I’m going to do a little twofer today. I need to do a longer explanation of one of my assignments for my Writing for Games class, and I also wanted to talk a bit about character development here on my blog anyway, so here we go birding twice at once.
So we will start with the assignment design. Some of my students get frustrated, but in the Writing for Games class I set things up, assignment-wise, to mirror what I consider to be the best elements of gamification. In other words, there’s a great deal of freedom to explore within a set of existing rules. This is the entire assignment prompt:
One of the most important elements of making a truly compelling game experience is creating engaging, interesting, well-developed characters. For this assignment you will create a character– it can be a player character, a significant NPC, a villain– complete with the following:
1) Description (physical, personality)
2) Backstory (sufficient for the needs of the game the character is proposed for)
3) Motivations
4) Sample dialogue
I allow in the assignment for the students to create a character for any game they’d like (their own game, an existing game DLC, etc.) but because they are currently writing Dungeons & Dragons modules, I highly recommend that they make a character for that (so that they are building toward the same project).
I also make an allowance for creating art here, but it’s obviously not required because it’s not an art class. This leaves the students to generate the four things listed above. I don’t give a required length, though I make suggestions (250 words– or a page, for physical description, another page for personality, a page for backstory, as much as is needed for motivations– probably a paragraph or two– and then a page of sample dialogue snippets or “barks”).
Another thing that I think frustrates students on some level is that character design is a skill, but it’s not, strictly speaking, a genre. There isn’t a specific way that a character design should look. The idea here is to develop the skill of crafting a character. Character, in the end, is the most important part of a narrative (that’s an opinion, but lots of scholarship would back it up). The reasons we love certain stories are inexorably tied to our affinity for (or loathing of) the characters.
The best way to understand characters, of course, is to participate in some sort of role-play as the character. Maybe not literally, but a tried-and-true Iowa Workshop style method is to sit and let fellow writers interview your character. This allows you to understand motivations. And understanding the character’s motivations, quirks, verbal ticks, etc. make a character that is otherwise misunderstood into something unforgettable.
Here’s a written game example that sort of presents a fusion:
Right now both myself and one of my students (who is in the class completing this assignment, which is trippy) are running parallel same-world D&D adventures in Ravenloft. Our main evil character is Strahd, D&D’s version of Dracula. As he’s written in pretty much all of the TSR literature, Strahd IS Dracula. Same motivations.
I ran Ravenloft a long time ago, when I was in high school. Back then, I played Strahd more like he was the Joker, just because that was the character I was infatuated with as a teenager. So this time around, I decided to incorporate trickster mythos into how I revised Strahd. Jarod, the other DM, make roughly the same decision. So our Strahd is very different from what is on the adventure page. But we’re re-writing him, essentially, together, so that our players– in different campaigns, technically– are experiencing the same world.
What is important for us to make this work is understanding how the existing motivations link with the character quirks and ticks and become something consistent. That’s the key word: consistent. Great characters can change, but they evolve. They don’t suddenly change. A character that stays consistent feels organic and enjoyable. If written wrong, a character fails to connect and can feel uneven.
So that’s the goal for this assignment in my class: create a compelling, consistent, interesting character. In the end, it should be around 5-7 pages of material, and it should be useful to someone else who is trying to understand how the character works. It can be for any game, but I highly recommend building a character for the existing projects because you could use the content.
Yay, synergy!