[Terry]

In fact, I suck at it. I'm trying to write decent dialogue for the characters in my game, but what sounds deep and profound in my head reads like video-game dialogue on the computer screen. It's not like I've got bad characters either - I know their personalities, what each character is likely to say - and in many ways, the game I'm making tells their story, not mine. Still, so far all my dialogue has come off sounding more like 'Breath of Fire' than 'Baldur's Gate II'.

I suspect that creative writing is more skill than talent, so there's got to be ways that I can improve. Are there tutorials for this on the web? Can anybody out there who doesn't have this problem give me some pointers?

- Terry Cavanagh
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http://www.distractionware.com

[entivore]

I can't say that I know how to fix that. It's hard to make written words sound real. It might be possible to convince a couple of people to "roleplay" your characters, that way you can get a more natural reaction out of em, but that would require that A: You convince them to actually spend their time helping you out, and B: Really understand the character. A logged mirc roleplaying experiment, if possible, would be my lame recomendation. Heh.
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*Only in darkness can one truely shine*

[Mandrake]

First off, writing for a video game is an entirely diffrent beast than writing for a novel. It's close to screenplay writing, but it's not. What I would suggest it to practice, practice practice. If you want the game to sound less like a video game, try writing a short 1-act play. Give it to other writers to read and critique. This should improve your writing drastically.

[Jihgfed Pumpkinhead]

     Entivore's answer is very interesting, and if you can arrange it, I say certainly go for it, even if as only a very worthwhile experiment. If you can't, try applying the same principle yourself: you say you know your characters, so, imagine yourself as one of your characters: when such-and-such another character says something, what do you think? and what do you do? and what do you say? Write it out stream-of-consciousness-style, to get the character's thoughts down, and then cast it up to a conversational style by filtering the character's thoughts through the four conversational maxims:

1. Maxim of Relation  Be relevant.

2. Maxim of Quality  Make the statement one that is true (obvious exceptions include lying for some ulterior motive and sarcasm).

3. Maxim of Quantity  Do not be more or less informative than is required.

4. Maxim of Manner  Avoid ambiguity and obscurity; be brief and orderly.

     Try to convey as much as possible of the character's inner thoughts while still obeying the maxims above. The maxims indicate only the normal, expected manners of speech; they can be broken whenever the character has a reason to do so, but only if that character has such a reason. Breaking them willy-nilly will make the dialogue sound strange.
     Now, this system is far from pefect: among its many problems is the fact that it takes a long time to get even one line. It has other problems, too, but ultimately I think it works fairly well.
     Also, never, ever try to be profound. Try, always always always, to be natural. Profundity will come of itself, if required.
     Probably the best thing you could do though, really, is to have someone read the dialogue and give you specific advice, just like Mandrake said. I'd be willing to help you by doing this for you, if you like, but it's only fair to warn you that my writing style is called "distinctive" at best and "weird" at worst. Well, not even at worst, really; it's just generally called "weird".
     Hope this is helpful.

---- EDIT ----
Here's a mad idea: I was browsing around in sourceforge.net, and came across a program called Nymm which generates text based on templates and word classes. As a simple example, you would create a class, like: <intensifier>so, very, extremely, superlatively, exceptionally, quite, unimaginably</intensifier>, and use it in a template like: He's <intensifier> strong! You could define another class like <powerful_word> and then just use: He's <intensifier> <powerful_word>. You never know what you'll get: "He's so strong!", "He's unimaginably potent!", or whatever.
Do I recommend this? No. I already said that it's a mad idea. But it'll at least get you non-cliché (though admittedly odd) dialogue. What would be really interesting, though, is incorporating a Nymm-like system into the game itself, so that NPCs won't be stuck saying the same thing over and over. That might make it worth considering.
You might be wondering why this edit doesn't have indented paragraphs. Well, my "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"s don't seem to be working. They always worked before, though; oddest thing. Perhaps I'm mistaking the character sequence? Any help?