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[DavidCaruso]

I'd probably make each word appear at the same relative frequency as if a person was saying it, except with the overall speed much faster (something like 2 or 3 frames per word.) Letter-by-letter text looks cool, but the problem is that it's really tedious (I always just speed it up whenever it appears.) I guess the best compromise would just be to put a choice in the options menu and make your favorite choice default, I don't think this is such a huge aesthetic or mechanical decision that letting the player decide for you would hurt too much.

EDIT: Another option: set a constant rate for each word to appear in and apply it to groups of letters? So for example if your rate was 4 frames per word then "bear" would have each letter appear individually but "aardvark" would have 2 letters appear at a time, and "screeching" would alternate between 2 and 3, etc. It could look decent if done fast enough, I think.

[Mega]

I was facing this issue.

The pros outweigh the cons. It has something to do with the technical sci-fi feel of playing a computer program/ game. As though bit by bit. I think that's how it started, and once started then thats where you're 'nostalgia' point comes in.

Yea books don't have that readability issue, but when your at your computer/console interface your not reading a book.

Another thing is that the nature of game screens is usually hectic with alot of other things going on, so if continually you're bombarded with a giant slab of text, while you were focusing on the scene or image or whatever, psychologically it becomes stressing or (distressing). But when they gently start with a single letter, your mind has time to say "ah, text time".

It adds fluidity. Instead of page after page of text, literally out of nowhere.

Also it's more intimate as if the game is typing, speaking to (with) you. A wall of text is distant as though just being displayed like a street sign.

A very important point is also control. A person might accidentally skip an 'important wall of text' (if that's not an oxymoron), and you know in these games there's no rewind, usually. Especially if they get to a boring part, hopefully your game has none lol, then start button smashing only to realize they just glimpsed the word 'password is' highlighted in red on the page they skipped.. I think this was a major concern in the beginning.
 
The only con is that for the people who say they can read faster than it's displaying. If they couldn't there would be no issue at all, none. This is solved by having the instant feature as an option, and notice it's never the default option.

What I do is have the user able to press a button while its in typewriter mode which would complete that section, then once entirely displayed they still have to press the 'next' button.

Just remember in the game world: anything properly done, if isn't appropriate.. becomes appropriate.

So if you have a game design that has the entire screen of text and a 10px by 10px image at the top left corner then it is possible to be correct 'for that game' 

In the beginning there are bits, the rest is up to the author.
 

[Paul Eres]

Most RPGs and pretty much any game that displays dialogue between characters has it appear letter by letter across the Panel o' Text. Whenever there's an option to change the speed, I always set it to instant or as fast as possible. Is there some reason that games do this? I want to draw up a pros and cons list for whether to put text scroll in a game. Here's what I have so far:

PRO:
Can create a sense of pacing.
Nostalgia.
Can be less intimidating than a wall of text.
More capable of inserting pauses.

CON:
Can destroy pacing.
Can be frustrating to fast readers.

Other:
Fairly common/standard.
Makes little noises.

Anything else?

i think you missed a major "pro"

first, if text scrolls in letter by letter, it creates a way to follow text with the eyes, similar to speedreading techniques. studies have shown you can actually read text faster and have greater comprehension if you have something to follow (such as your finger) and move it over the text, as opposed to just trying to read the text without a visual thing for the eyes to follow

this is the biggest reason to use it for me. if i set the scrolling speed to a fast non-instant rate, i can usually read it *faster* than i could if i set it to the instant rate. try it and see for yourself

[Irock]

Honestly, when I play a game with dialog without letter-by-letter text, I assume the developer was either lazy or had no idea how to implement such a feature.

[paste]

@Paul I don't like to speedread books or games. Also, people who read faster tend to read in larger "chunks", which letter-at-a-time goes against.

As I think about this, I realize that it is very heavily a jrpg thing, and I wonder if it is related to that. Japanese speak 1 mora at a time, which is pretty much 1 character at a time. Kind of if we read one syllable at a time, I think. So maybe it would be good to have a one-syllable-at-a-time display.

Either way, it seems like choice is the option to go with.

Does anyone here ever slow down the text?

[Muz]

I really hate scrolling text. I've always assumed it was some kind of way to show off the dialog engine rather than be anything useful.

Most of the time it's because it's much too slow, and reminds me of those people who drone on in political speeches. If you can pace it to the rate at which someone would talk, like faster or slower based on how excited they are, it would be quite awesome.

And sometimes you want to just skip the text because you don't give a damn about the story, and scrolling text means I'd have to press a button twice to do that.

It makes it feel more interactive when you have to press a button each sentence instead of sitting back and watching.

I like sitting back and watching, it's a lot less tiring. If I wanted interaction, I'd play the game.

[Paul Eres]

@Paul I don't like to speedread books or games. Also, people who read faster tend to read in larger "chunks", which letter-at-a-time goes against.

only at *really* fast speeds do you read chunks like whole lines at once; at normal reading speeds (up to around one page per 30 seconds) you still read word by word

as an aside, in my game SD what i did was make letters for single words appear in close succession, and then give a longer pause for the space; this creates almost a word by word appearance of the text on the screen which i think works even better than letter by letter

[paste]

By chunks I meant syllables, words, or sometimes small groups of small words. I'm not speaking about chunks in terms of speed-reading but of perception. Like if you look at the 'B' at the beginning of this paragraph, you can see the entire paragraph (it's in your range of vision), but your brain will only allow you to recognize a small field around it as letters. If I focus on the B, I can only make out letters up until the 'm' in meant. The size of this field varies from person to person, and people with larger fields tend to read faster. To break this up breaks up the reading process.

@Muz I've had the same thought about showing off dialog engines. It does look fancy, but it's hard to say if it matters.

It seems that it's also there sometimes to emulate speech, but of course we don't listen the same way we read. I don't know if emulating speech is a practical reason when in doing so, you counter what's intended at the core: to present text (or at least the ideas being conveyed by it, spoken or written).

[Graham.]

Ocarina is almost unplayable because of slow-text. When I was a kid it was wonderful. The pacing captured me. Now, the first hour of play is like 35% spent in a text-stream of what is now a cliche story line. All I can think is... "Nintendo... it's not that good...."

Scrolling text gives character. You may even want to consider changing the way it "scrolls" - _slightly_ - for each emotion. There are a lot of non-annoying ways to animate text. Doing so would take real work to make it not look cheap, but it would be totally awesome. I miss the days of profile shots and text boxes. I'm loving Persona 2 because of this.

If you fucked up the multi-dimensional scrolling, people would hate your game for that reason alone.

[Paul Eres]

Ocarina is almost unplayable because of slow-text. When I was a kid it was wonderful. The pacing captured me. Now, the first hour of play is like 35% spent in a text-stream of what is now a cliche story line. All I can think is... "Nintendo... it's not that good...."

maybe that's because the game is *intended for kids*? you have to realize that most videogames do not have adults as their target audience. if you found a game wonderful as a kid but boring as an adult, it doesn't mean the game failed. it means the game succeeded for its target audience of kids

[ASnogarD]

Definetly a pacing thing... and as long as there is a push button to speed up the text I dont see a issue putting it in.

Part of the issue is that some gamers are so used to playing a certain genre they can actually catch the whole story from just the opening lines and its ...blah blah blah from then on. Oh generic 4 heroes must collect the 4 crystals of epicness to defeat the troll of lameness... oh that story again, wheres the skip text option.
The player will then be in a hurry to get to the mechanics rather than bother with the story... so then scrolling text is a chore.

If the actual story was interesting and delivered in short quick helpings, rather than one overly lengthy monologue of overly embellished flowerly script delivered at a slow scroll while the screen sits on a limited repetitve scene...

... deliver the story in small helping to avoid inactivity, try make it to the point... waffling on about the epic nature of the epic tale of epic proportions makes it a chore to go through.

Some games also add 'voice' via high pitched random noise for female actors and low pitched noises for male actors as the text scrolls, which can either be annoying as hell, or add some extra element to the scene.

... but in my opinion it boils down to the story , and more importantly the delivery of the story.
My 2p , take it or leave it 

[Graham.]

maybe that's because the game is *intended for kids*? you have to realize that most videogames do not have adults as their target audience. if you found a game wonderful as a kid but boring as an adult, it doesn't mean the game failed. it means the game succeeded for its target audience of kids

. Of course its intended for kids. That's why I loved it as a kid. But, here's the thing. The text is probably the top reason I don't enjoy it as much now. Scroll-speed is literally the barrier to entry. Why can't I speed up the text? Often small design decisions can slice off huge sections of an audience because they make a game in-accessible. Was Nintendo wrong? No, they managed to control the pacing. If they gave the option haphazardly to kids to change the text speed, kids would do it without fore-sight and ruin their own experience. Miyamoto is like Steve Jobs, "the consumer is too simple to make a good choice." (Apple is now the world's largest company). I'm just saying that the way shit scrolls is actually a really big place for interesting things to happen.

[Azure Lazuline]

Small note here: the Ocarina text speed is accidental. In the original Japanese version, the text appears one character per frame (20 per second). When it was translated into English - which takes approximately twice as many characters to say the same thing, just due to how the language works - they didn't compensate, and it was still one character per frame. So basically it's half the intended speed.

That was fixed for Majora's Mask, which scrolls at 2 characters per frame in the English version.

[Irock]

The text in the 3DS remake of OoT is way faster too.

[Graham.]

Small note here: the Ocarina text speed is accidental. In the original Japanese version, the text appears one character per frame (20 per second). When it was translated into English - which takes approximately twice as many characters to say the same thing, just due to how the language works - they didn't compensate, and it was still one character per frame. So basically it's half the intended speed.

That was fixed for Majora's Mask, which scrolls at 2 characters per frame in the English version.

Ah, interesting.