Loving NPCs?
In my free time I’m working on a mod with little robots as main NPCs (you’ll end to see a lot of them). While thinking about the narrative component, I was worried about what makes me care about a character in a videogame if it isn’t playable.
Personally, I use to care at least a minimum to my digital companions, but most of the times it’s because I try to be part of that world, in despite of the poor job of the developers.
So, it’s not about my personal attachment, but the kind of effort that as a developer I can in put in my creation, because in general the good examples are very sparse.
Speaking of robots, two good source of inspiration could be WALL-E from the homonymous Pixar movie and the companion cube from Portal.
They are both robots but they pertain to different media, so they have to adopt different approaches.
You know, movies can use real people so a big part of the problem is automatically resolved, but in games, with the actual technology, it’s the opposite: you take for granted that the NPCs is unreal.
Here I think that the uncanny valley is responsible for this lack of credibility, in fact it’s difficult to take something seriously when it’s so damn pixelated!
Actually the ongoing graphical improvements will permit us to create stunning works of art – some high profile games such as Crysis are a good insight; nevertheless, the overall components of reality doesn’t scale relatively. Characters might seems “real” but they don’t act properly. I argue it’s a problem of interactivity.
Characters who moves in our same environment inside the game are limited to a finite set of actions, designed once forever by the developer. This is a strong remainder of the fiction you are playing in.
However, sometimes a limited interaction could enhance the realism and consequentially the immersion.
I think about Cleverbot, an AI to dialog with by writing sentences on a command line. It’s enough reliable until you understand how to trick it (one minute), but it’s fair.
Returning to the examples made above, WALL-E is far to resemble an human, however it can express a varied range of feelings, and stimulate others in the viewer too.
In this case, it’s mostly useful as a reference on the design of the robotic character: I really like how it’s eyes can change expression simply rotating. The same is valid for all the rest of the cast, where none have big anthropomorphic round eyes stamped upon.
The Companion Cube of Portal is said to create attachment in the player, even if in effect it’s only a clever gimmick that plays with a player’s common behaviour.
Surprising, what I find remarkable isn’t the time that you spend with it, but the part when (spoiler alert) you have to leave it behind, incinerating it too. Actually, it’s an undoable action.
In modern games you can quicksave, regenerate your health using medikits, take advantage of checkpoints, and so on. It’s ok to respect the player by not forcing him to spent more time than he wants, but in our daily reality there are no do-overs. Maybe it’s why we consider NPCs not so seriously.
I pretend to think that narrative in games have not to be linear, thanks to the interactive nature of the medium, to fully take advantage of it. Having a character to merely instructing us about its life is a passive method typical of movies, that works on building empathy with the viewer.
Games more commonly motivate players to care about NPCs by having them to give at your character items, quests or experience points. This seems to me like promoting a relationship with a drug-dealer. You are probably going to like him, or dislike him if he doesn’t feed you. Pretty dull indeed!
What I’ve understood is that we should not treat NPCs like peaces of a puzzle. They should not be part of a problem that the player has to solve or something superimposed.
The dog of Fable II now comes in mind. I thought from the previews that it could have been a great chance to create a credible relationship, but it ends up being immortal – the player can’t dispatch or leave it behind.
It’s even worst if the NPC has different skill than you have, obviously assigned to be exploited to solve puzzles and pass locks. The character appears merely as an extension – an appendices.
The NPC should be a “source of choices”.
From a designer point of view, problems serve to guide the player, instead of choices that serve the purpose to diversify/enrich the experience.
When you start thinking of a NPC on the base of its stats or its role in the game’s economy, no deep connection could appear. You are implicitly not treating him like person, but a cog in a machine that you want to work as efficiently as possible.
As an alternative, if the character is part of a choice of yours and, for example, something bad happens to him by your fault, then a stronger feeling could arouse. Actually you are losing an useful companion that you have chosen to be such, and as you can see this imply a certain degree of not linearity.
This lead to me to think that the NPCs could depend on the player, instead of the contrary; moreover, they could choose to not join us or maintain a certain distance, based on our attitude towards them.
In my mod, having to do with little robots, this seems to work fine. They could be innocent, indefensive, maybe a bit childish, and so dependant on the player. I could also build a mutual relationship – they serve to me as I serve to them.
Any good example not already cited here?
