[Game Design] Humanizing the Player Character

Veiled Age is somewhere between a novel and an RPG, and that can cause creative dilemmas sometimes. Here’s one: It’s a given that the main character in a novel needs depth, but giving an RPG protagonist depth has a price. The more detail provided by the writer, the less is left to the player’s imagination and expression.

Each approach has its merits. Character drama requires well-described character motivations. You couldn’t make a game like The Last of Us with a blank slate protagonist. JRPGs, maybe partly because they thrive on melodrama, tend to have protagonists who are well defined, from their bizarre fashion sense to their finely tuned angst level.

On the other hand, there are RPGs where you input the character’s name. That’s the tell-tale sign the creator wants you to imagine the character for yourself.

Real People Have A Past

The other day, my friend sent me a nostalgic screenshot of our Dark Souls 2 co-op playthrough:

We can see I apparently had a character named “Lost Dahlia.” I have no memory of why I named the character this, but the word “lost” suggests I couldn’t resist implying a backstory. Real people have a past. The merest suggestion of a past of a fictional character will lend realism, too.

If you tested an early prototype of Veiled Age, you may remember you could choose which of five nations your character was from. In the current version, you’re always from a particular village in the forest nation of Amloth. This is because as the project became more ambitious in terms of story, I realized wanted to give the player character (“you”) a proper origin story where you get hooked into the plot and have to leave home. You are not some disembodied soul isekai’d into a fantasy setting. You grew up here. You know people.

Eventually, I want to bring back a choice of 5 nations, adding them one by one when there is enough of a storyline around it. Dragon Age Origins is my template for how to do this well. The first chapter of the game was completely different depending on your character creation choices. And each background would come up again as a subplot or quest in the main story.

Real People Have Subtle Traits

To me, humanizing the player character isn’t just about having 5 different pre-written storylines, though. I want to give players ways to express themselves in a way that the game stores away for later.

For example, in an early scene where you’re expected to hunt an animal for dinner, you have an option to refuse on account of being a vegetarian. If you choose it, I add “vegetarian” to the list of one-word traits that describe your character (female, elf, hermit, clumsy, etc). Why? Just in case I think of a reason to use it later. I reject the game design convention that says your choices are either totally irrelevant or result in some shocking plot twist. With every choice, the player describes their character just a little more. And I want the game to say to the player: hey, I see you. Now that we’re in a fancy dinner scene, I remember that your character is a vegetarian. And that cleric remembers your snide comment about religion two chapters ago.

Not every choice needs a consequence. But I’ve never seen a video game even try to keep long-term track of “random acts of self-expression” this way.

[Worldbuilding] Humans are Vanilla, Humans are Weird

What’s the deal with “humans” in fantastical settings? It’s common to see a main cast that’s a human or two alongside a bunch of freaks. What I want to know is, how should we human authors imagine non-human characters react to humanity? What are humans like from the outside perspective?

Option 1: Humans Are Normal

When a sci-fi/fantasy world setting has numerous sentient races, the other races usually tend to be caricatures of real-life human diversity. Klingons are hotblooded and aggressive, Vulcans are coldly logical. Dwarves are masculine, elves are feminine. Giants are big and dumb, fairies are small and tricky. So what are humans like? Humans are normal, obviously. They give us a grounded perspective. Just as a comedy routine needs a straight-man, your monster people / aliens / robots need a human or two to bounce off of.

Option 2: Humans Seem Weird

But what if humans are the strange ones? In Sci-Fi settings especially, non-human characters sometimes comment that humans are especially tenacious, ambitious, and unpredictable. Villains may ridicule humans for their sentimentality, while robots admire it. Like all fiction, this is propaganda for the author’s values. “Human” traits are code for whatever the author thinks really matters over and above lame things like logic.

Option 3: Humans ARE Weird

There is yet a stranger route for defining humans in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. You could make them actually weird:

In Dark Souls lore, humans are the titular “dark souls” who are a rising threat to the old dying gods. Humans are uniquely associated with various ominous creepy things, like an undead curse and a surreal Abyss. The creators of the game turned the humans-are-normal assumption on its head and gave humans a vague eldritch horror flavor.

Humans in Veiled Age

In Veiled Age, humans are pretty normal from our perspective (we’re humans after all) but they stand out in two main ways.

1. The human birth rate, which is normal to us, is notably high compared to Elves and Dwarves. As a result, they are more numerous and widespread, despite being a younger race.

2. Humans were created by the same god who created the Golden Veil, which protects the planet from The Nightmare. So, for both cultural and supernatural reasons, humans are associated with “holy” things in the setting.

[Opinion] On Man Vs Machine in Creativity

“Interactive fiction, huh? Are you using AI to write it?”

Thankfully, this question has only come from people who have not yet read any of it. The answer is no. Every last word was written in the way we all wrote before 2022. Much of it is first written with a paper notebook or a typewriter, because it’s less distracting.

Right now, it seems like people fall into one of two camps regarding AI in creative work. To some, it’s a blight upon the internet, feeding us all meaningless slop at the expense of real writers and artists. To others, it’s just the latest technology revolution, which will as usual be decried by luddites and displaced workers, but will ultimately advance human civilization once again.

I feel both of these viewpoints are somewhat correct. AI-generated content can be very impressive for what it is. It can also be quite annoying to see it flooding search results and feeds with random trash. But let’s not forget that low-effort clickbait trash has been a blight upon the internet for a long time. So is my view, the evils of “AI slop” has less to do with AI and more to do with the internet’s original sin: advertising.

I am not an AI expert, but it seems to me that AI-generated content will always have an impressionistic quality. It can imitate the typical form or vibe of anything you ask for, but since it lacks any conscious understanding of what it creates, there will always be something that is subtly incoherent or otherwise lacking in insight.

For my purposes, this means there is a category difference between AI images and AI writing. With writing, you have to think through whether what you’ve written really works, and I don’t mean grammatically. I think we’re fast reaching the point where AI can consistently write beautiful-sounding paragraphs, maybe even paired with a decent plot outline. But I’m skeptical we’re anywhere near the point where it would seem to have a compelling creative vision.

But illustrations are a different story. In an image, the impressionistic, uncritical, random quality of AI-generated content is less of a detriment. As you may know, Veiled Age contains both AI images and human-painted images that were paid commissions.

To elaborate, some illustrations are generated by an AI that was fed my text description of the thing. Often, I want to show the reader something specific, yet conceptually simple and easy to visualize. AI excels at this. Here’s a background image I’m using in Secret of Gloam Lake:

Prompt: fishing village on a cold misty lake at dawn with pine trees in the background atmospheric watercolor --ar 16:9 --test --creative --upbeta

If you look at the details of this image, you’ll see some typical AI nonsense. However, the game’s UI will cover most of this, and you aren’t really meant to look at it closely. It works perfectly well for atmospheric purposes.

Other times, I need something with a higher level of intentionality. First and foremost, I want portraits for the main characters that convey their personality, background, culture, and so on. Besides that, Veiled Age is a fantasy world. AI imitates its data set, so it can produce elves and unicorns all day, but it struggles when I veer into the truly weird or original.

So what do I do if I really need a morally ambivalent demonic moth queen who collects books? I pay a concept artist. I discussed the concept back and forth with Alice Haun, and she made the perfect thing:

On the one hand, AI is a long way from producing something as awesome and specific to the details of the story as Alice’s portrait above. On the other hand, it’s impractical to ask an artist to create, say, 50 illustrations of that caliber for a relatively short story.

For me, it’s not as simple as loving or hating AI. It’s about using tools where they are appropriate, which means they usually take a back seat to let the human effort shine through. Like when we take one of Alice’s hand-painted characters, color match the speech bubbles in the UI, and use various AI-generated atmospheric backgrounds to match the scene where each conversation happens.

I don’t know what AI will be capable of in the future, so I won’t say I would never use it for this or that. But I think AI is at its best when thought of as a tool in the hands of a creative person, rather than some magical creative force on its own.