Better Game Characters by Design

A Psychological Approach

Katherine Isbister

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000688863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Games
• Index: Computer Science

Games are poised for a major evolution, driven by growth in technical sophistication and audience reach. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the game-play itself (not just in cut scenes) will be essential to next-generation games. However, the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood within the game development community. Further complicating the situation are powerful gender and cultural issues that can influence perception of characters. Katherine Isbister has spent the last 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. This work has revealed that the key to good design is leveraging player psychology: understanding what's memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and applying those insights to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these psychological principles without realizing it. Better Game Characters by Design gives game design professionals and other interactive media designers a framework for understanding how social roles and perceptions affect players' reactions to characters, helping produce stronger designs and better results.

PART Two Focus on the Player

DOI: 10.1201/9780367807641-4

What Is Covered and Why

Chapters 3 and 4 provide a starting point for designers hoping to reach broader audiences with their characters, replacing some of the guesswork involved at present with recommendations for how to proceed. It is my belief that true cross-gender and cross-cultural character appeal arises from understanding of and respect for the differences that shape social perception and behavior.

Psychologists aim to conduct research and produce results that apply to all human beings, and the findings in this book have been selected with an eye toward generalizability—forming first impressions, noticing and caring about dominance and agreeableness, seeking social information from faces, bodies, and voices, and so forth. Yet within this broader context of being human, there are important variations. Each person is as unique as a snowflake in their perceptions and assumptions.

It is impossible to draw an adequate picture of each and every person’s psychology. Instead, researchers look for results that are generalizable across all people, and where this fails, they look for variables that help to explain broad swaths of difference among people. Marketers do the same thing when researching audiences—they look for broad groups and for variables to help predict what will appeal to these groups. In both cases, a characteristic that is true of many people, and which helps predict aspects of their behavior, becomes a useful tool.

Designers face the same dilemma as researchers and marketers—they must make choices about characters, knowing that each player will react in a different way. Descriptive categories employed by marketers, such as gender or culture, are a start, but segmenting audiences does not solve the problem of providing useful guidance for designers. Chapters 3 and 4 work to delve deeper into these broad demographic categories toward a richer understanding of how these dimensions of a person’s experience impact expectations and perceptions of self and others and toward targeted recommendations for shaping character designs.

Who Will Find Part II Most Useful

The concepts and recommendations in these chapters will be especially useful to designers who shape the early focus of a game and its characters, as well as to project team leaders and marketers. They will also be useful to team members involved in character production decisions along the way—artists, programmers, writers, and animators—as broader audience appeal emerges from the bottom up through design detail (not just through initial conceptual choices).

Overview of Key Concepts

Both chapters emphasize that demographic variables are a shifting terrain—what it means to be “Japanese” or to be “female” changes over time and fluctuates even within a given time period. The two chapters also point out the role that designers themselves can play in shaping notions of culture, subculture, and gender given that games have the power to actively transform the social landscape.

Chapter 3 includes interviews with both industry and research figures who deal with cultural differences in characters, in Chapter 4, several gamers (female and male) are interviewed about their play preferences to illustrate the individual differences possible within the broad category of gender.

Culture

Expression and Physical Characteristics

Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of the ways in which everyday social expression can differ among cultures and subcultures. This chapter also includes a discussion of differences in appearance, such as ethnic features, and the role these can play in identification with game characters.

Posture and gesture norms for conversation are quite different in Japan and the United States.

Roles and Expectations

Another important factor for character design, and one that varies among cultures and subcultures, are the roles people learn about and the expectations they form about how to behave to fit a role. The discussion in Chapter 3 includes some dimensions along which cultures tend to vary, in terms of role behavior.

The player character in Halo—Master Chief—is an individualistic hero that fits American role expections. Screenshot from Halo^®: Combat Evolved. ©2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Media Contexts and Their Impact on Expectations

Chapter 3 also includes a discussion of the ways in which culture is shaped and reflected in media and the importance of understanding the local media landscape when designing characters for a particular audience. This chapter includes discussion of characters and contexts that have evolved a global reach, including experiments such as SquareEnix’s Kingdom Hearts, which combines Disney and anime-style characters.

Kingdom Hearts blends Disney characters and environments with anime-style characters from the Final Fantasy tradition. ©2002 Disney. Developed by Square Enix Co., Ltd. Character Design: Tetsuya Nomura. ©Disney Enterprises, Inc.

Gender

Nature versus Nurture: Biology and Gender

Chapter 4 begins with a clarification of the concept of gender, making a distinction between biology and the process by which men and women are socialized to be masculine or feminine. While a few biological factors that may have an impact on game play are briefly cited in Section 4.2.2, the bulk of the chapter deals with the enculturation of being male or female, not with biological differences.

Play Styles

This subsection (page 111) summarizes research investigating differences in the way girls and boys play that could have an impact on character design choices.

The Sims™ offers players domestic settings and non-violent, socially-oriented game play that may have greater appeal to some female players. ©2005 Electronic Arts Inc. All rights reserved.

Roles for Girls

One important aspect of enculturation of girls and boys is offering them role models and fantasy personas that they can imagine being. This subsection (page 115) discusses the importance of providing accessible fantasy personas for girls, including providing the capacity to self-generate player-characters to allow for a wider range of role play.

Reactions to Girls

Chapter 4 also discusses the importance of socially appropriate reactions of NPCs to female players, particularly in the case of the kinds of interest and attraction cues that a character uses. Narrow use of sex appeal and gender-based assumptions can inadvertently skew a game toward a male-only audience.

Non-player characters in Animal Crossing react to the player-character in gender neutral ways. Image courtesy of Nintendo.

Take-Aways from Part II

After reading Part II, designers will feel more confident approaching character design for an audience with members who are not from their own gender and culture—mostly because they will have a healthy respect for the subtlety and depth of differences in how people respond socially to game characters. Designers will also leave with some ideas for how to design games to support both genders and games that can travel across cultures well. One key message in both chapters is the need to include a broader base of design-team members from target audiences in the process, from the very beginning, because designers do best when they create from and for what they deeply know.

Chapter Three Culture

DOI: 10.1201/9780367807641-5

3.1 What Is Covered and Why

This chapter offers a brief and targeted introduction to culture as it affects people’s perceptions and interpretations of one another. Particularly for those who have never lived in another culture (or in a setting with a diverse population of subcultures), it is dangerously easy to resort to over-simplified stereotypical notions of what someone from another culture is like, or would like, when designing characters. My hope is that reading this chapter will eliminate this possibility for the reader, substituting instead a respect for the complexity and layers of culture and a desire to incorporate this understanding into character design.

Culture is far too broad a topic to cover coherently in a few pages, so this chapter focuses on the aspects of culture that relate specifically to the crafting of game characters, with findings that modulate the theory and design practices in the subsequent sections of the book. The chapter concludes with design recommendations for dealing with culture well when crafting characters and with two interviews—the first with two localization experts for Sony and the second with researchers who have been developing characters to train cross-cultural awareness in language learners.

3.2 The Psychological Principles

3.2.1 Culture: Getting Clear on the Concept

In the game industry, discussion of culture is often reduced to reference to nations or continents—designing for “the Japanese” or for “the European” markets. In fact, these national and supranational identities are fairly recent in human evolution and are only one of the many social groupings that make up cultures. In many cases (for example, in Japan), ethnicity is intertwined with national cultural identity, creating outsider subcultures of ethnically different groups. Within nations, there are other identifiable subcultures (for example, the cultural differences between the East and West coasts in the United States or between the South and the North; or the contrast between Kanto and Kansai dwellers in Japan). Aspects of a person’s environment, personal qualities, and history can have an affect on his or her cultural identifications. There are subcultures that have economic status, life-stage, gender, and many other characteristics as their predominant markers of identification.

Each person may simultaneously belong to several cultural contexts. Some of these transcend national boundaries—consider, for example, the subculture of motorcycle bikers, which has members around the globe who share common points of reference and rituals (see Figure 3.1). There is also the subculture of airline pilots, who may be from very different national cultures but who share training, procedural knowledge, and daily experiences that lead to a shared set of assumptions and beliefs.

Culture, even at the national level that we often think of first, is something that shifts over time. What was true of the typical American or the typical Japanese a generation ago may not be true today. It is also clear that people as individuals and as groups can get more familiar with, adjust to, and appropriate one another’s forms and expectations—in this way blending formerly distinct cultures. For example, the proliferation of Japanese gardens in the West, or the global distribution of American serial television.

Despite all the distinctions among subcultures, there are fundamental qualities and situations that human beings share that produce similarities among cultures. Meeting basic survival needs, having and raising children, caring for the sick, adjusting to changes in the environment, and managing the distribution of labor and property within groups, are all shared circumstances. The bedrock of culture is made up of such universal concerns that spring from being human.

FIGURE 3.1 Accoutrements are an important part of getting subcultures right in character design. Full Throttle captures the costumes and atmosphere of the biker world. ©1995 Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. All rights reserved.

What does all this mean for designing culture-appr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the DVD-ROM
• I First Impressions
• II Focus on the Player
• III Using a Character's Social Equipment
• IV Characters in Action
• V Putting It All Together
• Appendix: Summaries of Games Discussed
• Index