Notes on character empathy in games

The following is an essay of sorts, dating back to late 2016. I was trying to make sense of character empathy in games for a project I was working on at E-Line Media.

Long-distance character empathy

After playing more Massive Chalice, I’ve been puzzling over how players empathize with characters they don’t regularly interact with. (It may be jumping the gun, as we haven’t yet formed a concrete system for combat or dialogue… but considering how character empathy works could point us in a good direction, which I think was already happening when we discussed how WTT vs. CTB conveys character individuality)

For a game that follows a time-elapsed model like Massive Chalice and Crusader Kings II, there will be extended periods where you do not interact with certain characters. From my experience playing MC and CK2, I find this mechanic usually dampens empathy, because whenever a character leaves my immediate influence, I stop thinking about them (e.g. MC - I make a character a regent, they’re removed from combat; CK2 - I send off my child to be married in another kingdom).

While this long-distance relationship with NPCs isn’t a big problem for MC or CK2, since those games are concerned with lineage not individuality (grand strategy games as a whole tend to this), it’s still something to be wary of. A natural solution is to fill these time lapses with dramatic encounters that humanize the characters.

But how and to what extent will the encounters humanize the characters? What is the desired level of empathy we want the players to have for the characters?

Dramatic vs. mundane characterization

The problem I see is this:

Episodic encounters in character lives are a great way of establishing dramatic arcs. However, in their current state, encounters do little to facilitate emotional empathy or understanding what a character is like on a personal level.

According to the game structure overview doc and meetings we’ve had on the topic, a character’s life can be conceptualized in an obituary style outline of dramatic events:

Aidna was a great hunter. She was stolen by Uldra as a baby, but her father Henes threatened to burn the forest down and got her back. When she was a teenager, she encountered three blind Stallo who passed a single eyeball back and forth between them. She stole their eye to barter for their treasure, but tricked them and ran off with both the treasure and their eye. She was killed before her time when a raiding party of Chudes cut her down as she defended her village.

This is great as far as action is conveyed, but IMO it lacks something that defines the character as a relatable individual. After reading this description, I know that Aidna’s life was full of adventure, she probably had a strong personality, but there’s not much of an emotional connection. By contrast, a lot of IRL obituaries also sound like this (taken from a Seattle obituary):

His nickname “Corky” was given as a young boy because of his boundless energy. He worked tirelessly to build the family business and raise a family. He was actively involved in his children’s’ lives, coaching and helping with many grade school CYO basketball and baseball teams. He loved to watch his children and grandchildren play their various sports and take them fishing. He took a great deal of satisfaction in watching his children and grandchildren grow up together on the family farm and taught all of them about the importance of faith, family and hard work

The language is actually not too sentimental. The description is just full of information about Corky’s mundane personal life, and that goes a long way to painting a picture of how he was understood and valued by his community. When looking at other games, it seems like one key to humanizing a character is expressing that mundanity in a variety of ways.

Some approaches:

Maximize familiarity by offering higher frequency of opportunities to interact with character, witness the character behave in consistent patterns of behavior/growth (A minimum number of encounters per character? Three battles was hardly enough in Massive Chalice)
Glimpses of personal lives and relationships, either by profile view and post-event summary (Dwarf Fortress, and to lesser extent This War of Mine, thoughts & emotional states), dialogue (Oxenfree’s casual dialogue, Bioware character conversations), or watching it happen (cutscenes, in-game or not)

Dwarf Fortress is an interesting example that I keep going back to. Even though DF is essentially a god game, it’s far superior to something like Thea: The Awakening (write-up coming soon), where your workers have no personality and just go from task to task. Dwarves lead autonomous lives–they drink, work, make art, admire doors, argue, have families, have dreams and fears, and express thoughts and emotional states about the world around them. See: Dodok Inodod, a crafter from Dwarf Fortress. The last couple of paragraphs are great. Here’s another slightly scary one which is a trip

Obviously this level of complexity would be crazy to replicate in any game besides DF. But I wonder if there could be a way to express this on a simpler level…

e.g. Aidna and Benne encounter a group of three stallo in the woods. It goes badly and Benne is killed, but Aidna escapes. In addition to a mourning sequence post-encounter, we also get a lasting change to Aidna herself. Perhaps a character profile description could display something like:

Aidna feels grief for the death of Benne. Although she disagreed with Benne over many things, she respected him and valued him deeply as a friend. She feels guilt over her actions. She does not wish to go to the woods again until her sorrow and nightmares have passed.

Maybe Aidna could even be temporarily restricted from being placed in the woods on the strategic layer? Idk!

OTOH, the encounter could go well, Benne survives and Aidna’s description looks like this:

Aidna feels pride and accomplishment for defeating the 3 Stallo with Benne. Although she disagreed with Benne over many things, she valued his quick wits and cool-headedness in that situation. She feels pride for her actions. She is eager to go to the woods again and have more adventures.

Benne’s description:

Benne feels relief and accomplishment for defeating the 3 Stallo with Aidna. Although he feels that Aidna is brash and aggressive, he valued her strong heart and bravery in that situation. He feels pride for his actions. He is eager to go to the woods again and have more adventures.

This still doesn’t address how the encounters themselves will convey empathy. It might just amount to the quality of writing (especially in the intro/outro sequences), not sure, but hopefully we can reach a point where the encounter & strategic gameplay syncs up with characterizations. Or else something, something ludonarrative dissonance (I still haven’t played Bioshock Infinite but I hear that was a major complaint)…

tl;dr

I’m wondering how character empathy will be conveyed in the game, which mainly stems from the fact that strategy and tactics games usually don’t function as vehicles for empathy (“godlike” perspectives generally distance a player from the characters more than games with a small cast or single protagonist do). Obviously things will be more clear as we work on the combat and dialogue systems. A couple of additional solutions would be to: (1) have plenty(?) of fairly rich encounters for characters to experience in their lifetime; (2) display character emotional states, casual dialogue, or even cutscenes.

I’ll probably attempt (and fail) to play some Dwarf Fortress this weekend.