Trope-Informed Design

Trope Informed Design is a new approach to designing game dialogue systems. Drawing from the fields of pragmatics and Conversation Analysis we explain when and why many conversations with NPCs break player immersion. Considering how and when to perpetuate, subvert, or transcend tropes can help guide designers in improving their game mechanics.

In this paper we talk about handling repetition, turn-taking, skipping and interrupting - you can read it here, or invite us to come and talk to you about it! More recently, we’ve applied the trope-informed design methodology to dialogue optionality, which you can read about here.