Building Character

Contents

Character Identification The Three Linked Elements Personality

As games evolve into an increasingly complex and sophisticated medium, game characters are also experiencing a considerable metamorphosis. Just a few years ago, a game character had to be simple enough so that it could be represented clearly under very severe artistic limitations. Essentially, game characters were just icons, amorphous blobs, or tiny men rendered from a handful of pixels. But steady technological progress has slowly opened up possibilities for more believable and realistic characters. The question now is, how does a game developer leverage all of these additional technical resources to create more compelling characters?

This article attempts to set out the elements of design that need to be addressed in order to create a memorable and powerful game character.

The greatest genre for characterization has always been the adventure game. Early Infogrames classics like Planetfall and LucasArts' later adventures (such as Full Throttle) showed how effective "game actors" could be, meaning characters that used spoken dialogue and were portrayed with emotional personalities. Now these game actors are moving into new cross-genre 3D games, and it is here that they really thrive. In fact, they may be becoming a little too successful; we're beginning to see games sold purely on the strength of these characters. Worse still, it seems that characters today are inserted into games that simply don't require them, perhaps because it is now seen as a marketing necessity.

The single most important rule in character design is "the game comes first." The type of game you're developing will determine most of your character-creation decisions. A character is just a tiny element of any game, and in many cases, it is a superfluous element. If a game works without a character, it shouldn't have one. The rules of elegance apply - look for the clearest, simplest way to represent an idea.

Character Identification

You can split games broadly into two groups: those with a first-person point of view (POV), and those with a third-person POV. Although that difference between them may seem slight, it is absolutely fundamental, as the psychology of the two POVs is drastically different.

A first-person game invites players to immerse themselves in the game, to play as though they themselves are in the game experiencing the events firsthand. On the other hand, the third-person game makes a distinction between the player and the on-screen character; they are separate entities. In a third-person game, the player is controlling a character rather than becoming the character.

This difference utterly splits character design into two entities that I will refer to as the "Avatar" and the "Actor." The Avatar is simply a visual representation of the player's presence within the game world. The Actor is a character distinct from the player, with its own personality, characteristics, and, to some extent, mind (Figure 1).

Figure 1. There is a fundamental difference between a first-person character and a third-person character.

For example, let's look at Lara Croft vs. Duke Nukem. Although some projection always occurs in games, when you play Tomb Raider, it is Lara who gets eaten by the tyrannosaurus rex and goes around shooting animals, not you. When you play Duke Nukem though, even though Duke shows a personality, it's you who gets killed and you who goes around shooting things. Many games muddy this distinction and they lose a great deal of impact on players as a result.

First-Person POV: The Avatar.
A first-person game should make it as easy as possible for players to believe that it's actually themselves in the game. The main character (the Avatar) must not interfere with the player's illusion of immersion. This means the Avatar shouldn't do anything with a mind of its own, for example it shouldn't go around talking, and the game should never take control away from the player under any circumstances. From a design point of view, the Avatar is a cipher, an empty vessel waiting to be filled and given purpose by the player.

There are two basic routes that you can go down when designing an Avatar. Either you create a deliberately insubstantial character, or better still, you allow players to create their own. This second method is even more valid when it comes to multiplayer games.

In a first-person perspective, many of the techniques of storytelling and characterization common to other mediums can't be used, simply because you don't really know what the main character, being completely controlled by the player, is going to do.

Third-Person POV: The Actor.
The third-person POV allows far greater freedom to tell what is a more traditional story form. Because the character (the Actor) on the screen is a separate entity and dissociated from the player, it's not too disturbing when the Actor acts of its own accord in certain situations. Even though this on-screen entity is controlled directly by the player, it is distinct from the player's personality, allowing the designer to imbue the Actor with a personality of its own and occasionally control how it behaves. This extra element of control over the game makes it possible to use some of the less intrusive storytelling and mood-enhancing devices that have evolved in film.

Making an Actor

From a design point of view, game characters can be sorted in order of design detail:

• Avatar. These characters require visual design only.
• Actor. Full character design, but with a necessarily one-dimensional personality so that the player can flesh out its motivations. The trick is to strike a balance between establishing the actor's personality without letting that personality disturb the player.
• Non-player characters (NPCs). These require full character design.

We all use very powerful subconscious mechanisms to judge people visually, whether we realize it or not. When you meet someone, the amount of information you gather from them using your eyes is incredible. You take into consideration their shape, height, sex, race, physical attractiveness, hair, clothing, makeup, cleanliness, facial hair, age, weight, stance, facial expressions, body language, movements, and so on. You perceive a vast amount of information almost instantly and without really trying. Your brain then begins to make assumptions about that person using built-in pattern-recognition techniques, most often based on your personal set of stereotypes. In contrast to these visual cues we pick up on, the slow linear stream of spoken information is incredibly small. After a while, our opinions may be reformed based on a person's personality, but for a long time it is still filtered through our preconceptions based on our first impressions. So to create a really good character, you have to control all of the visual clues that people use to judge each other and establish a clear, unified message to make players interested in -- and ultimately like -- your character.

Style and Exaggeration

In the early 1930s, Disney animators were struggling to bring the same depth of acting skills to their cartoon characters that actors were achieving in live-action films. Cartoons are a deliberately simplified representation of reality, stripped of the incredibly complex subtleties we are accustomed to in the real world. These animators realized that they could never portray the same subtleties through animation, since the medium was too broad by nature. Instead, they exaggerated all the subtle body language and emotional expressions made by actors until they became almost a pantomime of good acting. Through exaggeration, cartoons are able to elicit very powerful emotional responses from an audience, because cartoon acting is a concentrated version of live acting.

Computer games are much more akin to cartoons than films. Games aren't very good at imitating reality, because elegance requires them to be visually limited. They can't mimic the incredibly complex world we live in. If such detail could be achieved, most games would consist of overly complex, messy, and irrelevant details. Similar to cartoons, games use simplified representations of real-world ideas, stripped of the massively complicated rules found in reality. Therefore, to make the greatest impact, we have to caricature; we must amplify the aspects we want players to focus on. This is the route to making games a more powerful medium.

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The Three Linked Elements