Paralanguage defines all of the audio information in a conversation beyond word choice. Simply listening to someone’s voice, even if you can’t make out the words, conveys their emotional state. A whisper can imply secrecy, while a shout gets everyone’s attention. By emphasizing particular words in a sentence, the entire meaning can change.
This demo (under construction) shows how a voice conveys emotional information far beyond the bland statement the words make.
This demo (under construction) provides an example of empasis changing the meaning of a sentence.
Paralanguage is currently handled in games via voice actors, usually recording for a non-interactive cinematic. Thus real voices, usually in monlogue, provide all the richness of real language.
Products with extensive character interactions generally limit voice acting to the more important story points and in small clips as background audio. The simple reason for this is expense, either in the cost of recording and processing the audio, or in the amount of disk space it takes. Also, when games provide huge chunks of back story, players can read much faster and with less irritation
In addition to emotion and emphasis, voices provide clues about the speaker. A monotone (low affect) and/or slowness of speech implies dullness or even lack of intelligence, while rapid speech implies flightiness. Accents convey origins, and summons the associated prejudices for the listener.
InteraQuest is evaluating methods to take a voice recorded at one or two base levels and modify it to inject different emotions, emphases and affects. In this way, the amount of voice recordings is kept low, but designers have more flexibility in using it.
Conversations are composed of formalities (greetings, titles and honorifics) and pause fillers (such as um, ya know, and expletives). By taking a base statement and adding these elements dynamically, the audio choices become even richer.
From an interface point of view, games have conversational pacing only in non-interactive portions of the game, where the recorded dialogue simply plays. Other interactions take the form of statement, pause for menu selection, statement. Of greatest importance for these games is conveying the specific mission information. Thus the same statement can be brought up repeatedly.
InteraQuest is evaluating the use of optional pauses in conversations, where the player can interject a follow-up or bridging comment or simply allow the computer character to continue. In addition, the player is provided timing based controls to modify his own paralanguage or other nonverbal communication elements. To inject excitement, the player might rapidly click on a control which adds greater affect into the voice, speeds up the words and triggers gestures.
In this way the pacing becomes more realistic and the game provides the player some real time complexity usually found in combat engines. The key is to balance out this complexity with the naturalness of the human interchange. In addition, the game must provide sufficient feedback and reward to make the player feel he is not wasting his time.