If you're new to my retrospective on Creating Emotion in Games, start at the first post and work your way forward; it'll make more sense! If you're just catching up--in part 3, we got introduced to the book's basic ideas--how to define non-player characters (NPCs), give them interesting traits, and then add deeper texture to them. This time around, it's a bit more of a mix of content--there's still more about NPCs, but we're also going to move into some more unique (and game-specific) territory: groups and factions.
Making Groups Interesting
Like I mentioned--while it's true that groups and factions are part of books, movies, TV shows, and other traditional media (the book even uses Star Trek's Klingons as an example), they have a unique connection to game design. Games often ask players to commit large amounts of time to them, which means they have the space to present complex, nuanced groups to players. Within a game, you have the ability to both present the broad strokes of a group, and also give them as much detail as they feel like exploring--this applies not just to video games (like the open-world Dragon Age series or the convoluted lore of fighting game series) but also to tabletop games, like the lore-rich World of Darkness roleplaying games.
When it comes to making them interesting, the book follows the same advice that it did for NPCs: give them a "diamond" to define them. The traits presented here are more lengthy and less concise than in the NPC chapter, but overall it's a good, straightforward way to condense the ideas you want to explore in a group. Again, it reminds me of the way that the roleplaying game Fate uses "aspects" to organize themes and groups within the game's framework, in a qualitative way. Within this chapter, the author also reminds us that it's important to have specific manifestations of this trait, offering us some examples of ways we could depict a sample trait of "affinity for music":
- This group has finely-crafted musical instruments; if you have one, you can trade it for supplies/money/etc
- You befriend a female musician from this group, whose music gives you healing powers (hmm. You might gather that a pattern is developing in these examples, and I'm even leaving out some. More on this later on.)
Making Groups Deep
While this chapter is much shorter than the previous one, it also has what I feel are more interesting takeaways. I've come to recognize that there's a lot of issues sort of woven throughout the text, but this section has, in some ways, aged very nicely, because it focuses on looking at groups as real entities that deserve respect, especially when they have values and perspectives that differ from what we're used to.
There's a few different things suggested here--wisdom, aesthetics, nobility. They're all values, somewhat intangible, with a hint of something transcendent to them. Thinking about this in more detail, these are all things that the book suggests be buried beneath the more overt and objective traits. What's interesting here is that the NPC Deepening Techniques put emotional pain and regret front and center, but those are nowhere to be found here. I can think of a couple of good reasons for that, whether or not they were intended by the author:
- It's easier to work with the buried secrets and specific emotional pain of an individual, whereas the same things won't be true of an entire group of people--while there might be painful events in the past of a people, not everyone will internalize them the same way or associate the same meanings with them
- Defining a group of people by their trauma is dicey at best; while overusing the pain of a single character might feel cliche and obnoxious, overusing the trauma of a whole people mirrors some very exhausting tropes in fiction that reduce living cultures to the objects of pity, and can often echo some of the same feelings
NPC-NPC Chemistry
I think it's incredibly interesting that the book introduces techniques for building chemistry between NPCs before it introduces techniques for relationships between NPCs and the player's main character, but it also makes sense to me. The dynamics and relationships between NPCs are simpler, and they work off of some of the basic building blocks that get used to build relationships with the player character. They also work to build an engaging emotional backdrop that doesn't require the player to weigh in--it just happens on its own. This means it doesn't require as much intensive focus, so it's a good way to start thinking about character-relationship concepts.
There's a variety of techniques that get mentioned in this chapter, such as having characters use the same mental models/think in the same way (the book gives the example of a film noir game where a "sexy, dubious damsel in distress" and her otherwise undescribed sister use metaphors about toys to describe things in the world--communicating a specific commonality between them). One example where NPC-NPC chemistry worked well for me was the network of relationships between the various survivors in Telltale Games' The Walking Dead: Season 1. There were clusters of survivors with pre-existing relationships, who would talk with one another and also talk to you about each other, but there were also interactions between members from the different groups, which eventually started to drive the plot. It built the idea that there was a complex web of characters that formed your network of survivors.
NPC-NPC Deepening
This chapter is short, but it's also such an interesting and memorable idea that it's one of the few things that came back to mind as I thought about this book, years later. It's a simple but compelling idea called a relationship "layer cake", and it's informed not just how I think about characters in games, but how I do character analysis for stories in general. While I don't explicitly invoke the metaphor, I have often talked about a character dynamic by going through a "layer cake" in bits and pieces.
The idea itself is straightforward enough that you've maybe guessed it: relationships between NPCs get deeper as you add layers to them, layers of ways that they feel about one another. One NPC might admire another, as one layer, then see their younger self in the other, as another layer. In the book, the example given is four layers deep, which seems like a good (albeit maybe heavy) number. Not all of these layers will be demonstrated consistently over the course of a game, but it's at least a cool idea. I do wonder how much of that is practical to have in a game, however. Oftentimes, very simple character dynamics are all you need for the relationships between non-player characters, although some games (like those in the Fire Emblem series) derive a lot of value out of building up rich connections between NPCs.
Looking Ahead
With these chapters under our belt, we're past the first quarter of the book! So far, the techniques have been focused on very fundamental ideas, nothing too unusual, although there has occasionally been oddity and datedness around some of it. There's a particular focus on cinematic writing--partially because of the author's background, but it's also a reminder that games still draw on traditional storytelling. This is more clear now than before, where lavish open-world games and massive RPGs have taken up a space as a significant genre. Games like Crystal Dynamics' Marvel's Avengers and Larian Studio's Baldur's Gate 3 exhibit narratives that are most like movies and TV shows, but giving players the ability to explore the narrative in-depth at their leisure.
Here's what we've got coming up in part 5, as the scope of the book develops:
- Giving NPCs character arcs
- Giving "rooting interest" to NPCs
- Techniques for Player-NPC chemistry
- Techniques to deepen Player-NPC relationships (from the NPC side)
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