|
So what can we do to
ensure that subtitles in games are usable for the players?
The benefit of my work
is that I get to work with players on a regular basis, and I am therefore able
to base a lot of my research on actual practical experience. This comes from
observing how they play the game, questioning them about what they like and
dislike, and getting a general understanding of what makes games playable from
the player perspective.
From this experience,
I realized that it could be beneficial to everyone if there were some kind of
guideline we could follow that would help when putting subtitles in our games.
So, this article is meant as a means to highlight areas that we need to pay
attention to when implementing subtitles within our games and also to potentially
serve as the basis for a first-set of guidelines. Please note that this list
may not be complete, but it's a start.
The Guidelines
1. Use the
right font
This may sound like a
no-brainer, but I've seen games which have tried to go for the "fancy"
font only to have it completely unreadable. Subtitles should be in a nice,
simple font which is easy to read. Some good ones are Times Roman, Helvetica,
Arial, or Calibri. If it is important to have a stylized font, then ensure it
is tested thoroughly on players to make sure they can read it.
2. Large enough font
They font needs to be
large enough to be easily read. There is no point having them if the user has
to strain and squint their eyes to try and read it.
3. Consistent font size and in mixed case
The font should always
be the same size and in mixed case to ensure good readability. For example:
"The rain in
Spain falls mainly on the plain" reads easier than "THE RAIN IN SPAIN
FALLS MAINLY ON THE PLAIN".
This also makes it
much easier if we ever need to use capitals to emphasize certain aspects.
4. Usable on various output devices
Not everyone has a
HDTV and until that day comes, we need to ensure subtitles are visible on both
HDTVs and SDTVs. Therefore, ensure that your game is thoroughly tested on all
the displays that the game will be played on, to make certain players are able
to easily read the words.
5. Try to keep the line length under control
There can be a
tendency to have long sentences that can cover the entire length of the screen.
Research has shown that users find it easier to read smaller, narrower lines of
text.
6. Good space between words and lines
If there is a lot of
dialogue, then there is the possible tendency to try and cram as many words as
possible on the screen. This just makes things difficult to read as the words
are often extremely close together, which means it makes the words harder to
identify.
Ensure there is enough
space between the words and, if need be, split the dialogue up to ensure the
user is able to clearly read and identify individual words.
Additionally, if the
subtitle splits onto multiple lines then there should be ample space between
the lines to ensure there is no crossover between letters.
7. Can be switched on or off (at any time)
Not everyone
wants/needs subtitles and, because of this, we need to give the player the
ability to switch them on/off whenever they want -- even when mid-game.
8. Separate button for control
If the user is
pressing a button to skip the subtitles, it is important that the same button
does not carry out an action when the last subtitle has gone. For an example,
check out Mass Effect. This had the
user skipping the subtitles and when they reached the last one, the same button
was used to activate a conversation option -- very annoying. Figure 1 shows an example scene where this happened.
Figure 1: Scene from Mass Effect.
9. User controlled speed
There is nothing worse
than having lengthy subtitles which do not give the player the ability to
control them. This means they can be either on the screen too long or not long
enough and we have to remember that not everyone reads at the same speed. As a
result of this we should give the player the ability to control how they appear
on the screen.
|
Printer-Friendly Version
Valve's Half-Life 2 is the undisputed leader for subtitles - every single person who has to implement subtitles in their game should play that game with subtitles on and learn!
I am a close captioning advocate, designed the Doom3[CC] mod, which adds captions for dialog, music and sound effects. If anyone wants to see many of the guidelines Gareth suggests put into action please view this video of my mod in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnLyKbCjlog
I never knew of Gareth before reading this article, but we follow many of the same guidelines. Just goes to show how good and common sense they are I think.
Note: Subtitles cover only dialog, while closed captions cover the full spectrum of sound, including dialog, music and sound effects.
In games, sound effects are just as important, if not more so than subtitles because they can communicate vital feedback for players.
Keep up the good work Gareth.
I'd like to add one point: use subtitles rather than replacing / redubbing the spoken dialogue, including any movie cut scenes within the game. This is my biggest complaint; there's simply no need to redub in other languages, or at least no need to ONLY offer redubbed voices (not with the technology and space we've had since the late 1990s anyway). Even if the original acting is "bad" I'd prefer hearing the original, thank you. I'm particularly annoyed when Japanese games have their voices redubbed, of course, but this point applies to any language.
Film and TV have finally gotten onto the subtitle bandwagon but it's taken a very long time for them to do so. Imported films, including specific genres such as Japanese anime, have learned good and bad methods of subtitling over the years, and Hollywood and other film bastions have finally made subtitling more the rule than the exception. It would be better for the gaming industry to be much more proactive about this issue.
One example of poor subtitles... Bioshock. (sigh) There's no excuse for such a shoddy job on timing. There's plenty of people out of work (like me) who would be very happy to edit and time subtitles for companies.
We've added CC to our new games (the older ones had subtitles) precisely because of on-point information such as you present here, and from some very useful guidance from Reid Kimball, above.
John Bannick
CTO
7-128 Software
First, I am not a native english speaker, for a long time I could only read and write english, never hear (because I never heard most of the words, thus I have no idea of how they sound like, and in fact there are several words that I still do not heard), thus games without subtitles screwed me, since I had to hear the cut-scene like 3 or 4 times before getting what word was that the person was saying, but since most of the games has no way to replay cut-scenes (Sands of Time I am looking to you... that do not has subtitles too...) I was pretty much lost in the storyline, something sad, since I enjoy VG stories...
After that problem was not a major program anymore, I have another problem: even in my own langauge, sometimes if there are more sounds than the spoken words, my brain fail to understand (ie: I hear everything perfectly, I am not deaf, it is like a auditive dyslexia to heard words instead of written words), and some games are particularly guild of having characters with bizarre accents, or wall of sound in the middle of conversations, and no cut-scenes.
And yes, Mass Effect button was evil... In fact MOST RPGs still use the SAME button to skip dialog (spoken, subtitled or only textual CRPG-like), and to initiate a dialog...
But any game should take care for that sort of unwanted actions to happen, like games that the camera suddenly inverts itself so fast that you get stuck in a infinite loop of going back and forth (with the camera switching too) with the only way to this not happen was take a action that do not need the button pressed for the character cross the line (like jumping or rolling), and such are really common in 3D games (Sands of Time, I am looking to you again, the multiple-door level... ow, and that one was also guilty of the soluting being hearing a certain sound in a certain place, and I was playing with my parents sleeping and turned off sounds, since the game had a tendency of have sound bugs that made sounds in the maximum volume sometimes... Since it had no closed captioning, I had to expend 1 hour to solve that by pure trial and error...)
It was still a bogus design decision though.
Another annoyance was that if you tried to press the skip button near the end of a line of dialog, you might end up accidentally pressing it right after the start of the next line instead. They should have implemented a short window at the beginning of each dialogue line (perhaps 400 ms) during which, if the previous line of dialog finished playing normally (i.e. it wasn't skipped), then the first skip button press during the window would do nothing. That would solve the problem, without preventing people from zipping through dialogue they had heard before.
One of the new games which I find really handles subtitles and cut-scenes very well is Fable 2. Here the user is able to hold down the A button to skip scenes. This is actually very useful because it can help minimise accidental pressing due to button mashing but also give the user control to skip the entire scene.
While I think close-captioning is a good start to inform hearing-impaired players of actions within the game, it inherently a). lacks positionality, and b). can take up lots of screen real estate. Much of this information can be relayed to the player through the interface. Our Project Lead has pointed out Metal Gear Solid 4's threat radar as a good example of a visual- based closed captioning system, where a circle around the player contains peaks of varying sizes based on threats near the player. If there's a large spike behind the player, they'll know they need to turn around as an enemy (or other POI) is there. The possibilities for extending this scheme to transmit other information to the player are immense. Even closed-captioning could be used to communicate positioning data, and that's really the point: to give hearing impaired players the chance to experience the game as closely as we envision for all players.
Our company has developed a technology that can also help both hearing and sight sensitive individuals get back another dimension to their game playing through the additon of Motion. We have created a method of adding motion to games that allows the player to experience the subtle and not so subtle pitch, roll, heave, and intelligent vibrations produced by the game, to get you right inside the action of the game, as if you're really there. In essence, they will be able to feel the effects within the game, instead of having to hear them.
We are very excited about what this new tehcnology to can bring to the gaming experience. Check out our Web site for more details, or to find out how we do it.
The brain process written information slower then oral information (this is why professional TV or movie captioning adapt and shorten lines - keeping main emotions) whereas according to Sony, Microsoft and Sony TRC/TCR, subtitles must match audio a 100%. They should modify their guidelines so we can have something both legible and practical.
More often than not, game subtitle systems are last minute patch-ups (subtitle plays as long as its associated audio file plays) both in terms of tech and layout design. We need to design systems earlier (preproduction).
Last but not least, the polyphony issue: most games use a wide set of AI lines that can potentially play simultaneously; depending on sound engine you can prioritize which lines will play over others. This needs to be accounted for in caption as well, unless you're planning to end up with a lot of on screen text overlapping.
Also check that your font supports all localized languages diacritical characters and have the UI designer think early about subtitle design so it looks good.