Creating Emotion in Games, Part 3 -- NPCs and Dialogue

If you're new to this series, start on the first post and go from there!

We wrapped up our introduction to this book in the last post, looking at a few miscellaneous things that the author has to say about building narratives in games, and also exploring his idea of the "deep" and "interesting" axes. While these are largely focused around presentation within the game (not surprising, given the author's background in screenwriting), I do plan on drawing this back to actual mechanical design and game structure as much as possible, in a way that builds on the book. So with that said, let's dive into the first Emotioneering™ techniques! These ones focus on non-playable characters, "NPCs".

Making NPCs Interesting

 Diamonds are a writer's best friend, or so Chapter 2.1 posits. The cure for boring characters, as the author explains, is simple: a diamond. Which, as far as I can tell, is a fancy way of saying "give them four distinct character traits" (although sometimes you can narrow it to three or expand it to five--"diamond" is just a handy visualizer). While it's a bit less revolutionary and less of a system than I'd hoped, it is still good advice. After all, the roleplaying game Fate works on the principle of establishing five Aspects, cornerstones of your character that serve as anchors to define them. It's a legitimately good way to make things interesting.

What's particularly interesting in this chapter is the way that the author points out that traits can and should be established outside of dialogue. In the sample cutscene provided, an NPC has the traits Athletic and Aesthetic, and repeatedly demonstrates them by moving with great catlike agility, contrasting with lines of dialogue that showcase traits like Sad and Insightful. While this isn't unique to games, it's something that games can still embrace in unique ways. Especially with the wide variety of mechanisms available in games, from actions to incidental dialogue to journal entries to specific game mechanics, centering them on a handful of traits for a given NPC helps to make that character both distinct and identifiable.

Making NPCs Deep

So there's one axis, what about the other? Chapter 2.2 is a little harder to summarize, because the techniques are more disparate, but if I were to summarize them in broad terms, it would be "pain" and "hiding". It's one of the classic combos, and it's one I use all the time when I build emotionally-complicated characters for a tabletop roleplaying campaign. Take a wound, layer something on top of it, add an external pressure, and suddenly you've got all these levels that are working against one another, but in a really compelling way. It's that good, delicious drama you get by holding all of those elements in tension, cooking up a mess of a character!

But there's another half to it, something that I think gets missed in this chapter, which is that the pain needs to hold a promise of release--and after that release, the character needs to retain depth. One example that comes to mind is the character work done with Asgore in the game Undertale: while many of his layers are built pain that's hidden behind his literally soft exterior, there's also a catharsis when you achieve an ending that sees him finally beginning to heal from those wounds. We start to see layers emerge that aren't defined by pain, but by the more powerful passions which drove him through his pain and sustained him.

Making NPC Dialogue Interesting

For Chapter 2.3, we move into some more practical applications again. Now that we've talked about some of the base theory of what makes characters interesting, we get to some examples of bringing that to life, through dialogue. Something I enjoy here is that the book acknowledges a few purposes of NPC dialogue: adding color (such as "barks" or filler dialogue), prompting action, and providing information. No matter what, the directive here is to take the NPC's character traits (the "Diamond") and use that to flavor the dialogue. For example, the book takes the bland filler line "Here's your food." and uses the traits Caring and Cynical to turn it into "It's bad, I know (Caring). But hey, at least you're alive to eat it. (Cynical)"

There's a point here where I think it's maybe a bit overdone, where it's unclear whether the traits are actually being referenced in the line of dialogue, but I think the overall point stands: NPC dialogue shouldn't be a regurgitation of its main purpose, it should be informed by the character of the NPC. I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins recently, and it manages to do this a lot--while some of the dialogue is bland, it still gives emotional inflections to dialogue that comes from NPCs. At minimum, there's plenty of dialogue that gets colored by an NPC's outlook and traits, especially in terms of the companions who constantly fight by your side. (The standoffish frankness of Morrigan is a particular standout--although Claudia Black's voice acting elevates the writing immensely as well; the bluntness of Sten's dialogue also carries an incredible amount of flavor.)

Dragon Age also uses an interesting technique where it floats conversations between your companions into your hearing, so you get to hear them interact with scripted dialogue--these sequences do a great job of not just showcasing the interesting traits of your companions, but also building up the idea that they have rapport with one another.

Deepening NPC Dialogue

Chapter 2.4 gets a bit fuzzy, because parts of it feel very similar to the previous chapter. It's hard to tell the difference between "tweak NPC dialogue to be interesting" and "tweak NPC dialogue to be deep", because, well, dialogue is short. I think the missing piece here is that you don't try to punch lots of depth into one line of dialogue; instead, you scatter the depth across lots of lines of dialogue, planting glimpses into the inner world of the NPC in bits and pieces, where they may or may not get caught by the player. Keep them frequent enough that players will catch some of them, and they'll still build up that character.

There's a couple other noteworthy ideas in this chapter. The first one is paying attention to subsurface emotions. In the example given, your female companion (whose given roles seem to be: missing you, saying she loves you, and giving you a cool gun...sigh, there is an ongoing theme in this book so far that I think I'll find space to touch on later) has a line where she's supposed to reveal her emotional bond with you, but the book suggests subsuming that feeling under a layer that somewhat masks it, letting the true feeling peek out. Anger, superficial affection, and cold frustration are all suggested ideas here--while I can't say I care for this specific example, there's some good ideas here. Layering emotions is an A+ technique.

The second idea, which I am uncertain about (ironically enough) is the technique of ambivalence. Freeman talks about how having an NPC's dialogue be more noncommittal/vague can give them a sort of suspenseful depth. I don't like this one as much, because of the way that the pacing of games tends to work. Gameplay is spread out over time, and not necessarily orchestrated like a TV show or movie--so when you get reactions from NPCs, they need to communicate something clear. If you don't get a clear communication of anything, the exchange is going to filter away into the background--and you're not likely to experience that moment again for a long time, if ever.

Wrap-Up

That was our look into a lot of NPC techniques. I think there's things worth exploring here, but a lot of it is also pretty straightforward character work stuff, without a lot of consideration for video game adaptation. However, next time, we're digging into some much more game-centric topics:

• Group Interesting Techniques
• Group Deepening Techniques
• NPC-NPC Chemistry Techniques
• NPC-NPC Relationship Deepening Techniques