Dialogue tree

The earliest known dialogue tree is described in "The Garden of Forking Paths", a 1941 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which the combination book of Ts'ui Pên allows all major outcomes from an event branch into their own chapters.

Much like the game counterparts this story reconvenes as it progresses (as possible outcomes would approach nm where n is the number of options at each fork and m is the depth of the tree).

Games often offer options to ask non-players to reiterate information about a topic, allowing players to replay parts of the conversation that they did not pay close enough attention to the first time.

[4] Some games use a real-time conversation system, giving the player only a few seconds to respond to a non-player character, such as Sega's Sakura Wars and Alpha Protocol.

[4] This mechanism allows game designers to provide interactive conversations with nonplayer characters without having to tackle the challenges of natural language processing in the field of artificial intelligence.