Player Character Design Facilitating Emotional Depth in MMORPGs

This work proposes that massively multiplayer online role-playing games can achieve deeper emotional immersion by giving player characters a "virtual mind," a prosthetic consciousness that moves beyond the combat statistics and generic classes that dominate the genre. Developed within the Purgatory Engine and Ouroboros research project at the Interactive Institute's Zero Game Studio, the approach draws on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the Big Five personality model, and findings from psychology and cognitive science. Its central argument is that individually authored characters cannot scale to thousands of players, so depth must instead come from a generative system. In place of conventional numerical levelling, the Ouroboros design substitutes "being-values" and organizes the character around a Mind System, Story Daemons, and a Metaphysics System.

The mind model layers a two-dimensional affect framework, spanning emotion, mood, sentiment, and personality according to focus and duration, over a Five Factor trait structure and Maslow's being-values. A Freudian-inspired division into id, ego, and superego is realized as a weighted semantic network rather than literal components. Notable design choices include omitting basic biological drives in the first iteration, modeling Ekman's eleven emotions plus "pain," and using four mood scales modulated by a player-supplied "Color of the Other World," so that mood cannot be exploited as a gameplay advantage. Affect persistence and threshold-triggered acute reactions draw on Frijda and Lazarus. The authors justify the model by its effect on gameplay experience rather than by its fidelity to real psychology.

The implementation consists of interconnected psychic components, including trait nodes, sentiment and emotion nodes, and finite state machines, instantiated from XML data files. The pre-authored character Greyhowl, an undead hedonist with specified anxiety, depression, and trust values and an initial satisfaction link to his servant Jorme, illustrates how such parameters drive semi-autonomous behavior, including the possibility of breaking his undead curse through love. The authors conclude that prosthetic minds turn player characters into semi-autonomous agents whose affect enriches dramatic play. However, the work is explicitly an ongoing project, and no empirical player evaluation is presented to support these claims.