Narrative Theory Series
Characters
Designing Games & Interactive Stories
The representation of events linked together with causal relationships in time and space is our working concept of narrative. The main entities connected to events are generally going to be characters and all of the objects (e.g. props) of the storyworld and mise-en-scène.
We normally would say that objects have properties, while characters have traits. Generally you wouldn’t say that “Linda has the properties of athleticism and kindness,” since that would be odd, and you wouldn’t say “The rock’s traits are hardness and magnetism.” We seem to prefer making distinctions between animate and inanimate entities when it comes to the ‘stuff they’re made of,’ which we refer to as either traits or properties, respectively.
A basic typology of Characters would include:
Broadly: a storyworld participant, any individual or group occurring in a narrative.
Narrowly: participants in the narrated domain excluding the narrator (the presenter of information) and narratee (the audience).
Everyday Language: someone’s personality, their enduring traits and dispositions.
We can take broad or narrow conceptions of characters in a narrative. Normally the audience wouldn’t be considered a character, but they can be, if the narrative includes them. When Peter Pan calls out to the audience to save Tinkerbell by getting them to yell out that they believe in fairies, or when a novelist starts the book with “Dear Reader,” the audience suddenly becomes a characters in the narrative (these are also examples of violating or ‘breaking’ the fourth wall).
One of the high level aesthetic and design considerations to make around characters has to do with how mimetic or stylized they should be. This will also relate to how mimetic or stylized your overall storyworld and approach are as well, since you probably wouldn’t place highly mimetic characters inside of a highly stylized storyworld, though sometimes this kind of contrast is utilized as a narrative strategy, for example when placing real actors inside of an animated universe, or vice versa (placing animated characters in a live action world). Both of these approaches are used in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Mimesis (and its variants, like mimetic and non-mimetic) is an important concept in media, art and design. It’s derived from a Greek word (mimētikos) which in English is usually called representation or sometimes connected to a form of representation like realism. In the history of Western art, it is usually said that the major innovation of classical Greek sculpture was an attention to scientific detail and ‘life-likeness’ in accuracy of the human form that had not before been a feature of art, where images were more abstract or stylized.
Imagine you have a detective story set in the downtown headquarters of the Chicago Police Dept. You will not find detectives there wearing brown trench coats and deerstalker caps, and wielding a giant magnifying glass and a pipe. That would not be mimetic but rather non-mimetic, because it is a visual trope associated with the formal qualities of classic stylized detective stories, not how detectives actually look these days (and even in the Victorian era, certainly they did not all have clothing and props of this sort!).
We can summarize these concepts as:
Mimetic: representational, treating characters as human or human-like, using our experience of real people as a reference.
Non-Mimetic: characters made of compositional units, being more constructs of style assemblages of formal properties.
Character is one of the oldest concepts in narrative theory (it dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics) and so there are certainly a lot of theories about characters! James Phelan’s model is triadic, composed of three modes:
Mimetic: the aspects of a character similar to any typical person
Thematic: the aspects of a character where they represent an abstract idea or ideal
Synthetic: the character as a completely artificial construct.
A good illustration of these concepts can be found in the recent Wonder Woman films, where 1) there is everyday mimetic Diana (cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, if I remember my dialogue correctly!), 2) there is thematic Diana as representative of ancient Greek heroic ideals and fighting prowess (the Amazonian woman-warrior bravery-skill matrix), and then 3) there is the completely ridiculous artificial synthetic construct of the Super Hero which is currently dominating all capital expenditures in Hollywood.
A lot of things can go into characters, and what exactly you pack into them will vary based on how complex you want them to be, which might also be a function of how important they are to a narrative. A background character who makes a brief appearance will likely not be highly developed and nuanced compared to main or regularly occurring characters.
One trend you sometimes see in episodic tv series is that a villain is needed for a very brief moment of plot time, and so they will make that villain character (who is about to die, or be arrested or exiled etc.) a really compelling presence during their brief screen time, as with the ‘bad courier’ in Discovery Season 3 Episode 2. This scene is also interesting because it shows one of the main protagonist characters (played by Michelle Yeoh) behaving badly, since she is also a ‘bad woman’ in terms of having a murderous character, but she is forced to work with the ‘good guys’ in the Discovery series.
While the list of elements that can be packed into characters would a quite long, we can summarize some key aspects that might go into character construction, such as:
How do we locate them in space and time (where/when are they from?)
What traits are always on display, which typify them? What traits only come out sometimes under certain conditions? How consistent or inconsistent are they?
What is their emotional, physical, cognitive, communicative, social, perceptual, or mental style?
What do they believe in?
How much agency (power, ability to make choices and cause things to happen) do they exhibit?
In a narrative experience, we will never learn everything about a character, and so we will always have incomplete or ‘gappy’ understandings of them.
Sticking with sci-fi for a bit longer, in that genre sometimes creators try to grapple with the idea of representing the ‘truly alien’ since usually aliens are very humanlike. Do you know why aliens are so human usually? Because humans are the paying audience, and humans generally won’t want to pay for nonhuman characters unless they are cute cuddly anthropomorphized animated animals or endangered species in nature documentaries.
Yet, sometimes creators grapple with the ‘mimesis of the truly alien’ or truly non-human, if one can put it that way, and so it’s worth a mention of some of those attempts. The Polish sci-fi novel Solaris has been made into a film three times (in Russian, Poland and the US). The alien in Solaris is an ocean planet, where the entire ocean exhibits sentience — obviously not a very easy kind of character to represent!
Annihilation had a mimesis-alien, i.e. an alien that had no defined form but only imitated lifeforms around it on whatever planet it lands on. Spielberg’s A.I. showed us a vision of how today’s robots eventually become AI robots which eventually evolve into a totally ‘alien’ (in an emotional sense) sentient robot species which retains humanoid form but otherwise feels pretty cold since we-as-humans usually want human-like characters.
These creative efforts are noteworthy, but they are highly rare. Usually we get English-speaking humanoid aliens with painted skin and plastic-flesh add-ons, like when Rob Lowe plays the hormonally seducing alien in The Orville.
You may have noticed that characters in narratives have ranged from being fairly simple or straightforward, embodying limited sets of traits (e.g. Hero, Villain, Damsel, Damsel’s Father) to being very complex or complicated (e.g. Laura Palmer, Gatsby). Notice that you can refer to simple characters by their type, but complex characters usually need to be referred to by their name, since they don’t fit easily into types!
If we take a long view of narrative, e.g. at the level of thousands of years to the present day, we can note an ancient preoccupation with types that embodied key sociocultural values (the characters of myth, religious texts, classical tragedies and comedies), and a more modern interest in delving into the psyche of individuals which originally appears in autobiographical forms (like Montaigne’s essays) and Shakespearean dramas.
A contemporary twist is that with interactive narratives such as games, characters are avatars, that is, ‘blanks’ that are in the sense ‘filled’ by the user. Whether they are simple or complex avatars will depend on the user, and the affordances of the game (i.e. what does the interactive environment allow the user to do, in terms of complexity of story and character?). If you prefer, you can think of a blank as an avatar and use those concepts interchangeably. An avatar is a stand-in for the audience member, which makes this a unique character type in the history of narrative, as they are intentionally left blank (or empty, to be filled by the user).
There are some narrative traditions, such as Greek tragedy or Japanese Noh theater, where actors performed through masks. A mask is of course a frozen personification of the character type, and the inflexibility of the mask rigidifies or fixes the general character persona into a highly constrained imaginary entity.
Like we did with mimesis and stylization, we can create a spectrum of possibilities between two extremes. We can call the type end of the historical spectrum the Persona (the fixed limited set of character traits) and the opposite end obsessed with psychological complexity the Complex, in honor of psychoanalysis which explore people’s internal complexes.
Characters are also often understood along a vector of how much they do or do not change in a narrative. We also often find main characters who may change a lot against a background of static characters who are generally fixed in their qualities, and this is understood as the difference between dynamic and static characters. A character arc defines the general shape of a character transformation. Not only do stories as a whole develop, but each character within a story can also have their own individual lines of development.
There are several ways that characters can change or develop in narratives along different dimensions, including moral/ethical, knowledge, and fortune.
Moral/ethical change: This refers to the way that a character’s values or beliefs evolve or shift over the course of the story. This type of change often involves a character experiencing a moral or ethical dilemma, and making a decision or taking an action that reflects their values or beliefs.
Knowledge change: This refers to the way that a character’s understanding or awareness of the world around them changes over the course of the story. This type of change might involve a character learning new information or gaining insight into a situation.
Fortune change: This refers to the way that a character’s circumstances or fortunes change over the course of the story. This type of change might involve a character experiencing a change in their social status, wealth, or other external factors.
By exploring how characters change along moral/ethical, knowledge, and fortune dimensions, writers can create complex and well-rounded characters that evolve and grow over the course of the story.
A particularly interesting contemporary take on the Dynamic character can be found in the Netflix series Dark, which is a unique exploration of the time travel plot and which shows us who characters are at different stages in their lives. The particular time travel technology employed in the series only allows for jumps in time forward or backward by fixed intervals of 33 years in either direction. This gives us clear child/teenage vs middle age vs elderly versions of the same character to get to know over the three seasons.
While in literature we start to see very complex characters with essayists and playwrights like Montaigne and Shakespeare during the Renaissance period (16th Century, i.e. the 1500s) — though many would also point to the writings of Saint Augustine as being way ‘ahead of his time’ with his very personal Confessions of ~AD 400 — this tendency in narrative really begins to take off at towards the latter 19th and early 20th Century interest in the unconscious and psychoanalysis.
This is when you start to see stories about forms of ‘split personalities’ like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, i.e. a rational conscious personality and a dark violent inner beast-soul (or something like that!) where everything that civilization suppresses runs free and wild. Contemporary characters like the Venom/Eddy Brock duality continue this Jekyll and Hide interest in organizing a complex character out of this kind of oppositional split in the character’s psyche.
Usually narratives will give us something a bit less dramatic or violent in the presentation of character complexity, such as when they are visiting the psychoanalyst and talking about themselves, as in the ‘garbage’ scene from Sex Lies and Videotape. Here is an excerpt of the script:
ANN (voice over)
Garbage. I started thinking about
what happens to all the garbage. I
mean, where do we put all of it, we
have to run out of places to put it
eventually, don’t we? This happened
to me before when that barge with
all the garbage was stranded and
nobody would take it? Remember that?
…
DOCTOR
Ann, do you see a pattern here?
ANN
What do you mean?
DOCTOR
Well, last week we talked about your obsession with the families of airline fatalities, and now we’re talking about your concern over the garbage problem.
ANN
Yeah, so?
DOCTOR
If you think about it, I think you’ll see that the object of your obsession is invariably something negative that you couldn’t possibly have any control over.
With interactive narratives, characters are often avatars (blanks) for us to occupy, and take on whatever characteristics we want to give them, though how we behave with them is often highly dependent on props, controller and image affordances, and the overall setting. E.g. in a zombie shooting game, probably you will use the baseball bat or flamethrower or shotgun to do negative things to zombies, since the game won’t really allow you to psychoanalyze the undead or run away in the opposite direction.
Superheroes, horror and sci-fi seem to be the main genres that continue the classical and ancient dramatic traditions of having characters speak through masks (often configured as helmets) — or not speak through their masks, as with Michael Myers in the Halloween or Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th film franchises, respectively, since their silence makes them scarier.
You’ll find that in a lot of very expensive films, the actors are paid so much money that their producers won’t let them wear masks for too long. For example, Robert Downey Jr. has made the most income of any Avenger, so we get to see his face a lot through his Iron Man helmet interior. By contrast, the actor who plays the Mandalorian is nowhere near as famous as RDJ, so that character mostly keeps his helmet on all the time.
There are many different techniques that writers use to create interesting characters. Here are a few examples:
Give the character flaws or weaknesses: A character who is imperfect or has flaws can be more relatable and interesting to readers.
Make the character dynamic: A character who undergoes significant development or change over the course of a story can be more interesting than a static character.
Give the character a unique personality: A character with a distinct personality or set of quirks can be more memorable and interesting.
Use dialogue to reveal the character: The way a character speaks and interacts with others can reveal a lot about their personality and motivations.
Use descriptive language: Careful use of descriptive language can help to bring a character to life and make them more vivid and interesting to readers.
Make the character’s actions and decisions consistent with their personality: A character whose actions and decisions are consistent with their personality will be more believable and interesting.
Use the character’s backstory to add depth: Including details about a character’s past can help to give them depth and make them more interesting to readers.
Since narrative is highly dependent upon conflict to be interesting, the Greek word agon — a contest — slips into words like ‘protagonist’ and ‘antagonist.’ Characters are vessels for audience identification. And audiences often like complex, imperfect characters because, well, no one’s perfect! A protagonist can even be kind of a bad guy, like Walter White in the Breaking Bad series. Some characters’ imperfections rise to the level of being a tragic flaw, which as the term suggests, leads to events unfolding that will not exactly be positive for them by narrative’s end.
Related Articles
Narrative in Analog & Digital Media
Narrative Continuity vs Poetic Montage
The Structure of Narrative Time
The Fourth Wall & Direct Address
Fact, Fiction & Narrative Contestation
Character Interactions and Narrative Progression
Agency in Interactive Narrative
Bibliography & Further Reading
- A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design by Anna Anthropy and Naomi Clark
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster
- Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers
- An Introduction to Game Studies by Frans Mayra
- Basics of Game Design by Michael Moore
- Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made by Jason Schreier
- Board Game Design Advice: From the Best in the World vol 1 by Gabe Barrett
- Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: an Encyclopedia Of Mechanisms by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev
- Character Development and Storytelling for Games by Lee Sheldon
- Chris Crawford on Game Design by Chris Crawford
- Clockwork Game Design by Keith Burgun
- Elements of Game Design by Robert Zubek
- Film Art by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
- Fundamentals of Game Design by Ernest Adams
- Fundamentals of Puzzle and Casual Game Design by Ernest Adams
- Game Design Foundations by Brenda Romero
- Game Design Workshop by Tracy Fullerton
- Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans
- Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames edited by Chris Bateman
- Games, Design and Play: A detailed approach to iterative game design by Colleen Macklin and John Sharp
- Interactive Narratives and Transmedia Storytelling, by Kelly McErlean
- Introduction to Game Systems Design by Dax Gazaway
- Kobold Guide to Board Game Design by Mike Selinker, David Howell, et al
- Kobold’s Guide to Worldbuilding edited by Janna Silverstein
- Level Up! The Guide to Great Video Game Design, 2nd Edition by Scott Rogers
- Narrating Space / Spatializing Narrative: Where Narrative Theory and Geography Meet by Marie-Laure Ryan, Kenneth Foote, et al.
- Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction by Kent Puckett
- Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates by David Herman, James Phelan, et al.
- Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Fourth Edition by Mieke Bal
- Practical Game Design by Adam Kramarzewski and Ennio De Nucci
- Procedural Storytelling in Game Design by Tanya X. Short and Tarn Adams
- Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing by Wendy Despain
- Rules of Play by Salen and Zimmerman
- Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (Frontiers of Narrative) by Marie-Laure Ryan, Jan-Noël Thon, et al
- Tabletop Game Design for Video Game Designers by Ethan Ham
- The Art of Game Design, 3rd Edition by Jesse Schell
- The Board Game Designer’s Guide: The Easy 4 Step Process to Create Amazing Games That People Can’t Stop Playing by Joe Slack
- The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott
- The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits
- The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, by by Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson
- The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf
- The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory by David Herman
- The Ultimate Guide to Video Game Writing and Design by Flint Dille & John Zuur Platten
- Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design by Gordon Calleja
- Video Game Storytelling: What Every Developer Needs to Know about Narrative Techniques by Evan Skolnick
- Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG edited by Wendy Despain
- Writing for Video Games by Steve Ince
- 100 Principles of Game Design by DESPAIN
