Character Driven Game Design

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Character-Driven Game Design
no character is completely fixed, not even literature characters such as
Anna Karenina, as a character are always interpreted from narration
or perceived qualities. On the other hand, as argued above, the limits
and possibilities the game offers have relation to character recognition.
Hence, the character cannot be totally open.
As argued above, the player character design can be seen as designing
action possibilities for the character based on character and conflict
sketch that are important for that conflict. Importantly, also making
some action possibilities impossible is import part of design, e.g., a pacifist
should have different action possibilities to reach a goal that a bully.
This said, it is also important that players do not perceive these limitations
ungrounded. Moreover, how the character executes the choices
made by is important in gameplay. To continue the example in blatant
way, the pacifist might be slow to react to commands at fight and have
ineffective attacks, whereas the bully executes attack straightforwardly
and the attacks are effective (a more elegant solution might be letting
the pacifist to dodge fight by talking oneself out of the situation).
Alignment
The term alignment, first described in Smith’s theory on film [37], refers
to how the characters and player are related in terms of control and
access to information that enables recognition. Besides how a character
is controlled, alignment relates to what and kind of access is offered
to a character’s thoughts, affects, and actions. The access can be very
minimal and provided from the first person point of view. An example
of this is Half-Life [42]. In the game, players do have very little access
to characters thoughts and feelings. Implied goals give some information
about the character. Mostly the game uses the reactions toward
the player character and actions of NPCs to feed information about the
player character. The Thief Deadly Shadows [12] extends how the information
is on the character is given to players. The access is still very
minimalist: The game utilizes voice over narration triggered by certain
events; the role of voice over narration is, in addition to feed information
to recognition, is to give hints to players how to play. Short cutscenes
are also used. Mainly the character and gameplay is structure
using explicated goals.
Character goals can be stated explicitly or implicitly (see Lankoski
[19]). One game that uses explicit goals is the Thief Deadly Shadows [12],
in which goals are listed (and players can consult the list when they
please), and the goal list shows also if the goal has been reached or not.
On the other hand, games, such as Ico [38], use more implicit goals: the
player is not given direct access to any goals of the game. In Ico, goals
are not explicated to the player (with the sole expectation of escaping
from the castle, which is stated in the user manual), but enforced by the
game system: for example, a failure to protect Yorda, the main NPC in
the game, leads to game being over.