The Character in the Character...

I was having a lengthy conversation with my agent/headhunter and we briefly discussed one of my game designs and the characters I created.  He liked the narrative and thought the overall idea was decent but as I wrapped up the description of the depth of their world and how they all interacted he pulled up an existing story with images and said to me, “I hope and pray that your characters don’t look like this.”  They didn’t, but the concept art, the time period and other nuances I had in mind weren’t too far away.  I was put off a bit at first when I thought about how much work I had put into the fine details, but shrugged it off and realized that I just had more work to do.  Still, in a heartbeat several months of work was nearly thrown away.  He assured me of one thing; “People will copy, or attempt to copy you.”  After our Skype call, I realized that it isn’t so much how much time one spends searching the world and their mental constructs for something that no one’s done before as it is all about extensive and lengthy research.

Once we’ve established that there are no shortcuts in building meaningful characters, I’ve found that we should create the nuances that make the character(s) relatable before we go to great lengths to make them completely unique.  The best of today’s modern games (across all game genres) are rich in characters with character and vast in world depth but when we look at hit games like Plants Vs Zombies, the entire game world takes place on your front lawn and we never actually see our main character (though we can also argue that the plants are our main characters).  Having said that, physical game world size matters little as does the feeling of immersion in said game space.  By creating a greater sense of urgency when night falls in the game, Pop Cap developers succeeded in creating depth by simply having the sun set–which has an immediate impact on the user’s meaningful choice and game mechanic options.

Clearly, it’s becoming a bit complex and messy discussing depth of character, but maybe that’s the concept.  Maybe it’s important to not focus on depth for depths sake or to fill up our characters with so many traits that they’re borderline Schizophrenic (unless that’s what we’re going for).  Whether the world is fictional or based on our very real world, a character should be created and nurtured based on their truth, whatever we the creators deem that to be.  Just as having a firm foundation laid down is important to the stability and/or “truth” of a structure, this is also true for creating memorable characters that stay true to who they are, what they believe and the world that they live in.  If you take a glance up at the picture above, we all know at least one of the depicted characters and know that no matter what happens, they will always be that character and like a film thespian, their performances will always be believable and convincing.

This concludes my thought process on this matter today… For now... ;-)