Character, Viewpoint and Audience Sympathy

Ex-BioWare writer Alexander M. Freed, whose previous credits include Star Wars: The Old Republic, has penned a blog post on viewpoints, characters and audience sympathy, which starts from the assumption that the audience’s investment in the player character is inversely proportional to their investment in NPCs. It’s also the second installment to a series of blog posts he started on Gamasutra, so you might want to read that piece too.

In the meantime, here’s a snippet:

Empathy and Sympathy

Knowing how much players care about and empathize with different types of viewpoint characters, we can consider what this means for how players relate to non-player characters.

When it comes to player-influenced viewpoint characters characters I deeply empathize with and feel a close connection to, whose growth and change I’m responsible for we’re looking at a situation closest to the real world. When I look at non-player characters, I’m doing so through the lens of my own experiences and in the context of my character’s needs. My viewpoint character is the absolute center of my world.

As a result, my feelings for non-player characters are dependent on my relationship to them. Two characters talking about something my character isn’t personally invested in? Boring. A character I don’t know well telling me about her past traumas? Difficult to relate to. On the other hand, a non-player character I’ve spent time with, befriended, and come to know gets a lot more leeway like a real-world friend, I care about what she’s going through even if it doesn’t affect me directly. Generally speaking, I care about other characters in regards to their relationship to the viewpoint character and resent being upstaged.

Fully defined viewpoint characters, as mentioned above, most resemble characters found in traditional media. With a fully defined viewpoint character, players are pushed to see the game world and characters more objectively as opposed to the subjective, (inside the character’s head) viewpoint of the player-influenced character. As a player, my focus is still on the viewpoint character at a level untrue of traditional media, of course there’s still the risk of being upstaged, and a host of game-specific narrative techniques that must be minded but my decreased sense of ownership means that time and emotion spent on non-player characters doesn’t detract from the core experience to the same extent. I have the luxury of sympathizing with other characters and developing an interest in their stories, because it’s clear that (my) story doesn’t actually belong to me.

Many traditional media rules are still applicable. A film or novel that wanders from its main character or doesn’t allow its protagonist agency is likely to lose an audience’s attention, and the same remains true of games to an even larger extent. But that difference is one of degree, rather than kind.

Total ciphers force the emotional weight of a game’s storyline onto non-player characters, and the player’s sympathy will typically gravitate to such characters naturally. There’s a reason why (audio logs) (as popularized in System Shock and used in so many first-person games thereafter) are an effective storytelling device for first-person shooters with cipher viewpoint characters players are starved for characters to connect to in the game world, and logs are a cheap and direct solution.

To reiterate the trend the more I care about the viewpoint character, the more difficult it is to make me care about non-player characters. Those connections have to be built, earned, and carefully maintained. The less I care about the viewpoint character, the easier it is to make me care about others. This isn’t an end result it’s a baseline, and writing quality and game design can dramatically shift the outcome but it’s vital to planning one’s approach and assessing problems.