Project Summary:
• Interviewed design team to understand game and role of dialogue within it. Researched sports commentary, racing game dialogue, and past buggy races. Interviewed official buggy commentator to understand sports commentary theory.
• Wrote dialogue that conveyed feel, cadence, and diction of raceday commentary.
• Wrote dialogue that provided exposition for history of buggy, context for game's race, and taught gameplay mechanics.
• Ensured dialogue was responsive, well-timed, and engaging.
Project Objective:
In a Polygon review of F1 2019, reporter Owen Good remarks, “the sports video game that helps fans understand or relate to the sport better is the one that is really doing its job well.” Buggy AllStar’s was commissioned by the Buggy Alumni Committee to celebrate 100 years of buggy by capturing the feeling of raceday. Buggy’s commentator booth is a core part of the authentic buggy experience, so I knew my dialogue needed to embody the commentator’s feel, cadence, and diction. Dialogue also needed to provide exposition. This meant teaching players the history of buggy, providing context for the game’s race, and teaching them about gameplay mechanics such as potholes and speed boosts.
Postmortem
Sports Commentary
I don’t watch any sports, at all. So learning about, and then falling in love with, sports commentary was a fascinating and surprising experience. Professional sports commentator Will Weiner described it to me as a form of storytelling. It contextualizes the match. The commentator creates a rich narrative which allows audience members to experience the sport through an expert’s lens and passion. It's like literary interpretation but for live events! As a writer, I loved learning nuggets of craft, like: “try to find the stake in everything,” “frame teams and events as archetypes (underdog vs. evil empire, bitter rivals, ect.),” and “help the audience to understand how to watch it.”
Lesson: Dynamism in Game Dialogue
In arcade racing games, players expect that their skills will be recognized, rewarded, and celebrated. When a game acknowledges the player’s feats of skill, the game feels more responsive. This encourages the player to engage more deeply with the experience and enter that desired “flow state.” Dialogue in an arcade racer helps keep the tempo, providing constant feedback that keeps players in the now rather than have them simply chasing some final time in the future. That’s what is really special about games: in games, you don’t just see or feel the satisfying slice as your car drifts a corner. Your actions are also underscored by music, explosive UI, and dialogue. In my personal opinion, this is what makes racing franchises like SSX, Mario Kart, and Burnout, the best around.
Lesson: Timing and Delivery in Games, Especially Racing
This project helped me better understand the nature of timing and delivery in game dialogue. This was new to me as a fiction writer, where time is imagined and therefore far more malleable. Racing game dialogue is far less flexible than even other mediums such as film, because the dialogue is subservient to gameplay. As a result, it must be worked around the time-spans that gameplay allows. Dialogue length needs to be responsive and relevant: a six second comment on a two second speed boost will feel poorly timed. You especially need to be careful about dialogue arresting or distracting from gameplay. In my first draft, the pre-race lines were too long which turned the pre-race jitters from anticipation to frustration.
The tight deadlines in game development compounds this. I joined the project when it was already nearing the end of alpha, and the onset of COVID threw their timeline into chaos. As a result, the team could not adjust the game to accommodate dialogue, such as how F1 extends the length of their pre-game commentary by engaging the player with visuals of the course ahead. If a dialogue line was going to work, I was the one who needed to make that happen by making it fit without obstructing this greater experience.
Lesson: Dialogue Influenced by Medium
In analyzing different games I grew to appreciate how game feel shapes dialogue writing. In researching, I found that F1’s pregame commentary was a full minute longer than Need For Speed’s. Need For Speed is about, well, speed, so it makes sense that they made the introduction fast and punchy. However, F1 encourages you to spend time fiddling with tracks and cars until they’re perfectly optimized, building up anticipation for the explosive race. The dialogue reflects the intended play experience.
