As someone who has done a small but interesting bit of research into linguistics, I have to disagree with you. Perhaps I didn't explain it well. Symbols, after all, are at the root of all communications. By focusing on flexible symbols instead of 2 or 3 options in a typical dialog (which usually break down to "Yes, I'll help you, because I'm good!" and "No, I'll kill you because I hate puppies and life"!) you'd be able to communicate repeatedly making, and changing on-the-fly arrangements involving the intentions and emotions of both parties to any conversation. You'd know immediately the exact tone of any speaker to you, and be able to communicate a broad range of tones in turn. This wouldn't communicate background, but that wasn't its purpose, not when Crawford's games appeared in the mid-1980s. It was designed as I mentioned above to move dialog into a realtime, flexible, genuine exchange, with an AI that would learn from your dialog behavior as well as from your combat one.
I could see it working -- very, very remotely -- if the gamer is familiar with a language that uses symbols to communicate (Egyptian, modern Chinese because, yes, Chinese alphabets are made up of "pictures").
But uh, for most people, I think the response would be: WTF is this?
