The Science of Imagination: Creating Characters

Sure everyone loves action Films, just like we all love games like GTA4 for the gratuitous amounts of fun, and the same reason we all love Gears of War; it’s all about action. Keeping your focus on the screen and actively engaged in the environment, but what happens if they get you to become emotionally engaged in the characters?

DocuDramas have always been so successful in this practice, as well as many other genres of film, but so many times we find ourselves stuck in a game that while the environment is interesting and beautiful to look at, it still feels alien; “Why is this?” I often ask myself. The fact of the matter is that while you can have a game that is both fun and entertaining it can also be engaging emotionally, but for some reason, I find that it’s either poorly practiced or not even practiced at all.

Games like Mass Effect that give you the opportunity to just assemble the team and finish the game, or to take the time and assist these characters in various journeys not just for experience, but for allowing us to have the opportunity to take two dimensional characters and give them a past, depth, experience and in some cases, even pain. It adds a certain amount of endearment and continues to draw you back in to check on those old friends.

Sure, allowing teammates to have depth adds to the experience, but an enemy with a past and posthumous motive based on these events adds to the tension and drive even more; it gives us the right to grant absolution or hand out the retribution should we choose to do so. Basic story telling practices tell us that the conflict should always be the basis of the story, if it wasn’t, it would be boring right? Giving a cause to the effect can give us a basic understanding of the emotional context of our heroes, heroines and enemies alike. Plenty of games use the pasts of these fictional characters to give us context, much like Nico’s old friend that caught up to him in Liberty City and decided that he wasn’t quite finished with him yet.

Writers are tasked not only with dialog options and whimsical quips, they’re creating individuals who are supposed to give the world credibility, make these “people” seem like people in the eyes of the player. In the games that I mentioned above, and in an innumerable amount of other games that I did not list, those NPC’s and starring ensemble make these worlds seem alive; not to mention a little less alien-feeling and a lot more homey. It’s the writers that get us emotionally engaged with a fantastic story and a compelling group of key players, and they generally do a stellar job.