The game expands upon this further once the boat docks at its island destination.
#Oxenfree thought bubbles free#
Namely, naturalistic and free flowing dialog that isn’t beholden to specific line readings. Right then, Oxenfree lays out what it’s all about: dialog. By not letting the camera get too close to the characters, the player is left to fill in the nuances of their interactions. The game doesn’t miss a beat and continues the trio’s discussion like nothing happened, weaving each character’s lines into the conversation in a seamless manner. The player character cuts off the other speaker to deliver her lines. If you’re quick enough with your decision, something interesting happens. The game subtly encourages the player to pick one of the bubbles by pressing the corresponding button. The third passenger is then given an opportunity to speak, but instead of saying something, three speech bubbles with text begin to float above her head. Another of the passengers chimes in, complete with his own speech bubble, and asks who Henry Fonda is. Blank speech bubbles begin to pop up from one of the passengers, indicating that he’s the one who’s been prattling on. The screen then reveals the voice coming from a boat, which appears to have three passengers in addition to the vessel’s skipper.
You don’t get to hear the entirety of what he’s been saying, and it feels like your mind has drifted and you’re just now paying attention. The game opens with someone excitedly discussing military bases, ranches, and Henry Fonda. Thankfully, the folks at Night School Studio feel that games can do dialog better, and have proven it with the excellent Oxenfree. For the most part players and designers have just accepted the status quo acknowledging the difficulty of putting organically implemented dialog into games and leaving the situation be. There’s no guarantee that players will stay in one spot or even pay attention to what is being said, and so we often see Band-Aid solutions such as walk and talk segments that kill pacing, cutscenes that don’t match up with the in-game aesthetic, or stand-in-place RPG style interactions that take agency away from the player. But in video games, using these long established performative rules for speaking may not be as effective in delivering dialog. For a long time, this wasn’t really an issue, as we’ve come to accept that speech in theater, television, and film is fundamentally different than real life speech. To converse with our friends otherwise would come across as stilted and weird. We interrupt each other, mishear words or phrases, and change the subject all the time in real life casual conversations. However, rules such as these only make sense in the context of performance. The hand drawn art style of Oxenfree works really well to set the tone of the story. Finally, it simply looks and sounds unprofessional. For another, it is disrespectful to the person being interrupted, as you are taking away from the time that they are the focus of the show. For one, it makes the dialog harder to follow for the audience, who rely on theater's specific speaking tropes to understand what is being said.
Interrupting another actor impedes a performance for a variety of reasons. One of the most sacred rules, however, is to never step on another actor’s lines. For actors, these rules include such things as delivering one’s lines as written or agreed upon by the company, avoiding interactions with the audience during a performance, and not saying “good luck” to another member of the production. As anyone who’s had the thespian bug bite them can tell you, there are a great many rules that govern how a play operates. Whether I was working backstage or doing a terrible impression of an actor onstage, I adored the artifice that was live performance. In high school I was a bit of a theater geek.
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