Hot damn, THIS is how you deliver a talk.

This guy is a top tier dialogue surgeon

Absolutely fantastic talk.  This Ingold guy is a treasure and someone should throw a lot of money at him to help make the next generation of AAA RPG titles really sing.

29:35 Standard three choice "response" pattern:
• Accept - go with the current conversation ("Well, my name is...")
• Reject - react against the current conversation ("I'm not here for you.")
• Deflect - change to a different conversation ("Tell me something...")

Fascinating and informative.  It's reassuring that SOMEBODY out there in game development is thinking about dialogue.  The folks from Bethesda could benefit from watching this presentation.

That was amazing. The general quality of video games dialogues is why I want to write video games, and this was a very useful demonstration. Thank you for that.

Wish Bethesda had hired him to come in for 3 months at the beginning of development on Starfield. Just to train their writers how to use these types of systems. (Which could certainly be done in their engine… maybe not as easily as in inkle, but could be done, as it’s all just logic.) Then, after several months of putting the writers through a bootcamp on how to structure convo, they’d be able to write using those ideas, for the rest of the project.

I really do wonder which AAA studio is going to pick up on Mr Ingold’s ideas. It’s insane that his GDC talks on open-narrative/quest structure have been available for years, and we still get… what we get, from AAA studios. "Hi i’ve been waiting here on my porch for you to talk to me, and because you’re the only person who does things, i need you to go kill a werewolf in the forest. Bring back the wolf’s head. Go on now, fetch!" 😂 There is a better way. I’m convinced his ideas will eventually become more commonly used, to allow better interactions and storytelling.

lovely stuff!

Thank you for this, I agree with every bit of it.  Especially important IMO:
18:30 "Because, if all of the meaningful interaction is happening in the subtext, then the text itself doesn't matter that much."
49:09 "Agency; we have to reflect a range of approaches, but it's the range that we give the player, not the range the player wants.  That's crucial.  They don't know the story -- We do."

It's true, even though it may seem counter-intuitive for an RPG.  One of my favorite RPGs is Deus Ex 1, and I would love to hear Jon's thoughts on the dialogue of this game.  Typically (about 90% of it) the dialogue is as Jon described in this video.  The subtext of a conversation usually stays the same no matter what you choose, but your choices add flavor and might alter how a character interacts with you later on... But the important part is the dialogue usually does not depart from its subtext, while the range of choices still succeeds at being diverse enough for most players.

Another benefit to overloading the game with "meaningless" choices that the speaker did not cover, is that they help to conceal the more rare "real" choices, which do actually alter the story.  And it's good that those real, story-altering moments are buried in conversations that only have meaningless choices -- because as a storyteller, you do not want the player to consciously (or even subconsciously) derive the outcome of every dialogue option with near perfect accuracy before those outcomes actually happen... Which is what happens in many modern games.  If you can see right through it, it's not fun.

Masterful talk

Looking forward to Heaven's Vault.

What a talk!

This was really fascinating & enjoyable to watch! Thanks for posting it.

Eye opening. Thanks so much for this!

Great thoughts here!

Brilliant talk. Thanks a lot

Brilliant, thank you.

It's so much fun when the speaker is witty and funny in addition to being knowledgeable!

Thank you so much

so funny and useful... great speaker, :)