ErikH2000
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I've played a lot of adventure/story-based games with voice in them. And I've made some with voice too, e.g. DROD. And I spent a few years producing audio dramas and running a voiceover studio.

I've come to the conclusion that subtitles or captioning in games are a dismantling of the ideal experience.

The character's voice starts talking. Player sees the text on the screen that says exactly the same thing. Player reads the text before the voice completes. And then the player has no use for the voice. It's redundant.

Reading the text requires a little spike of attention taking you away from proper gameplay for a moment. Many games make this departure from the game official by putting interacting with characters inside of dialogue trees or other side-UI. Sometimes, this mini-game treatment can be made into something worthwhile, e.g. the humorous dialogue of Thimbleweed Park and other Gilbert adventures.

I'd never watch a stand-up comedy special with subtitles on--it ruins the punchlines. Similarly, if you throw text up ahead of the spoken word, jokes, dramatic proclamations, and other strong moments that rely on suspense are dampened.

And if a game seeks to have an immersive quality, where you can forget a little bit that you're playing a game... text overlaid on the screen breaks this as well.

The economics of developing games with voice bias game makers towards use of subtitles. There are two big reasons for using them: cheap localization and limiting VO retakes.

For cheap localization, we often want to record in one language, usually English, and use subtitles for the other languages. It's quite a bit more expensive to record in languages for all your markets rather than get subtitle text translated.

It's also expensive to bring VO actors back in for retakes when lines are not read articulately enough to be well-understood. It might seem like it's easy to catch this in the first recording session, but even with a recording engineer paying very close attention, a lack of clarity might not be found until editing or worse, playtesting. Arranging multiple sessions with actors can be difficult. They may be tied up in different projects and lose availability. If you're using SAG/AFTRA actors, there are minimum session fees that cause a 10-minute recording session for retakes to cost as much as a 2-hour session.

You know what's a lot cheaper than getting really good, clear lines? Throwing some subtitles on the screen.

I wouldn't ever say, let's not have subtitles. We want deaf people to be able to enjoy games with character dialogue, for example. Sometimes players want to play games in environments where they can't have audio turned on. Localizing with subtitles is often the only practical solution for a project's budget, and not having them means leaving out players who don't share the recorded language.

But I think that in most adventure/story-based games, the default experience should be "subtitles off". Those games should be designed for that experience as the ideal and offer subtitles as an extra setting that can be used if somebody needs it.

-Erik

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ErikH2000
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Sorry, I meant to put this in electronic games. It's not terribly DROD-related.

-Erik

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disoriented
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I always turn on subtitles.

In my experience, audio mixing in games is often less than ideal, and spoken audio is usually competing with background music and sound effects. I tend to miss syllables and words from listening to audio alone. But then again, I'm getting up there.

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navithmastero
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For this reason I almost always have subtitles off, unless for some reason I cannot hear/understand what the characters are saying.

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Xindaris
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I guess I'm a bit of a weirdo; I don't find subtitles to hinder my experience whatsoever, and many times simply prefer them. I'll often turn them on when they're off by default. Maybe it's something about how my attention span works: I have a lot more difficulty focusing on a single thing than I do two things at once, but one of them to a lesser degree.

But--for accessibility reasons as well as in case it's difficult to understand some lines, my only real concern is whether they're in the game in the first place and whether their display is handled well (which I've been made a bit more keenly aware of by GMTK's coverage of accessibility issues in games). I'm rather neutral to whether they should be on or off by default, myself.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-21-2021 10:39 PM]

larrymurk
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disoriented wrote:
I always turn on subtitles.

In my experience, audio mixing in games is often less than ideal, and spoken audio is usually competing with background music and sound effects. I tend to miss syllables and words from listening to audio alone. But then again, I'm getting up there.

Ditto

ErikH2000
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disoriented wrote:
In my experience, audio mixing in games is often less than ideal, and spoken audio is usually competing with background music and sound effects.

Thanks for reminding me of audio mixing.

This actually goes along with my argument. If the game design is assuming the safety net of "we'll have subtitles", there won't be enough attention spent on getting the dialogue audio mixed right. There are nuances to consider like whether some dialogue is meant to be foreground ("Go talk to Clancy. He knows how to get this door open!") or background chatter.

And when the music swells for some dramatic moment, it shouldn't drown out the dramatic thing that the character is saying. That takes attention to mixing. Subtitling to fix it is a cop-out.

My VO company sent a good acting performance to a client to put in a video trailer. The client also got a great song from a composer for the trailer, and they asked him to mix the two things together. Predictably, the musician drowned out the dialogue so that his music would be more clearly heard.

Argh... bad mixing.

Note my whole rant is on what game developers or designers should do to make better experiences - not on what game players should do with the bad situation the devs brought them. Yeah, of course, as a player you want to throw the subtitles on if that's what makes the game work better for you. Although, it might be worth trying a game with subtitles off at first.

-Erik

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averagemoe
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Nice try, Eric. I may have lost interest in doing voice work for The Godkiller, but I'm still watching you develop it. I've seen the placeholder text you put for the subtitles, singing the praises of the concept. I don't believe you.

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Xindaris
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I think I might fundamentally disagree with the notion that anyone trying to make a good game/experience is actually going to think to themselves "oh, we'll have subtitles" and use that as a crutch to not think through their game design carefully. Like, my overall impression is that when a work (such as a game) is done well, it's done well because the people behind it had enough passion for their art to try and make every single detail they can think of work. On the other hand, a soulless or bad work doesn't need a crutch to exist for them to do something poorly*.

So, in the former case it either won't be an issue in the first place or there was nothing they could do about it, and in the latter case, assuming you want to play something like that in the first place, well-made subtitles are basically only helping the player.

As for how, exactly, it can be possible that a voice line being difficult to hear is unavoidable, I would say it's very easy for something like that to happen in the medium of video games, where the player does a lot of the determining the timing of things, but not in a way that allows them to know ahead of time exactly what that timing will result in. So, a first-time player who isn't expecting a line of dialogue to come up might fire a particularly loud gun over the first few words, or wander too far away from the speaker to hear; the dev can't prevent that from happening without yanking the player into a cutscene, and they may not want to do that for this particular line. I'm thinking about a Sideways video I saw recently about how video game music/sound design is partially Aleotoric, because the player plays a part in the "performance".

*-Some detail is missing here, obviously. "Passion" alone isn't what makes a good work, but I'm using it to sort of conceptually lump together time, effort, energy, money, and so on, so forth, basically the collection of all of the things that a person or group of people need in order to make that particular work of art good.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-22-2021 04:07 AM]

Kalin
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ErikH2000 wrote:
But I think that in most adventure/story-based games, the default experience should be "subtitles off".

I'm fine with this, mainly because I'm not interested in such games. I don't want immersion or atmosphere or even story. I play games purely for the sense of accomplishment.

So when I try a new game, the first thing I do is turn off the voices (and music, and ambient noise, and fullscreen, and particles, and...), because they get in the way of what I want.

Also, I read much, much faster than I listen (and more accurately too). One of my gripes with DROD is that I can't skip to the next line of speech when I finish reading the current one. I either have to wait forever while it pretends to speak it, or press space and then double-click the portrait to see what I skipped.

xpym
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I'm not a native English speaker, but I prefer playing most games in English, because translations/localizations are almost always inferior and often downright shoddy, and you can't usually tell in advance which one you're going to get.

The issue with the lack of clear articulation isn't exclusive to games, many movies and TV shows sadly also have this, and they aren't generally developed with the expectation to be watched with subtitles on. Even with more than a decade of experience, I still occasionally miss a detail of what's being said if I watch/play without subs, and this is much more annoying than being slightly distracted by glancing at text, or having a joke being "spoiled" by a few seconds.

Also, some anecdotal data. Whenever a variety Twitch streamer asked their audience at the beginning of a "story" game playthrough whether they preferred subtitles being on or off, the majority was always in favor of them being on in all the cases that I personally witnessed.

The real point of this topic, I guess, is that bad audio quality and subtitle availability might plausibly form a sort of vicious circle status quo that Erik wants to break out of, and seeing whether it's possible would be an interesting experiment at least.

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[Last edited by xpym at 01-22-2021 11:49 AM]

ThemsAllTook
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An alternate solution to a lot of the problems mentioned in the first post: Timing the subtitles so that each word appears in sync with when it's spoken, instead of having the line appear all at once. This keeps the accessibility of the text without ruining the pacing.

Some games without voice acting use different timing and effects on dialogue text to simulate the cadence of speech. See Wandersong or Paper Mario. It actually works pretty well! I don't have any immediate examples of subtitles being perfectly timed with speech, but I've probably seen it and not noticed because it was so seamless.

One bit of value I personally get from subtitles is knowing how to spell a name when it's spoken. Without text, I'm left guessing for anything that's not a standard dictionary word. I also find that taking in information with two of my senses at once makes it easier for me to understand and retain it.

Illusionist
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Two cents (or maybe less)
1) I usually like to listen to music on computer, so I very often turn off the audio in the games, so subtitles are neat for me
2) not an english speaker either so if there is a difficult word that I might not know, it's educational

It's worth noting that some gamemakers and artists like to troll the listeners with slightly modified subtitles that have some puns, or using words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meaning like for example "sheet" and you know what.

And additional cent
Imagine my surprise when I've played Flash Drod, and I could chose my own language. It was a very positive surprise. And the translation was really really cool. There are cases when a localization / translated work can be better than original, but I digress.

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[Last edited by Illusionist at 01-22-2021 11:40 PM]

ErikH2000
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Hmm, this has been a firehose of unexpected viewpoints for me. One takeaway is that not only do I need to include subtitles, (I'd already conceded that) but I should try to do them well. There's just going to be so many players wanting them.

DROD subtitles are actually pretty good, in my opinion. They're color-coded and shown next to characters speaking.

I liked what Thems/Alex said about timing display of text to match vocals. I actually wrote a bit of code like that in my game already, and it's feasible to include.

Hmm. Hmmmm.

-Erik


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Xindaris
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In terms of the guidelines from this video, DROD's subtitles:
+Are in a good, readable font. I don't know how dyslexia-friendly it is, but at least it doesn't seem dyslexia-hostile to me?
+Have a solid background color behind them which ensures that they can be read no matter what the game environment "behind them" looks like.
-Are not centered on the bottom of the screen--but I'm not actually sure how important this standard is for DROD. I mean, as-is they're not actually difficult to locate or track with your eyes or anything.
-Are kinda small, maybe? More importantly, their size can't be customized at all. But that seems to be partially a result of how old the game is and the technical limitations present when it first came to be.
+/-May or may not be displayed with the right length, timing or duration--that's left up to the architect. Fuzzy memory for me suggests this part is handled just fine in the official holds, though.
++Have a nice handy reference the player can refer back to at will if they had any difficulty reading them at all.
+Indicate the speaker via colors, location, and usually the top-left portrait. And even though it doesn't name the character at the front of the speech (as in "Beethro: Blah blah blah") when first displayed, that sort of indication is present in the speech history.

Overall I think I agree that they do very well, especially for being a legacy from as long ago as Architect's Edition came out. Plus they do double duty of acting not just as subtitles in the first place, but also acting as just the dialogue itself for the many holds that don't have voice acting.

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 01-23-2021 02:35 AM]

ErikH2000
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Xindaris wrote:
In terms of the guidelines from this video

Just got done watching this. It was helpful, thanks.

-Erik

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ErikH2000
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I've been agonizing over every aspect of subtitles this week, but focusing on just this one point...

And not specifically arguing against Xindaris who has his own doubt...

Xindaris wrote:
-Are not centered on the bottom of the screen--but I'm not actually sure how important this standard is for DROD. I mean, as-is they're not actually difficult to locate or track with your eyes or anything.

Think about how you play DROD versus how you play something like... Fortnite, Call of Duty, or... any kind of visceral "you-are-there" first-person game.

A DROD player is typically in a desktop setting, upright, relaxed, surveying a screen of tiny pieces of information. Gameplay is naturally interruptible by just not issuing a new command.

It seems to me appropriate to the game, its sensibilities, and its players to have small pieces of text near the characters that emit dialogue. It jibes with that feeling that you are looking over a tiny, little world. It is fun.

I'd resist overstating the need for standards to be followed the same way in every game. In particular, when that call is made based on certain pundit/writer voices feeling the urge to put together a "majority consensus / experts agree" kind of argument in a Youtube video or Gamasutra article. If you had to write such a thing, you'd dutifully gather up every complaint voiced by the community at large, heavily biased by status quo conventions. And it would all sound very convincing. I'm instead using a video like the one linked above to get to the *reasons* why the conventions are recommended, and let that impact my decisions.

Games should have tons of freedom to break norms when there are good reasons to do it. Let's even say, they should have freedom to break norms with very little justification other than the thing might be kinda cool. If games don't experiment, things get stagnant.

-Erik

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Xindaris
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Oh, I absolutely agree with you. I just went through the bullet points out of a mixture of curiosity and wanting to share my findings once that was satisfied. Actually, Mark Brown tends to start his accessibility videos by saying "Video games are for everyone", and I personally feel that that comes with the caveat that not every video game is for every person. As extreme examples, you don't make a typical rhythm game for deaf-from-birth people, or most video games in general for people who were blind from birth (not that that's stopped a few of the latter from doing things like beating Ocarina of Time!). You could make an RPG that people who are illiterate can enjoy, but the majority of games in that genre, quite reasonably, expect the player to be able to read.

But more than that, I think there needs to be a certain amount of push and pull between the experience a developer wants to provide and which people that experience will actually be fully available to. There are just some accessibility considerations that it's not feasible to create a "curb cut" type solution to, and sometimes what you want your game to be like just isn't compatible with certain kinds of disabilities. That's okay to me; if you're not going out of your way to exclude certain groups and others are making games for them, then the statement that "video games are for everyone" and the spirit behind it still holds true. And that's not even getting into the resource and time cost for adding various kinds of accessibility features, which is a big deal for not-big-budget productions.

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mrimer
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ThemsAllTook wrote:
An alternate solution to a lot of the problems mentioned in the first post: Timing the subtitles so that each word appears in sync with when it's spoken, instead of having the line appear all at once. This keeps the accessibility of the text without ruining the pacing.

Some games without voice acting use different timing and effects on dialogue text to simulate the cadence of speech. See Wandersong or Paper Mario. It actually works pretty well! I don't have any immediate examples of subtitles being perfectly timed with speech, but I've probably seen it and not noticed because it was so seamless.

I really like how Celeste did this.

One bit of value I personally get from subtitles is knowing how to spell a name when it's spoken. Without text, I'm left guessing for anything that's not a standard dictionary word. I also find that taking in information with two of my senses at once makes it easier for me to understand and retain it.

Agreed. I actually find myself watching TV shows with subtitles sometimes because it gives me more information about the show-world than I get just by listening. I can sometimes understand what people say better as well.

(Tangentially, for some anime, when I listen to the English dubbing, I sometimes keep the subtitles on there as well, because what the voice actors say is not identical to the subtitles! There can be a shift in Japanese vs English idioms, for instance. Taking in both at once is an interesting exercise in educating myself on different ways of articulating the same idea.)

But I don't like taking my eyes off the visuals to read the words. It's tiring and breaks immersion. If the game simply has a cutscene where subtitles are displayed below a letterbox scene, that's annoying because it divides my attention needlessly, as Erik said. But I like the way DROD does subtitles, because the subtitles are often applied in order to draw the player's attention to a place in the game. Think of how the Pit Thing speaks. They can be used for nice visual puns too.

And, IIRC, DROD 2.x+ has always had the option of turning off subtitles when lines are voiced. But I've always left them on, because it's easier for me to tell who's speaking, as there isn't a first/third-person camera to focus on the speaker.

...

Hmm...now I'm thinking the way DROD has implemented the speaker portrait in the top-left corner divides the user's attention a bit from the subtitles.

UX is interesting!

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[Last edited by mrimer at 01-29-2021 08:48 PM]

ErikH2000
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mrimer wrote:
But I like the way DROD does subtitles, because the subtitles are often applied in order to draw the player's attention to a place in the game.

Yeah, I think we did this part right.

Hmm...now I'm thinking the way DROD has implemented the speaker portrait in the top-left corner divides the user's attention a bit from the subtitles.

That's been on my mind too. GK puts the face portrait over the character's head while they are speaking, which has its own pitfalls. But I think it's gonna work fine.

-Erik

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skell
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I have some hearing problems, subtitles are great accessibility option for me. Please don't make games without subtitles!

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ErikH2000
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skell wrote:
I have some hearing problems, subtitles are great accessibility option for me. Please don't make games without subtitles!

Never! I got that from the beginning.

Since the original post, the subtitles in The Godkiller have been enhanced to check nearly every box on the subtitles wish list.

They are turned off by default in the game with an in-game prompt before the first line of dialogue offering the user a chance to enable them.

-Erik

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Keiya
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ThemsAllTook wrote: Some games without voice acting use different timing and effects on dialogue text to simulate the cadence of speech. See Wandersong or Paper Mario. It actually works pretty well!

I love it when games do that. I have trouble processing speech, so I rely on subtitles for the informational content. But the speech is almost always vastly superior at conveying the emotional content. That trick lets speechless games get some of that effect back.

Plus, playing with text boxes is just fun.

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Keiya
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ErikH2000 wrote:
They are turned off by default in the game with an in-game prompt before the first line of dialogue offering the user a chance to enable them.

Excellent! Reminds me a bit of Brütal Legend. They did that, and since a game about a metal roadie (and with Ozy Osbourne playing basically himself) would feel off without a bit of swearing, later paused mid opening cutscene, when it was clear Eddie was about to let loose, and asked if you wanted censorship. It also frames both positively, as "I want to hear every nasty syllable!" and "Bleep it! It's funnier that way!". Which also acted as a joke in itself to make up for the interruption.

Giving the players the tools they need to tune their experience is important, but done well doesn't have to be intrusive (or at least can be an intrusion that fits the tone of the game)

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skell
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ErikH2000 wrote:
They are turned off by default in the game with an in-game prompt before the first line of dialogue offering the user a chance to enable them.

That's how you design for accessibility!

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