Ode to Short Dialog
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I've been thinking a lot about short dialog recently. For most of 2007, we at Iron Lore were working on Dawn of War: Soulstorm, the third expansion to Relic's superb strategy series. When it came time for me to write the unit voice-over it was first necessary to stop and admire the standard set for my task by the folks at Relic.
I was an instant fan of lines such as "Just as Falcon brought Anaris to Eldanesh...," which deftly and poetically evokes the labyrinthine mythology of the ancient Eldar, not to mention, "'Ere ta fix yer gubbinz!" -- capturing perfectly all the comic braggadocio of an Ork warboss.
The nature of those unit voice-over lines highlights a major difference between dialog in games and other sorts of dialog. Take three steps into the world of screenwriting, and you're likely to come across the term "on the nose." (A good treatment of it can be found in David Freeman's book 'Creating Emotion in Games'.)
Being on the nose is a bad thing; it means the writing has come at its subject too directly and feels flat. It is the hallmark of juvenile, clumsy writing -- or worse yet, a script written by marketing execs. And it's true: People almost never talk directly at a point.
