Dialog as Interesting Gameplay, Take 1

March 23, 2018

As I wrote last time, I’ve been trying to find a way of making dialog trees – or dialog in general – into an interesting and engaging gameplay mechanic for Sleuthhounds: Cruise. My first such attempt evolved out of doing research into real life interrogation techniques. While this yielded some useful information, as we’ll see it didn’t quite fit with what I was going for with Sleuthhounds.

In performing research on interrogation techniques, I came across an article on the Crime and Clues website. The information in the article was written for real, serious police interrogations but I thought it might be possible to game-ify it in a way that could fit my needs. The article essentially outlines a four step plan for conducting an interrogation:

  1. Confront a suspect, forcefully or moderately, with facts about the crime and accusations of their complicity in it.
  2. Interrupt any denials of complicity the suspect may offer in order to keep them frustrated and off balance so they don’t think they can avoid confessing their involvement.
  3. Once the suspect stops offering outright denials and starts offering excuses begin presenting them with additional, pre-prepared arguments to further manipulate them emotionally to the point of accepting their own guilt.
  4. As a suspect begins to succumb to the interrogation present more questions that offer alternatives as to why they did the crime (e.g. to help their families, to support an addiction) to allow them to save face and retain a measure of dignity.

I liked how the article broke the interrogation down into a number of distinct steps or actions. This seemed like it could translate well into game rules. In particular I liked the idea of interrupting a suspect’s denials while still having to pay attention to whether they were denying things or moving on to offering excuses to show progress in the interrogation. After that, the remaining steps in the interrogation seemed a little more nebulous as to how an actual player would know how to progress.

To try out the system, I started writing dialog between Jane Ampson and one of the suspects in the game. I thought that by working through what an interrogation might “sound” like I could start to see how specific game rules could be extracted from the different interrogation steps. It was during this process that I ran into several issues that convinced me the interrogation technique wasn’t the right way to go.

Location

Although I didn’t mention it above, the article made it clear that interrogations should be conducted in a distraction free space: no windows, no clocks, nothing. The idea is to ensure the only thing in the room the suspect can focus on is the interrogator.

Since the next game is set on a cruise ship it felt odd to me that there would be a distraction free space set aside that interrogations could be conducted in. As well, since Jane Ampson doesn’t have any official authority, such as what a police officer would have, it would have made for cumbersome storytelling to have Ampson have to convince a suspect to go to a special room every time the game called for an interrogation.

Preparations

The key to a successful real interrogation is to be prepared. It’s known, or at least highly suspected, that the suspect is guilty. The interrogation is being performed to elicit a conviction or further corroborating details. This presupposes that the interrogator is already privy to a lot of information about the suspect.

While Jane Ampson will be learning some details about the different suspects in the game before actually interrogating them, my intended direction for the interrogations was that Ampson, and by extension the player, should find out new unknown information and uncover secrets related to the suspects. This was at odds with how interrogations should properly be conducted and was one of the bigger reasons I abandoned this line of development.

Aggressive

A real interrogation is quite exhausting and aggressive. While Jane Ampson certainly has a snarky side she’s generally a very positive character in the Sleuthhounds games. I found writing aggressive interrogation style dialog for such a character to be extremely difficult. Tonally it was at odds with the light comedy stylings that the Sleuthhounds games use. While the dialog I wrote wasn’t bad, it just didn’t fit the character.

Complexity

As I wrote out the dialog for an interrogation session for the game I came to realize that the four steps led to some relatively complex gameplay. Part of the work I did on this system was to write the gameplay tips for how the system would work. It took quite a bit of writing to put across the different steps. Even if that was broken up so that the tips only appeared as the player transitioned through the phases of the interrogation it was still a lot to take in.

By contrast, Pureluck Homes’s deduction board puzzles from the previous Sleuthhounds games are, mechanically, quite simple. The player collects a number of clues from various hotspots in a picture by clicking on them and then drags and drops those clues on one another in the shape of puzzle pieces. It’s a system that allows me to inject a fair amount of depth into the examination of a crime scene without overwhelming the player with a lot of complicated gameplay controls or rules.

Conclusion

After spending some time with the interrogation technique I could see how it could be adapted into something that might form the basis for another type of game altogether. However, in Sleuthhounds where I wanted to use it as a relatively straightforward and quick gameplay sequence to discover unknown information it didn’t really fit. It was still a useful exercise to go through and the idea of interrupting a character’s dialog has found its way into another puzzle sequence within the game. However, it still didn’t solve my initial problem with dialog. That said, some of the learnings led to my next attempt, which I’ll detail next week. Same blog time. Same blog channel.