Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency for 80 Days and Beyond

[Music] excellent what thank you all for coming I think I'm supposed to remind you to sort of turn off your mobile phones and possibly at the end like fill out your speaker evaluation forms though I might wait and see how things go before I tell you to do that all right excellent good okay so it's great it's great to see all of you here so my talk is actually meant to be complementary to CJ's talk the lives of others which is tomorrow at 1:20 p.m. in room three zero one six West Hall so go see that as well I mean you already here so I don't need to tell you to come to mind if this is a topic that interests you it's going to be a really great talk so CJ will be telling you all about how to use NPCs to increase player empathy whereas I'm going to spend the next 20 or so minutes trying to convince you to limit hurt stymie and stifle your protagonists to give your NPCs room to breathe so actually my talk title is a complete lie we're going to do the opposite of forgetting protagonists

we're actually going to I'm actually going to try and convince you to make them pay because they've had it their way for too long and many times at the expense of other characters so it might seem a little bit strange that I am up here talking about writing NPCs with agency when the game that I write that you're probably most familiar with is inkle Studios eightydaze which is a massively branching anti-colonial steampunk choosier an adventure story based on Jules Verne's adventure novel around the world in 80 days which is kind of fundamentally around two whitish Europeans going around the world on a silly bet encountering people cultures and politics in fleeting glimpses so the set up of our of our story of verne story really and the mechanics really almost lend itself to shallow characterization and the playing out of protagonist power fantasies it would have been very easy for us to make a game which just retold The Last Samurai over and over just to chewed over story of a white dude coming into a native culture and just saving the day but this

is exactly the story that we don't want to tell so we develop strategies to give our NPCs life agency integrity and to balance that with the demands of 10 this particular kind of story and today I'm gonna try and share with you some of our design thinking and our strategies with you and hope that you find it useful basically if we could make a game full of engaging and diverse NPCs with agency given the original novel could have been easily adapted to be a tourism simulator you can probably do the same with whatever limitations you're working with or at least that's the idea so we have I think personally spent too much time fridging girlfriends and little brothers because we're afraid of hurting protagonists we only kind of dare hurt them by proxy we think players will be turned off by experiencing a protagonist and loss or confusion or stupidity or failure who wants to play a loser but that's something that seems true but actually I don't think it is in fact I think it's winning all the time that seems fake true immersiveness

necessitates loss failure pain and frustration because do you remember that bit in the matrix when agent Smith tells neo about the very first matrix that's you know incredibly perfect this world without suffering where everyone was happy it's one of my favorite bits in the film because obviously a simulation of perfection is bound to fail everyone rejected it they lost entire crops I think is the line so living is the simulation of perfection is bound to fail and we're obviously going to keep trying to wake up from it but it also fails because I think immersion is social we want to play with other people we want to engage with people who feel real and and real people demand things of us being the specialist snowflake is a is a lonely fantasy there is a reason that the Truman Show I'm I'm dating myself with these references aren't I damn there is a reason that The Truman Show is about a guy realizing that his surroundings and relationships aren't real and trying to escape rather than to Jack further in everything in the Truman Show is all

about Truman but eventually that starts to feel shallow and unsatisfying he doesn't want the simple transactional easy relationship with his actor wife Laura Linney he wants the thrill and unexpectedness in the risk of Natascha McElhone and of course he does so why do games keep trying to give players Laura Linney's with perfect hair and saccharine smiles when what we clearly want is Natascha McElhone and her crappy apartment and Hurd lating blowout truman deserves someone real and messy and so do we but the thing is games protagonist aren't Truman who wants to Truman who wants to wake up from the self-absorbed dream they're Gregory House from season one of house they're the obnoxious jerk who gets away with their behavior because they can somehow solve all the problems basically the fictional equivalent of that one rude guest at the dinner party that never shuts up the thing is everything all bits around house everyone else has swallowed up in the supernova of his ego and the totality of his brilliance and it's a

great TV show but what if all TV shows were like that oh crap sorry genius is clearly a popular fantasy but jokes aside when it comes to television it's so easy to understand how limiting it would be to the kinds of stories that we could tell to the kinds of characters and ideas and themes that we could explore if every TV protagonist literally everyone was like house and if house was or any model for what a TV protagonist was so the thing is we have to sniff if we see how limiting it is with TV then surely it's as limiting with games and we have to stop letting games protagonist get away with this this kind of structural centrality these assumptions about what it means to be a game's protagonist and have agency can lead us to unwittingly reinforce unhelpful cultural and social norms to keep making the same game protagonist over and over again because we're mistaking variations on a theme for variety we kind of we need to start

thinking about agency player agency as an effect and a technique within a wider context agency isn't necessarily a goal in of itself it shouldn't be treated like that so let's let's talk a little bit specifically about eightydaze for tagging is passport ooh and how we approached his place in the game world so in 80 days pass parties perceived whiteness and masculinity and Frenchness never go unremarked we don't treat them as alien normal or automatically powerful and in fact we mark bits as a map as off-limits because of them we have NPCs deny you as passport to Authority and question pass parties motives because of it whiteness and masculinity make you an outsider in 80 days even more often than it allows you within a circle we remind players of past parties social and cultural limitations in his context NPCs will often discuss their plans and goals and ideas with pass party but we very rarely allow pass party to make the choice make a choice for them he gets involved in

revolutions riots plots and and NPC's adventures but he doesn't drive them yes he can make me too beautiful revolutionary and shout alongside him in protest against a despot we can't lead the revolution because he wasn't the one oppressed in the first place and because the revolution was already happening without him the you know and the thing is he can't do the liberating because he wasn't the one in oppressed because often the issues our NPCs struggle with our political and systemic fall beyond the ability to of one person even a games protagonist to solve so well that boils down to is that passport - in a traditional chooser and adventure sense actually goes around the world doing very little at all we kind of we limit his actions and his power but not the players agency so ok let's define player agency very loosely as the ability to interact meaningfully meaningfully with the game world but let's qualify that a little bit more if it's about making say

significant changes to the game world the words that we need to be looking at here are meaningful and significant I think so look at your friendships in the real world you can probably remember a time when a friend of yours was going through something a break-up trouble at work or at home and they told you about it you listen to them you might have even offered them an opinion they might have done what you suggested but they might not have that doesn't really matter you're still part of that story your relationship isn't based on the other person following your directives exactly or on you making a decision for them unless you have some incredibly unhealthy friendships but so the thing is the meaning the significance of it comes from the conversations you've had the connection you share the relationship itself the fact that you care about their problem you may have made a significant change in their life simply by listening so this is something that I want to about more that player agency doesn't have to translate into action in a traditional sense even if a player can't directly affect something if they can have an opinion or an emotional response

or a reaction for a game to allow them the space to have an opinion can be as powerful as allowing them to do something and giving protagonists this type of agency actually can allow NPCs then to have more development and depths to pursue their goals without being constantly overridden and overwritten by the protagonist overdeveloped sense of importance one of GDC and I'm losing my voice all right so let's look at an example of this from Bioware's Dragon Age 2 so how many of you here have played this game alright excellent great this is gonna be good so the thing is Dragon Age 2 gets gets a bit unfairly maligned I think Dragon Age twos my I think it's actually probably my favorite Bioware game possibly one of my favorite games of all time and all of that is down to the NPC's I can still load up any one of my 30s or so saves and feel right at home not because I remember exactly where I am in the main plot but because I know I know exactly where I am based on the characters around me and my relationships with them those

relationships pull me into the world and they feel real the characters in Dragon Age 2 feel real in a way that most NPCs and games don't and that's because they often act independently and sometimes they lie which always never happens in a game so spoilers berta in act 2 of Dragon Age 2 you the player find out that Isabela has been lying to you for almost all the way through the game so no matter what the state of your relationship with her how friendly you are or whether you're in a romance with her or not she betrays and abandons you because she has pressures acting upon her that you didn't really know about so it's entirely possible for Isabela to leave the party permanently leaving your companion quest hanging indefinitely denying you the player and you the protagonist any resolution to her action beyond rage or belated justification and even if she does return to you you have to deal with the consequences of her betrayal her independent action you can't control what she does and the only thing that you can control here is how

you react to it than how you feel and that's really powerful I think we need more NPCs like Isabella if games are ever be going to be more than entitlement simulators so Matt Bach talked about this at his GDC Micra talk last year and this is just such a great term for I don't know what what most games can you know often feel like he talks about how the story is the characters and the mechanics of games are up video games especially are often designed to give us exactly what we want uncritically and this is a problem because who ever heard of that great novel where the protagonist got exactly what they wanted all of the time yeah that sounds like a real page-turner so looking at games in this way as entitlement simulators also highlights what's wrong about most romances in games why they feel transactional and goal-oriented how can we believe in NPCs romantic desire if they don't have any other kinds of desires if they feel like skill checks rather than people we need to give NPCs agency and integrity of

romances and games are ever going to feel like more than just playing with ourselves as it were so let's keep talking about Dragon Age pretty much every single one of the romantic options in Dragon Age to stymie is the protagonist in some way which I love I'm going to talk about the most dramatic example of this and it only just happens to be my own champions romantic partner Anders Anders is a mage possessed by the spirit of Justice who occasionally gets all glowy eyed and kills people he is not Fenris a runaway slave with tattoos which occasionally get glowy and they kill people so just just to make it clear all right so whether he's in a relationship with you or not Anders actually chooses his political ideals over his personal loyalties and commits an act of terrorism that starts a war which actually goes on to play out in in Dragon Age Inquisition so it's a really really great moment in the game you sort of start suspecting that he's like sneaking around and lying and instead of finding out that he's having

an affair and cheating on you he turns out to have been plotting a terrorist atrocity what I love about this is that there is no way to stop him or to convince him out of it or even find out what he's planning no matter how many times you shag or even if you move him into your see mansion in high town and if you're romancing him the other characters give you the protagonist a hard time about the fact that your boyfriend's a secret terrorist just kind of fair enough right his actions reflect on you because you chose to romance him usually the game protagonists actions ripple out into the world and the entire game is about seeing the consequences of your choices the protagonist choices play out but in this instance you're the one stuck having to cope with and deal with the consequences of an NPCs actions what this does is is as well as begin to move us away from that kind of goal-oriented conception of romance where you win a romance by getting a character to sleep with you but in Dragon Age - shacking up isn't the end of your story it's the beginning it sounds really out there I know but

the game actually gives you content and dialogue and quests with a character even after you've slept with them almost as if one shagged doesn't tell you everything you need to know about a person in perpetuity I guess if these romances have a wind state it's staying together and is act contrary to the interests and goals of the protagonist and the experience of the game is made richer for it I personally think that Dragon Age 2 is a milestone for the treatment of relationships and NPCs and games so giving NPCs control and and limiting control and power can create interesting effects anime and experiences in games even beyond romantic fulfillment so I wrote a couple of guest islands for failed better games wonderful game summer see any of you played it here yeah as well okay most of you that's great so if for those of you haven't it's a text II literary game of darkness and exploration set in a vast subterranean underworld I'm deliberately trying to not look at Alexis Kennedy as I say this

I wrote Iroh the I I wrote a place called the Isle of cats which is a kind of Smuggler's Haven a really morally dubious place a dangerous place you have to pick a patron on the island and then perform a series of quests to progress and at one point one of the patrons ziyarah demands that you sacrifice a member of your crew to her to allow their memories to be harvested in in this incredibly gruesome and horrible way it's worse than murder and there is no way to access the rest of the content on this island without giving Zara what she wants there is a real cost to the protagonist but to the player as well you can retain your in-game morals but you'll have to give up on the story and the rewards that would result in completing a quest the protagonist really doesn't get to have everything and certainly not for free and that's the entire point that's how we establish the creepiness and drive home the danger but the thing is the player isn't entitled to the end of this story and even though there's no way to

subvert or Trix I era the player is not left without a choice there is there is a choice and it's not to play so papers please is a really interesting counter example that helps make clear I think the distinction between agency and control between agency and power so in papers please you have all the agency in the world to decide how to spend your time what documents to pass how to spend your money but your power is hugely and pointedly limited part of that limitation is by making the NPC's in the game demand things of you demand and need more things then you can provide forcing you to make choices and compromise and fail giving you the agency actually highlights how powerless you are in this world in playing you actually form a kind of kinship with the NPCs that you nominally dictate to you are all in fact powerless in the face of Aristarchus tyrannical bureaucracy so all of these examples I think show us show us ways NPCs can help make games that go beyond the power fantasy

basically so in fact the way in which we treat our NPCs in 80 days ties entirely into the theme but it's also a huge part of how our players interact with and understand the world in a very real way NPCs are a key part of our world building we explore wider social and cultural political social and cultural themes through personal concerns and entanglements the world feels complex because the way our NPCs think about react to and engage with the world is complex and often contradictory so this feels like a much more elegant and natural way to unfold things like backstory and politics and plot so in 80 days almost every single NPC has slightly different opinion of the artificers guild so they have their own entirely biased and personal in particular perspective and that's what the player experiences world buildings through NPCs in this way actually makes the world a kind of counter-intuitively I think feel more coherent and alive by you know even more so than offering the player a journal entry or a singular

definitive perspective it kind of gives the player the space to make up their own mind rather than having their mind made up for them there is no definitive truth about the artifice in a world building documents somewhere we developed our ideas about about the artificers guild through writing the NPC's opinions and and and our engagements with them that's what makes the fantasy feel nuanced and grounded so the reason that this works though also in 80 days is because there are so many NPCs and eightydaze and so many perspectives so no NPC has to bear the weight of entirely representing a culture or gender or a race which is kind of the quickest way to end up with them with stereotypes and mouthpieces or merely vessels for plot and story which is entirely what we don't want so the way around one of the easiest ways to avoid this is by doing the research and I know this doesn't really sound particularly sexy but it really is trust

me so beyond just having more characters and not just tokens you need to do this research whether it's about a hiss we're your game is about a historical period or a situation or a particular identity look for real-world examples or dilemmas of dilemmas or people or places or cultures to help inform and add nuance and and add nuance to your portrayal of your NPCs don't give your NPC the most obvious opinion you think they would have in some cases you might need to do research to discover this stereotype that you need to avoid do this it will be worth it this is the very first head or so don't fall at this one it's lazy and it's boring and it's so easy to avoid I promise you so part of the do it part of doing the research is also as writers and creators are asking ourselves whether this is our story to tell in 80 days some NPC stories are simply not full pass by - they're not for the player they're not for strangers tourists or outsiders and that's okay that can actually be a good thing this is a question we should ask ourselves when

we're writing games and design and designing NPCs how much of this is for the player how much of this is for the protagonist if we want to breathe life into our NPCs I think that kind of has to be something left over for them something that is just for them and not just in service of player protagonist or plot and that might mean telling the story in a slightly different way than you imagined so there are multiple times in 80 days where passport two encounters a person or a situation and can't do anything to influence them because of a particular set of circumstances so it's been really interesting for us to watch players respond to that in forums and blogs I think it tells us quite a lot about player expectation and how hard we have to work to subvert that to make worthwhile NPCs so in Brisbane in 80 days you discover you you encounter a girl from the indigenous Murray tribe and she's working as a maid in the hotel that you're staying at you can engage her in conversation and she tells you about the depredations her people have suffered as a result of colonialization

and she's written a letter of complaint outlining outlining this which she wants to get printed in the local newspaper to gain attention for her cause and you as passport to as a protagonist realise that it's unlikely that the white settler owned newspaper is going to print to any such note especially not on the request of an Aboriginal girl so you can offer to take the letter to the newspaper yourself to use your whiteness and maleness and your protagonism basically to help her but she refuses she doesn't trust you because you were because of all these things because you're an outsider because you're white in your mail you're closer to the oppressor than you are to her and all the good intentions in the world can't change that and what is wonderful and perfectly understandable is that there is a heated debate in various forums about how to get the Murray girl to trust you with her letter this is not oh wait sorry this is not surprising games train you the protagonist to fix problems or rather they teach you that all problems can be fixed in by protagonists if you try hard enough but here in this case it's not your problem and you can't fix it solving it using

your protagonist white privilege actually would make the solution part of the problem pass what you can try to her rescue he can't really solve racism by posting a single letter and your protagonist can't get past years of ingrained distrust of whiteness and his ignorance of local culture and politics in the course of one conversation she's never going to open up to passport to you no matter what item you the player try and use from your travels so but awesomely enough when I checked back this thread on the wiki someone had actually made this post which is great maybe it's a life lesson sometimes no matter what you do to try and help bad things will happen exactly anonymously Kia contributed this is not a bug this is not a bug this is a feature this is the entire point of the game but it is such an unfamiliar notion I think to people who play games and it's such an unfamiliar structure that inhabiting the skin of the protagonist can be limiting as well as liberating that you will meet someone that does not immediately want to open up to you the protagonism want

your involvement it feels unfair to the player to be shown a problem and not allowed to fix it but it's important we couldn't have done it any other way without completely undermining the kind of story that we wanted to tell we had to deny the player that fairness fantasy their white Savior fantasy we deliberately steal power from passport to you and give it to the NPC's and that's why the game works as it does because the way in which we understand an assign agency is not a neutral design decision as though there's any such thing and how could we write stories of indigenous power and ingenuity with our words if pass bar 2 is mechanically solving all of our NPC's problems for them it might feel unfair to the player but maybe unfair isn't an worst thing a game can be this is one of the myths of equality and multiculturalism efendim isn't feminism that I particularly despise but it's that's socially good and progressive outcomes are gonna come without a cost but you can't deny this truth in game design if you want someone who is silent to speak someone else might have to shut up for a while with

eightydaze we went in wanting to be respectful to other cultures and people in parrot ISM that meant that we had to balance the agency in the game as we would difficulty and challenge this was not only a question of design or storytelling on mechanics but a question of ethics so giving NPCs agency can genuinely be an ethical imperative so specifically one of our stated purposes was going in was to make a game which undermined the power fantasy the fantasy of white history and the fantasy of imperialism and the Imperial fantasy requires that the struggles of colonized people of people of color of women and working-class people and minorities are either ignored or enshrined in victims of porn in pornographic narratives of victimhood and suffering and victimhood is all-encompassing victims I exist to be saved or pitied but never respected victims are acted upon rather than acting in fact victims are the quintessential NPCs and if we don't deliberately and specifically work to undermine that all of our NPCs are going to be victims even if we don't intend

them to be just as we need to deliberately and specifically work to make sure that protagonist is not synonymous with hero we need to do this for NPCs as well and the more that we make these distinctions the more we interrogate these assumptions the more we'll be able to shift focus to NPCs to allow them power in space and depth and importance and I think this is vital to the progress of games narrative as a craft and to video games as a medium we need to come to an almost entirely new understanding of the meaning of protagonism inner agency and to find a definition of agency that can assimilate a loss of control of protagonism that works outside of primacy of games that can function outside of entitlement and that's my talk so thank you very much well you