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At the 2008 Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts in mid February, Mass Effect, the celebrated video game developed by Edmonton's BioWare Corp., was the big winner, taking home five of the 14 prizes, including game of the year, best game design and best character.

Turns out predicting ELAN winners is about as reliable as picking a sure thing at the Genie awards.

While Mass Effect was expected to do well, Drew Karpyshyn, the game's lead writer, figured BioWare's best shot was the award for technical innovation. After all, Mass Effect's Narrative Dialogue System – essentially the part of the game that lets the player makes choices that ultimately influence the plot of the story – had been raved about since the game was in beta.

But no. The innovation award went to Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts – a sequel to Relic Entertainment's 2006 strategy game, Company of Heroes.

Karpyshyn wasn't disappointed, though. He was more concerned about how to get five of the elaborate trophies back to Edmonton by himself.

“Winning the Game of the Year award was a bit of a surprise,” Karpyshyn said after the ceremony. “There are a lot of other great games on that list.... I honestly thought we had a shot at the innovation award for the dialogue system and unfortunately we didn't win that one.”

Of course, not everyone's seen it that way.

Casey Hudson, Mass Effect's project director, admitted that earlier BioWare games such as Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire had been criticized for being word heavy, as they required players to read pages of on-screen dialogue and narrative text.

The narrative dialogue system, Hudson said, was how the dialogue and the narrative storytelling were brought it into the interactive realm. “It's an innovation that is kind of deceptively simple but fundamentally changes the way that you can interact with characters in the game,” says Hudson.

Conversations in Mass Effect, Hudson explained, play out in real time because the player's dialogue choices appear before other characters have finished speaking. That way, conversations in the game can flow more naturally. And by providing players with paraphrased dialogue choices instead of full texts, players can flash read instead of having to read entire lines.

Handling dialogue is only one dimension of telling epic stories. The other is managing a non-linear plot, especially when the choices that players make can have an effect on the storyline.

Trying to document such a large story is difficult, said Hudson. “It is extremely complicated. It involves an ever-growing tree of choices and [consequences to those choices],” he said, pointing out that unless a player's decisions are recorded, they can't be integrated into the story.

What becomes rewarding for the player, said Hudson, is when they are hours into the game and realize that something they did earlier in the game is still influencing events.

The tool that helps the designers and writers keep track of all of this is the Plot Manager, which – in simplistic terms – is a content management system. It was developed to help manage the massive stories being told by BioWare developers, and each game has it's own variation of the software. “It's like a series of nested dropdown menus,” said Karpyshyn. For Mass Effect, the Plot Manager handled not just plot, story and dialogue, but also digital acting elements such as animated face effects and lip-syncing.

“It's quite a powerful tool,” said Karpyshyn. “It has all the different plots and subplots in the game, along with all the decision points a player can make. We track what decision they've made in a tree that cascades down to what consequences each decision has and allows us to visually see this complicated tree view of our plots.”

The implications of these systems become even more important because the choices players make while playing Mass Effect have been tracked, said Karpyshyn. That data will be incorporated when gamers play Mass Effect 2, already well into production at BioWare.

“All that data is stored in a way that we can grab it,” said Karypyshyn. “We can bring characters back, assuming they are still alive because you might have killed them off.”

Depending on a player's choices in the first game, explained Hudson, some civilizations in Mass Effect 2 may be different for each individual, “but I think the more important changes are the personal ones where maybe halfway through the next game you'll realize – on a very intimate and personal level – that a choice you made in the first game affected somebody in the second game.”

But the Plot Manager can only do so much. “It's actually too complex to plot out on a whiteboard,” Hudson explained.

While it can't convey the finer details of the plot, it does give you is a good high-level overview, said Karpyshyn.

“But the details are really what sell a story. That's why I don't mind telling people how we do it, because knowing the technical aspects of it and actually getting in and doing it are not the same thing,” he said.

“You can know how to work a word processor but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to write a novel.”