Blog - Writing Characters
Thursday, April 17, 2008Today it occurred to me a way in which my writing has improved:
I've gotten much better at writing characters.
This is due to a shift in how I write, I think.
I was for a long time in a big kick about writing stories set in everyday reality. I did so under the exploration of the idea that there's enough drama in our lives that there is no reason to enhance it with the fantastical.
I would base characters on friends of mine, people I knew, or very often: me.
The result? They were pretty bland characters.
Even my best completed piece suffers from characters that aren't as interesting as they perhaps should be.
I don't mean to imply that my friends or I are uninteresting people.
I built characters around what I found interesting in them, after all...
I just don't think I was good at capturing their soul, if not also their voice.
A guy in my screenwriting class at the moment is attempting a biopic, and our professor pointed out that it is very difficult to make biographical films that have a strong sense of personality in their characters, due to the fact that the writer must inevitably invent on their own the inner secret souls of real life people. That's a difficult risk to commit to.
I suppose the same is true when writing my friends into characters.
That doesn't excuse me for writing bland characters based on me, though. Perhaps I do imagine myself as a bit of a dullard... ;)
For a screenwriting class I took earlier this year, however, I had to write a spec-script episode of 30 Rock. When reading it a couple weeks back, a friend of mine said I had totally nailed the voices of all the characters.
This may have been the first step in my recovery, although I didn't see it at the time. I couldn't rely on my old tricks when I wrote that episode. Again, I can champion the wonder that is constraints.
For a class I had last quarter in writing for games, I created a main (player) character for my game project, which pleasantly surprised my professor.
She expected the protagonist of my game, which was set in the early Paleolithic era, to be your stereotypical hulking, brutish caveman. Instead, I asked the player to step into the role of a curious little adolescent girl.
Granted, I'm still not especially proud of that character, as I perhaps didn't invest as much time into developing her "voice" as I should have (voice might not be the right word as none of the characters in my game can actually talk...)
It was, however, an example of being given a world far removed from reality, forcing me to actually make up an original character.
Now I'm writing a sort of epic fantasy piece: a challenge I gave myself as I've never really written fantasy before. (Dark secret revealed: I'm not a fan of fantasy fare!)
As an aspiring game writer though, I figure I shouldn't let that stop me from writing it well, given how many games would fit under the fantasy umbrella...
In any case, it seems the experimentation with a completely out-there fantasy world has allowed me to play with some very fun characters. My inner dislike of the fantasy-genre has caused me to create a world and characters that take the clichés of fantasy trappings and turn them upside-down and inside-out.
Apparently the results are good: everyone in my class has been raving about how fun the characters in the story are.
...
Of course, maybe I'm just over-thinking all of this, and in reality my character-writing has improved simply because I've written more and more and improved over time. ;) posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 9:11 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Blog - Virtual Pets
Friday, March 21, 2008In an earlier entry I talked about the conflict between having a game be suitably casual to attract a casual audience, yet have characters you could invest in.
I'm wondering right now about virtual pet software (again, I also have a big interest in Artificial Life thanks to the Creatures A-Life virtual pet series...)
A virtual pet seems like an interesting way to bridge this gap between powerful characters within casual gaming.
It may, in fact, have lead me to answer my question from earlier about how the Sims soars as a success despite asking the user to watch people brush their teeth and clean the dishes and other dull activities.
Your sims, after all, are basically virtual pets, just repackaged as living doll house dolls. Make no mistake, however: we keep them and play with them as pets.
In any case, back to the point of how virtual pets can bridge the gap between character depth and casual play. The entire "play" of virtual pet software is in getting invested in a character: the pet. And yet, most virtual pet programs seem pretty casual to me: you just load them up every now and then when you're bored to feed them, play with them a bit, etc.
Most are far more "casual" than owning a real pet. The norns from Creatures are frozen in suspended animation until I choose to acknowledge them by opening up the game. The same is true with my dog in Dogz.
If I don't feel like feeding them that day, I don't have to, as I can just chose not to open up the program. But if I have some time to kill while, say, waiting for the bus, I can load up my dog in Dogz on my mobile phone and have something to interact with for a bit.
Of course, my dog in Dogz isn't particularly that deep of a character, as its world is so static. It only interacts with me. I don't even get the sense that I can alter the dog's virtual 'soul' that much through my actions.
The norns of Creatures are a deeper than that, by a considerable degree, as is evidenced by the outcry against my friend who ran the website devoted to torturing them physically and emotionally.
That however, begs the question again of memory that I discussed in my above entry on characters in casual gaming.
Creatures has much more "history" in its virtual worlds.
Generations of virtual life pass through the user's fingertips, as the norns interact realistically with each other and their world.
This makes it almost like a little soap opera virtual world that the user can try to influence.
That, however, means it begs the user to remember all that has occurred, and who begat who.
Even so, I don't get the sense that necessarily the user is required to remember any of that information.
Life goes on in the virtual worlds of the Creatures just as it does in the real world, regardless of what the user does or doesn't do.
So, the game can still effectively function as a casual game experience: log in when you like to feed them, bounce the ball around with them for a bit, and maybe teach them something new...
...with the option of following the drama in their life if you so choose.
The Sims takes a very similar approach, and to its phenomenal success (despite my criticisms from earlier, which, mind you, also apply to the Creatures series.)
Casual, with the option of more depth and investment, seems like a powerful paradigm to shoot for. posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 11:47 PM 0 Comments Links to this post