I’ve been through the process of sitting down, writing out the dialog tree choices and diagramming out the options from both sides. On the writing side, you pretty much end up having to write silly lines that overstate the intent behind that choice; and on the player side you end up with the task of reading each dialog choice and deciphering what it’s supposed to accomplish.

So if your choices were things like:
– Schmooze
– Intimidate
and other actions to manipulate the social variables, then actions to use the social variables like
– Dig for information about a specific topic (which brings up a list of things to ask about)
and, for when you really don’t care specifically what happens next
– Just make conversation or small talk

You’d probably get a more fun system out of it, and not have the hassles of building a dialog tree.

I think the real problem with designing an engaging “game-conversation” is that the conversation is hard to turn into a game. And that’s because almost all video games are built around the concept of spatial reasoning. What we usually consider “action games” are really just spatial games. Errant Signal has a good video on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSBn77_h_6Q Shooters, fighters, racing, sports, platformers. These are all games whose challenge comes from mastering spatial reasoning. Almost all games outside of this category are made up of rpgs and puzzle games.

And what’s been tried so far is to turn conversations into puzzle games (think Oblivion’s Persuasion Wheel), usually with poor results. I think to tackle the obstacle of “social interaction in games” we should do what computer games have always done: look back to more primitive games that handle the concept well. There are a lot of popular party games that don’t involve violence or spatial reasoning in the least. A game like “Apples to Apples” might make an excellent foundation for computerizing social interaction.

Allowing player-submitted ideas for dialogue options is an interesting concept. I noticed in one or more of the Mass Effects that you could turn on some kind of live monitoring that I assume told BioWare (anonymously, hopefully) how I was playing the game. So I could imagine that going one step further as Tom says, albeit on PC versions only – unless I can record using my Xbox headset what I would like to say instead ;)

My point is that a game can be done with more player freedom in dialogues and various other social interactions if we just substitute descriptions in place of speech.

I’m reminded strongly of http://xkcd.com/1350/

However, I feel like they do something brilliant to make those paths feel different. After offering a binary choice like “save X” or “let X die”, they then allow the player to clarify via dialogue with NPCs why they did what they did. This works especially well with TWD games, because a large theme in those is deciding who you are going to be in the face of the zombie apocalypse. Thus, “I did X because Reason 1” feels like a completely different option from “I did X because Reason 2”, and these reasons are an inexpensive way to make a small tree feel like an expansive oak.

This is almost the inverse of the strategy of explaining the lack of player choice by defining who the character is (not that TWD doesn’t employ that as well). This strategy offers the same limited game-affecting choices, but allows the player the choice of deciding Why in addition to What.

http://imgur.com/xQRPYAT

Nowadays there’s some cool research on text adventures that do interesting things with branching. A lot of them are coming out of Mark Riedl’s lab (@mark_riedl on Twitter). One student is working on a project that crowdsources new branches by asking people playing another game (or on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) to tell stories similar to the game’s scenario. The system then tries to understand what they’re saying and put them in as new branches of the story.

Branches feel so chunky and easy to play with that you do wonder why people don’t do more with them. One thing that might be tricky in your example is: how do you know what was influencing someone’s desire to say this right now? Is it because they have a particular personality, or because they made a certain choice? It’s a cool set of problems to solve.

Stories are prescripted are they not? I understand the concept of using interaction in the game to immerse the player but we have to realize that it’s a story and not a conversation simulator. Going out of your way to give the player so many options can detract from what you want the plot to be. Planning what emotions the player feels and in what order is necessary to have something sensical. Giving the player what they want is not necessarily good for the story. If the player is meant to feel restricted or uncomfortable maybe that is intentional.

Just thinking out loud, no guarantee my thoughts are logical.