Developing Rational Characters through Drama Theory
The valiant paladin, stood looking at his doom. It was his choice, and his alone. He nodded to the axeman, who picked up his axe and ended the paladin’s life. As per the Baron’s word, a messenger was dispatched to the princess, who lie dying on her deathbed, informing her of the paladin’s choice. She got the missive too late to save her own life, but in her dying breath, was able to cast a spell to bring peace to the kingdom for all eternity.
All characters in a story face choices. Some, like the paladin above, face choices of life or death. We need these shining characters to make brilliant decisions, serving as a model of virtue for the reader. This can often times be hard. It’s very difficult to have characters make giant emotionally driven decisions without the reader losing their connection with the character. In the story above, the paladin only has the word of a villain that the message will be sent, and even if the message is sent, nobody knows if it will arrive in time to cast the spell. How hopelessly idealistic does our paladin have to be to make such a silly sacrifice? What morals can we really relate to from a character as exaggerated as this? If the reader finds such characters unrealistic, they cannot get immersed in the story.
The world we build, itself, faces similar issues. Often one of the harder tasks in world building is the development of a “living” world, one that doesn’t feel like it was constructed on the back of a 8.5x11 sheet of paper just before storywriting began. There’s all sorts of tricks one can do to add artificial realism: dirt, grime, and flock. These are small tidbits that show up in every world, so adding them always makes a world feel more realistic. However, there’s nothing quite as effective as actually making a world that feels right on many scales. This forms a world where readers can connect to what you have created.
One very reliable tool at our disposal is the visible existence of rational thought in our world. While we all know the colloquial meaning of “rational,” in this case I use a more precise definition, from Rational Choice Theory:
At its most basic level, behavior is rational if it is goal-oriented, reflective (evaluative), and consistent (across time and different choice situations). This contrasts with behavior that is random, impulsive, conditioned, or adopted by (unevaluative) imitation. (source: Wikipedia)
The key to rational behavior is to understand “why” a character does what they do. If they understand why they do it, it is rational. If the reader understands why they do it, it feels rational. Take the story from the movie The Notebook. We see the main character put themselves through an unimaginable amount of pain in the name of love. The movie would have no emotional impact if we could just write him off as “just some love sick fool.” Instead, the movie takes the time to make sure we understand why. They craft his behaviors to be so clearly goal-oriented, reflective, and consistent that it leaves the viewer thinking, “Wow, that could be me, if my life had played out differently.” We resonate so strongly with rational thought that is surprisingly difficult not to feel compassion for a clearly rational character. This is profoundly true when characters do something for reasons that are clearly larger than themselves — self sacrifice.
Mathematicians have developed powerful tools which we can use to develop our world. Game Theory and Drama Theory are remarkably powerful tools for developing rational actors. In fact, they are so powerful that they can lead to a character seeming too rational, too mechanical, if not tempered, so I approach this article with caution. Most people accept that humans are not 100% rational. We expect them to be somewhat rational, but the last little spark is the thing that makes us human. Be sure to never let the tools snuff that spark out. Accordingly, I have two recommended usages for these tools:
- A source of inspiration for where characters may go next, based on their rational nature. I never let the mathematical theories declare what the character will do, but they are an effective input into the world building and storytelling process.
- A sanity check, to see if my exotic idea works. I may have an absolutely crazy religious-political structure that seems like a lot of fun, but I’m not sure how realistic it is. Here I can use Game Theory and Drama Theory backwards. If I can come up with a realistic progression from the past to the present for my crazy world using these rational tools, then the world has an aire of credibility to it.
Game Theory is the simpler of the two theories. It exists to deal with rational actors that observe the world as they go. They can’t rationalize everything right when it happens, so they come up with a strategy ahead of time, and then simply act it out. They might say “I will go to the store, but if the baby cries, I will feed it instead.” That way, when the baby cries, there isn’t a sudden need to think through the day’s plans; it’s already been decided. Game theory allows each actor to decide how they will respond ahead of time, and then the actions play out based on the combination of what everyone decided.
Game Theory is very powerful for situations where an actor has to act faster than they can think. They choose a strategy, and then play out the tactics that follow. In combat situations, especially among lesser trained soldiers, these rote rules can save their life. The fervor of combat can be shown quickly in a chart with two combatants. Each combatant can do one of two basic strategies in our example: they can either fight clean, or they can fight dirty. If they both fight clean, the best man prevails. If one of them fights dirty, they win and the other guy gets injured. If both fight dirty, its not clear who wins, but the winner will be left with scars for the rest of their life.
We can see from this how both combatants will have to think. If one chooses to go in clean, and the other goes dirty, they’re guaranteed to lose. The only way to not guarantee a loss and an injury is to fight dirty. This should seem familiar. It’s the focal point of virtually every sport fighting movie out there, like Karate Kid. How do you avoid this natural slide from clean sport-light fighting into warfare? Surely we succeed, so this simplified scenario can’t have the entire story. We’ll need to build on game theory, though. Game theory on its own isn’t enough. Before we do that, we should firm it up a bit by using a more helpful example.
Two criminals get caught after committing a crime together. They were careful, so there’s not enough evidence to convict them. Determined to get a conviction, the police detective on the case puts them each in separate rooms and offers them each the same deal:
“Look, I’ll be straight with you. We don’t have enough evidence to convict you of much. We could probably put each of you away for a year based on the evidence we have. However, if you are willing to testify against your partner, we can let you off scott free and your partner will spend 9 years in jail. Of course, if both of you testify, we can’t let you both off free. You’ll each get 3 years if you both agree to flip on each other. I need your answer before you leave the room.”
This is known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it really is just the same as the previous scenario. The best case scenario is when both parties stick together. This is labeled “conforming” because they are conforming to the group needs for the criminals to not go to prison. However, either party may “defect” by testifying.
This particular story, with the prisoners and the particular sentences, has been chosen as an example in many game theory books because there’s just enough information to make an airtight argument that both of them should rationally defect. The combat example works, but there’s more room for clever arguments about how war should work in the heat of the moment. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is pretty clear, cut and dry. However, the story doesn’t end there. If it was this easy, everyone would want to be a police detective or a prosecutor! In the real world, criminals don’t defect like this. In fact, its remarkably how much pressure they will endure without defecting!
In interviews with actual criminals, the overriding reason for conformance was unanimous: nobody wanted to be known as “the snitch.” In their culture, there is nothing worse than being a snitch. Better to do 9 years because of your snitching partner than to have nobody ever work with you again because word got out that you snitched. In practice this is very effective, but how did it come about?
In game theory, the actors make one choice, and then get to see what that choice does. In drama theory, we recognize that actors make multiple choices in their lives, and they’re allowed to change strategies. Drama theory is laid out as a series of episodes, each culminating in a game theory choice. Between episodes, actors are permitted to change their strategies, talk, and most importantly, observe the actions of others. We now see where “the snitch factor” comes in. If any one criminal snitches, everybody talks and adjusts their strategies to exclude the snitch.
What makes this powerful is the feedback that occurs. After everyone has seen that “the community will punish snitches, so snitches are going to be less common,” they will conform more. This makes it even more obvious who is trustworthy and who is not, until you have a very clear rule: “criminals don’t snitch.” Criminals that break this rule don’t stay in the business long.
In mathematics, we call this a stationary point. Its a state which, when iterated over and over through our rules, doesn’t change. These stationary points are very powerful for worldbuilders and authors. These are the things that our characters can rely on and the reader will “get it,” because they feel natural in the environment. As an example, I can be passionate about anything. I can be passionate about belly button lint, about undercooked hotdogs. I can be passionate about anything. However, many of these passions feel quirky and unnatural. Passions for patrotism, religious observance, and similar topics feels less unnatural. This is because our society has stationary points found in such topics, so its very reasonable for me to rely on them as “truth,” just like criminals rely on “criminals don’t snitch.” If my character has patriotism, I don’t have to explain much. If my character obsesses over the finer details in the preparation of soft cheeses, I may have some work cut out for me.
Ever better for worldbuilders and authors, there’s no such thing as a truly stationary point in society! There’s plenty of things that get really really really close, but are not perfectly stationary. What’s the job of our police detective making offers to the two prisoners? His job is to try to convince the criminal that snitching really isn’t as bad as he thinks it is — that the rule in the criminal community isn’t quite as stationary as he was lead to believe. If he succeeds, the criminal may defect, no longer able to lean on his certainty that his partner won’t snitch first. This means the world builder is never really bound by the logic that appears in drama theory. There is always a way out.
Also interesting for worldbuilders is that these actors don’t have to be people. If you look at the wording above, “the criminal community” is treated as an actor, even though it’s not a person. Each criminal is watching what “the community” is doing, and each criminal does their part of “the community’s” actions. This is great because cities and kingdoms are huge, and you really don’t want to have to write out thousands upon thousands of individuals and their hopes and dreams while building up regional politics. Instead you can have forces like “the noble elite” and “the peasantry” which represent the communal actions. In fact doing so does a good job of showing what turmoil looks like. Perhaps some of the peasants are fed up with the nobles, but the others are still sheeple going about their lives. “The pesantry” might split into “the uprising” and “the sheeple” overnight, and suddenly the nobility has two groups to interact with rather than just one! Later, once the uprising is mollified, your characters may homogenize enough to permit them to re-merge into “the pesantry” once more.
I will often use such drama theory models as inspiration for my characters and my overarching political forces. Sometimes I just know the French princess must accept the Italian prince’s advances or the story I want to tell just doesn’t work. However, sometimes the prince’s advances might just be a side story that is going on to ensure a consistent world for my real character, the chambermaid who is actually an English spy. I’m not concerned with whether she says yes or no, but I do want to make sure that what she says is consistent, because that consistency breathes life into my world so that, when my English spy has to choose between her love interest and her duty to country, we understand what duty to country means to people in this world. In these cases, I may build a few rounds of drama theory for the interactions between the princes and princesses, to see how she would likely act. Often I find inspiration here. The French princess may not actually resonant much with what the prince wants, but she may realize that she can spawn some new intrigue out of the deal to get the prince to do her bidding for her. This approach using drama theory lets me study a tree very intently without fearing that I might miss the forest.
Beautifully, no characters actually have to talk in the story for this to work. These side stories may be going on completely outside the realm of the book, but we observe the consistent actions that arise from the prince and princess, and they provide a backdrop for our real characters. The human mind is well primed to pick up on details consistent with rational thought, so the tiniest of detail gets catalogued and filed properly.
Drama theory can also be very useful for testing to see if a story is too exotic. The easier it is to explain the events that unfold using drama theory, the more realistic the story is to rational readers. This explanation doesn’t have to be the de-jure explanation of what is happening. In fact the most realistic stories often have several valid viewpoints to explain what happened. However, if you find it difficult to build up a drama theory scenario that lines up with the events, you may have bit off too irrational of a storyline.
The key to this process is to look for the stationary points in the interactions. They are the most visible facets of the story, from drama theory’s perspective, and they’re also the things that stay constant if you look at it from a different viewpoint. I draw upon Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke, and in particular some of the later books in the series, for an example. The Octospiders are a fascinating race in Rama. They are an intelligent species, completely deaf, relying on shifting pigmentation on their skin to communicate, like cephalopods do today. However, what is really fascinating about them is their approach to warfare. They appear completely peaceful, refusing steadfastly to enter warfare.
We find out later in the books why they do not go to war. War, for them, is a total action. They have no police actions or limited engagements. They are at war, or they are not. There is only one individual who can call for war, which is the Regent Queen of the Octospiders. She may petition the species-wide parliament to request that the species go to war. The parliament then decides. This process, from the moment the queen petitions for war, is a death sentence for the queen. If the request for war fails, she is summarily put to death. A level of violence in a queen sufficient to call for war is not an acceptable trait in their society. If the request succeeds, the species undergoes a genetic level transformation into their warfaring form. They then wage unrestricted warfare until complete extinction of the entire species they are fighting occurs (xenocide). At this point, every warrior, and the queen herself, are summarily put to death.
Sounds far out, right? How far out? We can use drama theory to look for the stationary points in their society. This is a society that has the ability to fight with all their might, but would prefer not to because they know how much damage they can do (similar to our issues with nuclear proliferation). Accordingly, there is a great desire to not put themselves in a position where they might choose to go to war. This creates a feedback layer creating a great amount of emphasis in “how can we live peacefully, because war is unacceptable.” If you then look at their society, many of our more warlike traits simply don’t appear. Things that cause us to escalate a scenario cause them to find another way. We can continue this process over and over, refining our understanding of the rational side of the Octospiders, until we develop a proper understanding of just how far they will go to avoid war.
And when we finally deal with Octospiders that “defect” from the group, acting on their own, we find that the way they defect, and their explanation of their actions are remarkably consistent with these societal stationary points. We find the defectors under tremendous emotional stress between the desire to conform with their species and their overriding desire to avoid warfare, and we as readers find ourselves compassionate for these strange unearthly creatures stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Drama Theory is remarkably powerful for helping any world builder or author develop characters that act rationally. By the definition of “rational” in Rational Choice Theory, this is any character which is goal-oriented, reflective, and consistent. This includes not only characters we tend to think of as “rational,” but also characters like religious zealots who are reflective enough on their actions to be able to explain why they do what they do. It also includes non character actors, like major political forces, which makes it powerful for building up societies. I recommend it for any budding world builder!
-C.
