Judas and Bioshock developer Ken Levine believes video game dubbing has a problem with “turn-based dialogue”

I remember talking to Brendy many moons ago about the FPS Metro Exodus’ decision to have characters frequently talk over each other. It’s something I always appreciate in movies (Brendy mentioned Fleabag, I mentioned Shane Meadows), and while the flow of many scenes in Exodus was pretty clumsy, it was still refreshing to see a game deviate from the usual, unnatural back-and-forth delivery. Ken Levine of Bioshock and Judas fame has a name for it – “turn-based dialogue.” According to Levine, it’s “one of the biggest problems” with the way games portray conversation.

“They often record the actors one at a time,” Levine told Dan Allen Gaming on YouTube. “Then whoever puts the dialogue together does what I call turn-based dialogue.” An actor says a line, there’s a solid pause, another actor speaks. “That line plays. There’s a half-second buffer – it’s always the same level of buffer – the next line plays.”

Levine has a solution, too. His approach is to “edit them, you know, they’re talking over each other. I really encourage the actors to not only read the perfect words as they’re written, but to bring as much naturalness as possible to even these fantastic characters.” The result, Levine says, is a “more human reading,” which leads to “much better-sounding dialogue, even with the exact same text, the exact same acting, just the editing process.”

“It’s amazing how many games just have this pre-written pause between each line,” he continues. “We put a lot of emphasis on editing the dialogue, even when it’s recorded separately, to make it feel a little more natural.” In real conversations, Levine says, people interrupt each other and stumble over their words. “Those are things that are sometimes hard to get (actors) to do because they want to do a good job and they don’t want to mess up your lines. But I’d rather have my lines be a little dirty and dusty.”

I’m all for imperfections! Sterilizing the human experience in the pursuit of inoffensive, impersonal gloss is, so to speak, bad for art and culture, and anything that scuffs at their calcification deserves a nice biscuit. I recently spoke to the composers of the strategy game Manor Lords, and they told me that developer Greg Styczeñ often preferred their less polished, bedroom-mic recordings to studio cuts.

So I appreciate Levine’s approach here, even if he admits in the interview that it’s his senior position and resources that allow him the luxury of focusing on these things. In 2022, Bloomberg published a report in which former Ghost Story Games employees accused Levine of erratic mismanagement, with one employee calling Levine “a very difficult person to work for.”

Judas, the upcoming project from Ghost Story Games, is set to be released in March next year. Levine revealed many details earlier this year, including the presence of a giant robot dog for fast travel. Fortunately, Alice Bell (RPS in peace) has skimmed through the entire discourse cycle in advance.