Element of game design: Characters

Moving on from the visual design, as a whole, in a video game, and on to focusing on one of the main elements: characters. Appearance is a good strong selling point, but it’s the underlining personality of the game, and the game experience that will make it a loved game among gamers.

For starters, if you interested in characters, you must be interested in humans. The study of humans helps creative such realistic characters. Back in the 80’s, the characters were just pixels, without much connection to the player. A lot of characters from then, have evolved and their personalities came a long much later, like Lara Croft. These days, people get attached to characters, form personal bonds with them, instead of having that distance.

People relate to human, or human like characters. The speech pattern or the nervous twitches or the body language is not enough for a character to be realistic. Forget the technology, it’s the art, and then the real character behind that, that will bring the art to life. It is the little details that matter, that reflect their personality, and who they are. Characters all need their own separate story, which is intertwined with all the other characters they meet, along with their own history, opinions, fears, motives, secrets and dreams.

A lot of games can get away with an empty shell of a character, where the player put themselves in the character’s shoes, such as Call Of Duty, or Halo. However, a character contains now much more of a personality. Lara Croft has a back story, certain relationships to other characters throughout the series, likes and dislikes and motives.

In books, there are characters who are deeply loved. Different people are drawn to different characters, by their actions, what they stand for, the decisions they make, who they relate to, how they react to situations, how they react and interact with their environment. The many remember able characters that I can think are mainly from books, and a few from video games. I have a strong love for many of the fictional book characters, because they helped me relate to them, or help me in ways that reality couldn’t, like relaxing.

On top of thinking about all of this when designing, you also need to consider the character’s appearance, as people will respond to characters similar to them. Gender, skin, height, tone, hair, build, and costume all come in to play at this point. However, there is not a lot of variation, you hardly see many old people, or young children. Blue, black, and brown is the standard colour palette for costumes. Majority of characters are based upon the same template.

Games are not subtle, and are perfect to display comedy and violence. They differ from films because now it is a popular thing to have a game with different endings depending on the gamer’s actions. The gamer obtain different view points and different sides of characters, as well as situations. It shows different points of justice, and a different light on the story. In films, you can not experience that, as you are not taking control of the character, and moving through their world, you are watching as a witness.