character's head' and 'options through which you can define a character' so that you're doing both simultaneously is really hard.

So there's a certain spectrum, I think, of how much influence the player has over the character they're controlling. How much agency does a character have without the player acting as an inhabiting spirit? What are they thinking about when I'm not in their proverbial "Investigate" menu? The answer, of course, is nothing, because they aren't real. But dialog options can kind of play in this space.

This feeling that's metatextual whilst also firmly embedded in the structure of a given game is perhaps a contributor to why Undertale got so big so quickly. Saving the game is usually a purely metatextual action. something done by the player, so having characters in the narrative acknowledge Saving in particular breaches the unspoken barrier and feels novel. Its follow-up Deltarune directly acknowledges with the idea that the player's choices are not the same as the character's choices, and Kris's resulting loss of agency is depicted with full effect.

I do not have a nice, pat conclusion here. As Thaliarchus notes, this whole spectrum of types of dialogue options and whatnot all still end up presented as text, "prose." Expecting one type and getting another can just feel wrong, and I don't know if there's an easy way to overcome that other than exposure and experience, building the proverbial vocabulary to be able to understand such things implicitly. And I'm still looking at this fairly narrowly; there's probably all sorts of weird vectors one could use to tweak player agency/intent and play it against that of the characters, the roles we inhabit. That's video games for ya, I guess.