What We Talk About When We Talk to NPCs

Not every fictional genre is suited to video games, and that’s ok. We don’t read poetry for car chases, we don’t go to concerts for psychological realism, we don’t play The Sims: Hot Date expecting an erotic thriller.

But the neo-noir crime drama? That should be a slam dunk.

There’s a reason detective work is a staple of popular fiction: it’s episodic, it’s lurid, it lends itself to good plotting and pacing. It also involves the audience more directly than other genres, inviting them to inspect the scaffolding while the story is being built. It’s a procedural format that should, in theory, perfectly suit the proceduralism of video games.

At least that’s what I told myself five years ago when I forked over sixty bucks in a Baltimore GameStop for the criminally hyped L.A. Noire.

In fairness, the guy who upsold me offered an irresistible pitch: as Detective Cole Phelps, I would detect across a lovingly recreated 1940s L.A., sifting for clues and interrogating suspects. An impressive roster of character actors lent their performances to the game’s many NPCs — which a groundbreaking technology called MotionScan purported to render with unprecedented nuance. To separate truth from lie, I would, as Phelps, analyze their behavior down to the facial tic, and use it to question them into a corner.

The game’s meticulousness made it that much more disappointing.

The art, for 2011, is sublime. L.A. Noire’s L.A. looks like the medium’s last major statement before its imminent pole vault to VR. The story is engaging and the writing is competent.

But Phelps himself is an erratic psychopath, misinterpreting every cue you give him. In conversation he bulldozes over criminals and bystanders alike. Regardless of how you the player interpret a scenario, it becomes impossible to make Phelps telegraph your savvy.

L.A. Noire’s writer and director, Brendan McNamara, later admitted that development changes were partly to blame. Phelps is given a set number of interrogative options — he can believe, doubt, or accuse a suspect — and these were relabeled after recording. “Doubt,” for example, originated as “force,” meaning that when you want Phelps to apply a light touch, Phelps wants Phelps to crack skulls.

Untold millions spent to animate a fluttering eyelid, and the game is routed by word choice.

In hindsight, though, the whole project seems quixotic. L.A. Noire is predicated on the most dubious proposition in gaming, which is that NPCs have an interior life. Its corollary — that you can access a shred of that life under the right circumstances; that you can communicate with a non-playable character — is equally farfetched.

And yet that basic premise isn’t unique to L.A. Noire. Versions of it crop up everywhere you encounter a dialogue tree. As traditional RPG elements start to color a wider cross section of single-player games — and as the market for those games dwindles ominously — designers have devoted more and more resources to bolstering the C in NPC.

But enlivening characters in a video game demands more than just good writing or thoughtful AI. Naturalism and a rich backstory won’t guarantee that you have a meaningful (or even coherent) interaction with a pile of code. Dialogue on the page is static and impermeable; in a game it must be transmitted, received, and interpreted by both parties.

Consider the virtual disconnects a game asks you to hurdle to defuse a rival or hit on a crewmember. As the player, you have to assess the behavioral options allotted to you, which are often taglined summaries of a meatier action or speech. You have to trust that you’re drawing the right inferences from those options — that you and the developers see the situation eye-to-eye. (Suppose one dialogue choice is “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou”. How barbed is that? Do the writers mean it as an observation or an accusation?)

It’s hard enough to communicate openly and honestly with a person you’ve known for decades. Making your intentions clear to somebody’s conception of a 40s-era gangster, let alone an Asari Matriarch, sounds like a job for a semiotician.

And all the while, with each encounter, you’re made to judge what the NPC is narratively capable of — what subplots or story arcs they’re waiting to unlock for you. One of the most refreshing discoveries in Mass Effect 3 is that Samantha Traynor, the Normandy’s comm specialist and putative potential love interest, is gay: not only because it’s an early instance of a mainstream game expanding beyond the heteronormative, but also because, if you play as male Shepard, something you thought was within your control is revealed not to be. An NPC is granted brief interiority by rejecting what you the player want.

That’s a rarity in games, and it hints at a structural problem. Playable characters don’t speak; they command. However incidental the exchange, every word directed at an NPC is progressing the game in some sense. Whether you’re opening a relationship or closing it, attracting NPCs or repelling them, the game’s world is adjusting to your whims. Your pronouncements trigger change.

The British philosopher J. L. Austin had a name for this kind of communication — he called it a speech act. He theorized that under certain conditions, statements can perform concrete functions. By saying “I do” at your wedding, you become married. By ordering a diet coke at a restaurant, one appears.

Of course, such conditions don’t often present themselves. If you’re able to summon a drink it’s because you’re paying someone to care that you receive it. If you declare yourself to be a husband it’s because the person opposite you desires to be a wife. The vast majority of our speech is met with ontological indifference: people listen, and then they continue living their lives.

That’s why persuasion is such a notable phenomenon, and why good trial lawyers bill crazy rates. The power to make people do things (or even just respond) is supreme. Our speech almost never acts, and we know it.

The playable character, on the other hand, is always performing — even when he’s simply talking. In that respect, he resembles only one other figure: God. The Old Testament is filled with famous examples of performative language. (“And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”) Speech acts are part of what defines God’s divinity, and in a video game, they help define yours.

The consequence cuts both ways. Obviously games only work when they provide a measure of control that is absent from our everyday existence. The thrill of mastery is exactly what we’re after. But as the player, your authority undermines any relationship that might otherwise feel organic.

When everyone is your subject, nobody is your peer.

I write sporadic, minimally researched essays on topics in gaming that interest me. Follow for more, and in the immortal words of Jeb!, please clap.