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10 Tricks from Psychology for Making Better Characters
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10 Tricks from Psychology for Making Better Characters,
2104

Game Design, Lecture

Katherine Isbister
Professor, Rensselaer (RPI)
This session explores ways to make characters more real, interesting, and fun for players. The goal is to expand the audience with characters that appeal to a broader set of gamers. With the increasing powers of today’s graphics and AI, it’s easy to create an elaborate and expensive, but somehow "flat" character. A cheaper and often more effective shortcut is to use a little psychology. The more developers know about how people "read" other people in real life interactions, the better their chances of making an engaging and fun game character.

In this session, attendees learn a few key ideas from social psychology that can help make characters that feel alive and really enhance a player’s gaming experience. Topics include: using social roles to set and deliver on player expectations, managing first impressions for maximum appeal and character clarity, the power of body language, using research about how gender affects gaming to build characters that appeal to women, and crafting player-characters that work at all four psychological levels for players: fantasy, visceral, cognitive, and social. The discussion will also address how developers can make sure achieving the effects they’d like—incorporating a bit of character psychology testing into their play- testing cycle.

The session includes examples from well-known games (including Jak and Daxter, The Sims, Half-Life, Halo, Zelda:Windwaker, and others) and look at why their characters work from a psychological point of view. You’ll get 10 easy tricks you can apply to your own character design process. These are relevant for artists and animators, as well as programmers.

Attendees leave the lecture with an understanding of a few key social psychological concepts that they can use to guide their character design choices. They leave with a practical understanding based upon seeing examples of these principles in action in well-known games, and have 10 tricks they can use right away in their own game design and production. They also have a list of sources for following up on principles of special interest.

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