Four lines

This week I wrote a blacksmith.

He isn't important. You'll walk past his forge on your way to something that matters, and if you stop, he'll talk to you. He has four lines. One when you walk up, one if you buy something, one if you don't, and one that only plays if you come back after a particular thing has happened in his village, which I can't describe, for the usual reasons.

Four lines is not a punishment. It's a budget. Every line in a game has to be written, reviewed, translated into a dozen languages, recorded by an actor, checked, fixed and checked again, and somebody pays for each of those steps. Multiply that by thousands of people standing around in hundreds of villages and you see why the blacksmith gets four. The man who sends you on the main quest gets a few hundred. That's fair. He has a lot to explain.

But I didn't want the blacksmith to be furniture. So before I wrote his four lines, I wrote about three pages on him that nobody will ever see. He's from somewhere further south. He came here because of a woman, and she's gone now, and he stayed anyway, because by then the forge was his. He had an apprentice who left for the city and hasn't written. His left knee is bad and he doesn't mention it. He thinks the people in this village are soft, and he would die for any of them, and he would be mortified to hear himself say so.

None of that is in the four lines. All of it is underneath them.

I think about this the way I think about the men I grew up around in Duluth. My father worked on the boats, and the men he worked with could sit a whole evening at our kitchen table on about four lines apiece. You learned everything about them anyway. Who said "cold enough" like a complaint and who said it like a prayer. Who asked after your schoolwork and who asked after your mother. You learned it from the shape of what they didn't say.

So the blacksmith's first line is short, and a little rude. His second, when you buy something, is a piece of advice about it that's slightly too specific, as if he's thinking of someone else who bought one once. The third is a shrug. The fourth, the one that plays after, I rewrote eleven times. It's six words long, and I'm prouder of it than of anything else I did this month.

Most players will hear one of his lines. Some will hear two. A few people will hear all four, and of those, maybe one will stop and think, "Who was he talking about?" That person is who I write for.

How much do you think you can know about someone from four things they say?