NPC vs. PC

NPCs and player characters have to be treated differently.  You can either go the Snake route, making your PC the focus of the story as well as the most developed character, or you can leave your main character to be an empty vessel and focus on developing the other characters, leaving the PC almost entirely out of the story.

Both of these have their advantages.  Focusing on the player’s character allows the storyteller to devote almost all of his or her energy to making one totally compelling character; it also helps the player contextualize his or her game play actions within the story instead of separating out the two.  On the other hand, focusing on the NPCs allows the game designer to give the player much more freedom of choice.

It’s worth looking at both Ace Combat 04 and Fallout for two very different examples of games where an empty vessel player character can still have a deep impact on the player.  Ace Combat 04 forces the player to really understand the consequences of their actions.  For one moment in the story the player falls out of being an empty vessel and becomes a living part of the world, and in that moment the player has to realize “I did that, that was me”.  Fallout makes the player abundantly aware that they are playing an empty vessel (going so far as to only refer to the main character as “vault dweller”) and forces the player to fill that vessel with meaning.  The main difference between Fallout and most other games that try to do this is the length which they go to to ensure that the player must make a meaningful character (3).

Standard Story Structure as a Bad Place for Character

Here’s where this gets dangerous...  I’m going to say that the “story-action-story” structure is simply bad for developing interesting and meaningful characters.  If we don’t carry the character development into the game play we simply do not have the time or the continuity to flesh out our characters to the necessary degree.  Let me give a few examples of games that are already making steps in this direction.

First I would like to cite all of the Final Fantasy games.  A character’s persona is reflected in their abilities.  Over the years Square’s developed their own archetypes.  Let’s look at the “white mage”.  Every final fantasy uses the kindly healer archetype for the white mage, so much so that we can now call it the “white mage” archetype and see it applied to other games as well.

Next let’s return to Snake.  Snake’s iconic cigarettes tell you a lot about him (after all, if you could only take three things into a life or death situation, would one of them be cigarettes?).   Kojima’s continued insistence on rewarding the player for playing his games in the least lethal way possible also goes a long way in developing Snake.  It would have been easy for Snake to have simply become a ruthless mercenary killer, but this game play element stops us from seeing him that way (though allowing him to kill when necessary still gives him that dangerous, tough as nails edge).

The Silent Hill series also does this incredibly well, simply by doing nothing.  The level of violence which the main characters in those games can readily commit and the preternatural horror which they can walk through unfazed serves to continually remind the player that there is something wrong with their character.  Without any words, and without taking any time away from the action, they successfully reinforce the idea that normal people don’t end up in Silent Hill.

Conclusion

Interactive storytelling is hard.  Some people would argue that it isn’t the point of our medium, that it is something we should simply step away from.  I’d rather argue that our medium isn’t limited to storytelling but that storytelling is certainly one area we should continue to explore.

In this exploration we must set a higher bar for our characters.  We must get away from exposition and move to true dialogue.  We must flesh out our characters through our game play and avoid using them as simple plot devices.  In the end, we must create archetypical characters that people can relate to, set in environments which make them shine.

With that I leave you.  As always your thoughts are welcome.  jportnow@gmail.com.

(3) Interplay achieved this by providing the player with a very deep character creation system coupled with a level of freedom unheard of at the time of Fallout’s release.