How 'Signs of the Sojourner' Tries to Rethink the Video Game Dialogue Tree

How often have you entered a conversation confident about what you want to say, the emotions you want to convey—only to watch it fall apart? For everything to be completely misunderstood, as if the two of you were, somehow, speaking different languages? All conversations are complex, a mixture of tone, inflection, language, and inferences. But in games, conversations are typically binary. Either the dialogue has been pre-written and recorded by the game developers, or you're picking from a series of choices that make clear both what and how you're saying something. Angry dialogue may, in fact, be colored red. 

Which is what made playing Signs of the Sojourner—released last year on PC to acclaim but not much attention, and coming to consoles, including Switch, this week—such a revelation. It's a game about having conversations that throws out all the typical conventions and interfaces we've gotten used to. You don't pick dialogue options, and instead, play a deck of cards.

"The idea of using cards came out of a desire to address some of those shortcomings of traditional dialogue trees," said lead designer Dyala Kattan-Wright in a recent interview with Waypoint. "Of course, there are some things dialogue trees do well that we miss. But we wanted a system where there isn't a right answer to select for every conversation, where your ability to min/max every exchange is limited, where you have to choose which relationships are important to you rather than being able to befriend every person you meet."

Kattan-Wright pointed to games like Betrayal at Kondor and Baldur's Gate initially creating an interest in the way games handle conversations, but it wasn't until later, while playing through more modern RPGs, that she started to think about what was (and wasn't) possible. What if, for example, you could do more than aggressive or passive? What if you could bluff—or lie? People were far more complex than the systems representing them. 

In Signs of the Sojourner, you do not speak in words and sentences but with cards. There is an obvious intention from the player's side, but even behind-the-scenes, the developers did not write out a secret script for the player's dialogue. They wrote a "gist" for the exchange.

Other characters also use cards to represent the flow of conversation, but they speak actual  dialogue in response to the cards dealt. Your goal in a conversation is to match symbols. Some cards have special features, like being able to shuffle in new cards or duplicate a previous card, but it's always about matching enough symbols to move the dialogue forward. 

In the early parts of the game, you're constantly around people you know, so conversations are breezy and simple. But the story in Signs of the Sojourner involves leaving home and trying to define what kind of future you want, and that means meeting new people who speak with different symbols. Along the way, maybe you add their symbols to your deck, so that you can better communicate with them in the future, but that means giving up other symbols. Maybe that means giving up the symbols that are most closely associated with back home.

What this means is that, over time, it's harder to speak with some people, maybe even impossible to communicate at all. You might've known someone for decades, but now, you've changed and are speaking past one another. You don't have the tools to talk.

"Having your deck grow and change and influence your options felt more impactful than having skill checks determine conversation options as is often done with dialogue trees," said Kattan-Wright.

The arc of playing Signs of the Sojourner, which can vary wildly depending on choices the player makes and characters they align with, is one of gaming's most honest representations of the change many of us experience in a lifetime, as people once close become strangers. 

"We did not, in fact, intend to make it a social anxiety simulator!" she said. "But really I think folks are just so used to dialogue in most games where there is no misspeaking, where it's very clear which response will lead to agreement or not."

It's also possible to be in situations where you have no cards with matching symbols for an area, leading you to wander in, piss someone off, and leave. Or, sometimes, there's one or two viable cards that lead to one or two viable conversations...but nothing more than that. Some interactions in real-life are fleeting, but in games, because most scenarios are about the player trying to save the world, everything has to feel weighty and important. Not here.

"We very much wanted dialogue in Signs to reflect the uncertainty of encountering a new culture or place where you just aren't in touch with local concerns or, more literally, the local lingo," said Kattan-Wright. "I think it's very relatable to have misunderstandings where both parties are doing their best to communicate their concerns and perspectives but just can't find that common ground. [..] I've also had experiences trying to communicate without a shared language, getting by with broken phrases and gestures and still finding a connection there, which I hope the [game] also captures just as well."

It's interesting to look back at older iterations of Signs of the Sojourner, while the team was trying to figure out how much information to convey and how much should stay hidden.

You'll notice, for example, there's no shapes in that screen shot.

Earlier designs for the game, according to Kattan-Wright, were more specific and literal. As time went on, however, the team started to make more of the game emotional and abstract.

"We found that going more abstract with the representation was actually better at capturing the feel and flow of a conversation, including those elements of what's left unsaid," she said. "The abstraction led to a much more liminal narrative space, but one that felt more relatable and true to the flow of conversation than those previous iterations."

The increased specificity in older versions of the game, she pointed out, often felt like a different version of a combat system, and Signs of the Sojourner is very much not that. It's wrong to suggest it's a game without heightened emotions or moments of conflict, but at no point—well, at least not in my playthrough—did anyone pull a gun. It's not that kind of game.  

"The initial pitch was 'your deck is your character' though of course figuring out what that actually meant took a while," said Kattan-Wright. "It was only when we went more abstract with the cards that it felt representative of our own experiences, of how actual conversations flow or fall apart without necessarily being antagonistic."

Follow Patrick on Twitter. His email is patrick.klepek@vice.com, and available privately on Signal (224-707-1561).