Critical Path /// Types of Characters

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Types of Characters

Interviewed 2010. There are two types of characters in games: the developed character and the blank slate character. The developed character lets players step into the shoes of the character's personality while the blank slate character has the player learn information in-game at the same time of the actual character.

Rhianna Pratchett

Roles: #Writer

Credits: #TOMB RAIDER #HEAVENLY SWORD #VIKING: BATTLE FOR ASGARD #MIRROR'S EDGE #OVERLORD #RISEN #LARA CROFT: RISE OF THE TOMB RAIDER

Tags: #World Building #Characters

Added on July 19, 2016 · View Transcript

Characters in games often fall into two broad categories. You got character characters which are characters who already have their personality that the player sort of steps into the shoes of. Someone like Lara Croft or Max Payne. And then you've got what we call blank slate characters, so someone like Gordon Freeman, for example, someone who has a name and has a past, depending on if you've played previous HALF-LIFE games but has no voice. And so your actions in the world and purely what defines Gordon Freeman. A blank slate character is, allows the player to role-play them in the more traditional sense, whereas a character character, stepping in the shoes, the player has to become more aligned with what the character does and how they react. And there are various challenges for games writers within that. With a blank slate character, obviously they have no kind of personality, they have no real reaction to the world and so you often find yourself writing a lot around them, which helps the player define themselves as a character a lot. So for example in OVERLORD, we used a blank slate character who had kind of no voice and no real personality so the player could plop themselves in their shoes, but the world around them was very verbal so they were talked to as if they were a fully-fledged character and the were kind of reacted to like that. In the same that say, Alex reacts to Gordon Freeman in the HALF-LIFE 2 and the episodes. So you often make the world a lot more talky around them to kind of compensate for that. And likewise with actual character characters, it's a fine balance so you don't make the character character do anything too extreme that might pull the player out of line with the character so it can be really annoying if the player character does a really douche bag move that the player wouldn't want to do or does something really random and not fitting, you know, the player gets very out of line with the character. And so we often talk about aligning the character, the player character and the player. So the player character may know certain things and the player may not, and it's trying to get the player and the player character in the same space so they're kind of experiencing the world at the same time. This is why amnesia has been so popular in games because it puts the player character and the player starting on the same point and kind of discovering the world in the same way. It's not ideal but it's one of the reasons it's been done.