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Building Character: An Analysis of Character Creation I
have been a game designer for nearly 20 years, mostly in the adventure
game arena. However, at the moment, I'm doing something completely
different, working as Creative Content Director for the online gaming
site, WorldWinner.com, and for the first time in my life creating
games that are pretty much devoid of story and character, which
is pretty ironic given this articles topic: "Building Character:
An Analysis of Character Creation." Basic Terminology First, some terminology 101. This is real basic stuff, but just bear with me for a minute for the sake of those who aren't familiar with these terms that I'm going to be bandying about for the rest of the talk. The distinction between player-characters, or PCs, which are characters under the player's direct control, and non-player-characters, or NPCs, which are all the computer-controlled characters in the game. The main thrust of this talk will be PCs. Second,
with the category of PCs, is the distinction between first-person
and third-person point-of-view, or POV. With a first-person PC,
you're seeing the gameworld through the PCs eyes; examples would
be Myst, or Quake. With a third-person PC, you can
see the PC as you move him or her through the game world; examples
would be Kings Quest or Tomb Raider. First-person
PCs are often styled to "be" the player, as if the player
were injected into the gameworld, in which case the PC is left characterless
in order to preserve the fiction that you are the main character,
and first-person games don't deal with the visual appearance of
the PC, so its more rare in a first-person game to have a PC with
a strong, fleshed-out characterization. Some games switch back and
forth, such as the Tex Murphy games, Under a Killing Moon and so
forth, which use a first-person POV for the gameplay, but use a
third-person view for the cut-scenes, the movie-like non-interactive
sequences. Character
vs. Characterization When we talk about creating a character in a game, we're usually talking about characterization, which is everything observable about a character: what they look like, sound like, how they move, how they dress, intelligence, attitude, career, and so forth. I'll be focusing on characterization for the first and longest part of this talk. Character,
on the other hand, refers to what's underneath — the human
heart, the essential nature. I'll be dealing with true character
during the second part of this talk. The Importance
of Character Development The first question to deal with is why is good characterization important? Of course, this is dependent on the type of game; if it's a real-time strategy game, for example, with its relatively distant point-of-view, and its large quantities of interchangeable units, characterization isn't that important. So for today's purposes, let's stick to games where character is important, such as adventures, role-playing games, action-adventures, platform games. Of all the aspects of such a game — the geography, the inanimate objects, the music, the action sequences, the interface, etc. — the element that is most likely to leave a positive lasting impression on players are the primary character or characters. Humans are hard-wired to respond to other humans (or human-like creatures). This point was driven home for me a couple of years ago, when my son went through a period of extreme interest in The Three Stooges. He bought himself a life-size cardboard stand-up of the Stooges, and kept lugging it around the house and leaving it in different rooms. I kept walking past a room and spotting it for brief moment, out of the corner of my eye, and just that glance would often cause the most visceral, startled reaction. This continued even after the damn thing had been around the house for months. If
you're going to expect players to spend dozens of hours with a character
you're creating, at the very least you want that character to be
interesting, easy to identify with, and hopefully very likeable
as well. The more a player can get into the skin of the character
or characters they're controlling, the more the experience becomes
something that's happening to you, rather than something you're
doing. Also, a strong central character serves as an almost iconic
representation of the game, which is damn useful as a shorthand
for facilitating word-of-mouth, and is useful for all sorts of marketing
hooks; furthermore, a successful character is a good, perhaps even
the best, way to build a franchise. Some Successful
Game Characters Let's look at a list of some of the most well-known and successful game characters:
Certainly not a comprehensive list, and I'm sure just about everyone here could come up with a handful of good additions to this list with half-a-minutes thought. But it's a good, representative list, with characters from a number of different genres; a mixture of characters aimed at children, adults and at a crossover audience; a mixture of males, females, animals, and various fantasy creatures. But what they all have in common is that they're the focus of their respective games, and have spawned sequels, in some cases many sequels in addition to spin-offs into TV shows, movies, books, card games, action figures, and so forth. In other words... a franchise. By
the way, I'm only going to be dealing with characters originally
created for games; I'm not going to be talking about cases where
you're transporting a James Bond or an Indiana Jones from another
medium. That process, of course, has its own set of issues. High Concept The
first step in creating a successful character, especially one that
you're going to hang a game on, is to settle on what we in the development
biz call the "high concept" for that character. High concepts
for some of the characters on the previous slide would be "a
cute talking car" or "a marsupial who's been genetically
enhanced by a mad scientist" or "a female Indiana Jones
with mammaries the size of Volkswagens". Remember the two things
you're trying to do with this character: make an enjoyable and interesting
character that a player will want to adopt into his or her life
for the next few weeks or months, and create a character that will
be different and memorable enough to help you cut through the clutter
of the several thousand other games that you'll be competing with
for shelf, magazine, and player-awareness space. So at this point
try to think, what's interesting? What's cool? What hasn't been
done before? Naming Characters Naming characters is a massively important step. A good name is a big part of what makes a character memorable; it is often what gives people their first impression of what the character is all about. Often, that character's name will be the game's name as well, or part of it, so this is a good opportunity to take that power into your own hands rather than letting the marketing weasels bungle it a year down the road, unless of course we have any marketing weasels in the audience, in which case, I meant to say, my very good friends who so skillfully and valiantly pilot our games through the intricate complexities of the marketplace. As with the high concept, a character's name should be interesting and memorable. In addition, it should be euphonious, pleasing to the ear, and rolling off the tongue rather than twisting it. It should fit the character. Studs Steelpike probably wouldn't be a good name for the skinny accountant who solves crimes with his amazingly logical mind, and Milo Twigbody is probably a bad name for the professional wrestler who becomes an ace assassin for the CIA. I think Duke Nukem, for example, is an excellent name — easy to say and remember, and which instantly creates just the right mental image. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, is a master of naming characters is. There's no doubt when you meet a Severus Snape or a Draco Malfoy that you'll meeting an unappetizing character, that Hermione Granger will turn out to be a studious know-it-all, that Percy Weasley and Cornelius Fudge will be prissy and self-important, that Peeves will be one extremely annoying poltergeist. It's
a fun exercise to think of the names of successful characters from
various media, and notice how well their names conjure up the right
initial mental image — the solidly strong James Bond, the sinister
Darth Vader, the human-doormat Arthur Dent, the mischievous Bugs
Bunny and the everyman Homer Simpson. Backgrounders Before you start developing a character, you need to know and thoroughly understand the character. The best way to do this is to write a background paper for each character. This can be just a paragraph or two for minor characters, and several pages, even 10 or 20 pages, for your main character. This is really important. It doesn't have to be in narrative form; lists are okay, and you should include stuff like:
The list could go on and on. And, if your character isn't human, your background has to go a lot further, explaining exactly what, in your universe, it means to be a hobbit, or a Jedi knight, or an outcast half-orc half-troll, or what it means to be a robot warrior with a malfunctioning ethics chip. You've got to know everything about the character, become the world's biggest expert on them, even if you end up creating 10 times as much background as you'll ever use. That way, once you start figuring out what your character will do in a given situation, you won't have to figure out, you'll know. And your players will know you know, even if it is just subconsciously, because they'll see your character acting and reacting in be real, natural ways; don't do this, and your character will be a shallow cliché. Here's an exercise. Once you've written your background for a character, try to think of a dozen mundane or not-so-mundane situations, and say to yourself, "How would my character react in this spot?" How would he react when stuck in a traffic jam while late for an important date? When passing a panhandler? When confronted with a stray cat? When a comely co-worker makes a come-on? When pushed out of an airplane at 15,000 feet? If you've done your background development well, you should have the answers to these questions without even thinking. I
recently saw the movie Jaws for the first time since it was
first released, and there's a terrific scene in it, when Roy Schieder,
Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw are in the boat's galley, after
a hard and futile day of chasing the shark. Dreyfuss' character,
the naturalist shark expert, and Shaw's character, the hard-bitten
shark-hunter, are trying to one-up each other, with near-shark experiences,
rolling up their clothes to show off one scar after another. It's
a wonderful scene, and the kind of writing that comes easily when
you've done your homework, but probably not at all if you haven't. ______________________________________________________ |
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Introduction
Features
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