I''m back with another bit from the local library. This one is about characters. Specifically, from a chapter titled The Hierarchy in _Characters & Viewpoint_ by Orson Scott Card.. Part I oif this post is a summary of what Card wrote, part II is my reflections on fitting this into an interactive medium. The Summary: This chapter is about characters who have a different levels of importance to a story. Card separates them into a scale from insignificant scenery to major importance, and suggests the scale is continuous rather than discrete. Insignificant characters are scenery, like furniture. They don''t stand out, don''t have names, rarely have lines, and don''t affect the plot. With increasing importance, the character might get a name, and afew lines devoted to him or her. The character might have an eccentricity, some feature or behavior that causes them to stand out a little. Card says, "your minor characters should not be deeply and carefully characterized. Like flashbulbs, they need to shine once and then get tossed away." The major characters are the ones that are significant to the story. They affect and are affected by events. Card lists and discusses the following as techniques to control the level of significance of a character: Ordinariness vs strangeness The amount of time devoted to the character The character''s potential for making meaningful choices Other characters'' focus on him The character''s frequency of appearance The character''s degree of involvement in the action Readers'' sympathy for the character Narration from the character''s point of view (For more details, read the book!) My Thoughts: Here is another stumbling block for an interactive medium. Often the game writer decides who is and who is not a significant character, while the player controls the action of the protagonist. Example: Bob arrives at a restaurant to have a talk with his ex-wife Helen. He sits down, orders a drink from the waiter and then spends several pages discussing relevant things with Helen. In this example, the waiter is is an insignificant character. He has no personality, not even a name, and is really meant to be scenery. But in a computer game, there usually isn''t anything to prevent a player from spending 30 minutes trying to chat up the waiter. On the one hand, the game designer creates a simulated game world with a complete and independent sprite for the waiter, and an AI routine that lets the waiter walk from table to table, all in the name of realism. On the other hand, the designer uses tricks from the theatre and movie business to discourage the player from trying to interact with the waiter. The waiters all look alike. They are drab and uninteresting in appearance and behavior. They don''t have names. All signs telling the player that this character is not important. These are contradictory, and neither is really satisfactory. The weakness is usually covered up by other, stronger, elements but it remains a weakness. I submit some possible solutions for comments: 1) Follow the writing model. Do not spend more time on the waiters in the game design than they would have in a book. Replace the nicely drawn sprite with a crude sketch. Since it doesn''t have a name, don''t bother to give it a face. Rather than portraying a waiter, just portray enough to give the idea of a waiter. Eliminate the opportunity for interaction by constructing a gameworld that only contains relevant objects. Instead of the player ordering a drink, have the waiter arrive, put down the drink, and then disappear from the game altogether, just as he disappears from the novel altogether. This would generally mean avoiding a gameworld that strives for realism. 2) Give the player control and vary the significance of the NPC depending on how the player interacts. Most NPCs start out as insignificant or minor characters. They should blend into the background, and all look and behave alike. The player needs to be able to interract with any one of them in brief, informal ways without disrupting gameplay. If the player just wants to ask where the local smith is, the NPC should be able to provide that info with out a separate conversation interface (or a minimal one). If the player starts to pursue other conversation with the NPC, then the NPC needs to rise in significance. It can adopt a slightly different appearance, as simple as taking off a jacket. It can get a different or quirky behavior, which could be a different animation or a quirk of speech. It also gets a speech interface. If the player chooses to involve it with the main plot somehow (a request for help, for example) then the NPC develops a moderate level of characterization. It gains a name, the illusion of a personality, and maybe some numbers (stats, skills, whatever). Obviously this approach rules out speech for spontaneously generated NPCs. And there are always the limits of graphics and limits to the amount of data from which to make the illusion of a personality. Which indirectly suggests an external plot manager, both to control pacing and to keep things on track. But that would be another thread. The second method doesn''t mean that all characters start out insignificant; the main villain can still be the main villain. The idea is to let the player decide which ones are significant and create the story as he or she chooses. This would require some heavy work on the interface as well as dynamically spawning simple personalities. Comments? Criticism?