"Shut Up, I'm Having a Mental Break!": The Strange Design Space of Characters You Command but Don't Control

This essay argues that video game characters such as RimWorld's colonists, XCOM's soldiers, and Baldur's Gate 3's companions occupy a distinct design category that sits between player characters and non-player characters. The author proposes the term "crew characters" to describe entities the player directs and develops but does not fully control, and contends that this category deserves its own design vocabulary rather than being absorbed into existing NPC or player-character frameworks. The core thesis is that crew characters differ from NPCs in their gameplay role and from player characters in their autonomy and individuality, and that designers who recognize these properties can build stronger emotional bonds with them.

The author situates crew characters on a spectrum running from bots and avatars through NPCs and crew to fully independent player characters, using examples such as Kratos, GLaDOS, and Doomguy to illustrate the boundaries. A central claim is that designing for a community of characters, rather than a single scripted protagonist, creates a fundamentally different challenge. XCOM and RimWorld are cited as examples of procedurally generated crews that produce emergent, player-specific stories, with RimWorld's colonist deaths adding no inherent production cost because new characters can always be generated.

The analysis then compares several titles. Middle-earth: Shadow of War's recruitment mechanic is described as weaker than its nemesis system because recruited orcs lose the narrative tension that made them compelling. Marvel's Midnight Suns is praised for its narrative tie-ins but criticized for reducing its heroes to ability cards during missions, while Fire Emblem is presented as a model that integrates battlefield stakes with off-battlefield relationships. The essay concludes that neglecting either gameplay or autonomy risks leaving crew characters feeling lifeless.