Character Development - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 152

Voice and Language
The way a character speaks conveys an enormous amount of information. This
breaks down into various elements:
Vocabulary indicates the age, social class, and level of education of the character.
People who don't read much seldom employ big vocabularies. Teenagers always use
a slang vocabulary of their own in order to exclude adults. Beware, however: If you
use too much current slang, your game will sound dated six months after publica-
tion. Conversely, period slang can help set a game in a different time—calling a gun
a roscoe promptly suggests the hardboiled detective fiction of the 1930s and 1940s.
In all cases, a light touch is best unless you're deliberately trying to be funny.
Grammar and sentence construction also convey information about education
and class; bad grammar reveals bad schooling. Although it's not really valid, we
associate articulateness and long, complex sentences with intelligence.
Accent initially tells us something about a person's place of origin and social
class. City people and country people speak differently the world over. Accent is
also, unfortunately, thought of as an indicator of intelligence. (This can backfire;
smart lawyers from the American South occasionally play up their southern accents
to fool their northern opponents into thinking they're not as bright as they really
are.) Avoid the “dumb redneck” stereotype; it is as offensive in its way as the “dumb
Negro” stereotypes of 1930s radio plays were.
Delivery refers to the speed and tone of the person's speech. Slow speech is—
again, mistakenly—often associated with a lack of intelligence, unless the speaker
is an Eastern mystic, in which case slow speech can be mistaken for wisdom. Try to
steer clear of stereotypes. Speed and tone can still work for you, indicating your
characters' excitement, boredom, anxiety, or suspicion. The speaker's tone conveys
an attitude or emotional state: friendly, hostile, cynical, guarded, and so on.
Vocal quirks include things like a stutter (Porky Pig), lisp (Sylvester the cat), and
catchphrases that identify a character (“Eh… what's up, doc?” from Bugs Bunny).
Consider how The Simpsons defines its characters' education, intelligence, and inter-
ests through language. Homer's limited vocabulary and simple sentences show that
he's not well educated; the kinds of things he says indicate that his interests are
chiefly food and beer. Marge's middle-sized vocabulary goes with her middle-class
outlook on life; from her statements we see that she's concerned with work, friends,
and her children. Lisa is the scholar of the family, interested in reading, writing,
and music; she has an unusually rich vocabulary for her age and speaks in long,
complex sentences. Bart's use of language varies considerably based on his situation,
from moronically crude when he's playing a practical joke to quite sophisticated
when he's making an ironic observation. Bart is a carefree hedonist but self-aware
enough to know it and even comment on it. He's a postmodern sort of character.
StarCraft , which draws on a variety of American accents to create several different
types of characters, exhibits some of the most interesting uses of language in games