How to make a game out of Twelve Angry Men (1957)?
A dialogue cannot truly feel alive to the player if they are always stuck making a limited amount of choices.
Neither can dialogue be challenging, if the player is always in control of the direction of the conversation.
Instead of the clean approach to dialogue one finds in a play's script, we want to utilize the messiness of real converastions,
where both agents have to somehow take turns trying to take the conversation in some direction.
Misunderstandings and interruptions are both common.
Instead of a tree-like structure, we create a dialogue space, which is oriented around topics, something the player and the AI talk about.
Each topic gets some amount of attention from them and has a measure for progression. The former is captured by the focus space, the latter depth space.
Last Call (An Ante-Nuclear Role-Playing Game)
To test out the freshly devised design of LUDIC DIALOGUE, it was necessary to create an experience that could demonstrate the viability of the system as a medium for not just art but for gaming. As a system, there were very few examples you could compare it to in the world of video games. The LAST CALL was made knowing the following:
- It would have the ludic dialogue system as its core element
- As such it would make use out of its freeform conversational structure
- And would last for 15 minutes, to show how dialogue could take place in real-time
- Because games are about conflict, the dialogue would be about conflict
- The conflict of trying to convince a disobeying officer to launch nukes at the soviet
- On the way, the conversation could go in many directions, some topics being like conversational landmines
- As such, the game way built on the idea of a deep interpersonal relationship that would form between two people before the end of the world