Snap to Character: Building Strong Player Attachment Through Narrative

[Music] welcome to snap to character building strong player attachment through narrative I really I appreciate you coming so what does that long-winded title even mean really I mean I think we can all think of games that we've played where we encountered characters that sort of stuck in our minds that we thought about and we wondered what they were thinking late at night and maybe they remember that horrible thing we said to them once and we can also remember games where we just didn't have that attachment to certain characters we sort of got through the entire game and never really felt emotionally attached to any of the characters so I want to sort of figure out why like why is that why some characters really stick in your mind and why do some characters just not do that so that's what I want to explore in the next 30 or so minutes um I'm probably going to use most of the 30 minute time so we'll have some questions at the end but um I'll have an I'll hang out on the Overlook after this if you have more questions uh this is something that I've had a lot of experience uh in my career uh thinking about and and working on um a lot of my

career was at Telltale Games where I worked on Walking Dead Season 1 400 Days the DLC episode uh and season 2 um I was the guy who designed the train puzzle so for the three of you in here that like missed Style Adventure game puzzles you're welcome and for everyone else I'm really sorry uh I was also the co-creator and lead designer of tal from the Borderlands so uh and now I'm at Hangar 13 games where I've been working on Mafia 3 and it's Associated DLC as a uh World designer so I've learned some important lessons that hopefully can sort of help you avoid undermining your players ability to connect with your characters I've only got 30 minutes so I'm going to just focus on four specific lessons that I've learned in my time uh quality time spent uh emotional and motivational parity balancing pragmatism and depth and specificity and for what it's worth there's going to be some spoilers for Walking Dead uh some for Tales in the Borderlands and a little bit of Mafia 3 so hopefully you're caught up on those games so here's the first first big lesson and this is the most important

lesson honestly in real life there's no way to force an immediate emotional connection between two human beings that's just not how people work right digital characters are no different players need to be allowed the space and time in a game's narrative to build an emotional Report with your characters to slowly over time learn about those characters and learn to love them there's no way to cheat or shortcut this none okay some game narratives trying to shortcut this by including a previously established usually familial relationship placing a player in a parental role or like an older sibling protecting a younger sibling sometimes sort of jokingly referred to as the da ification of video games um but the the assumption is is that humans care about their inre life family so that'll sort of relate one toone with caring about their digital family but that never works right family as a as a word as a concept just sort of describes a relationship you already have it doesn't have any power on its own they expect that sort of impress

upon you the need to care for these characters and because your avatar or your character cares about your characters other characters in the game doesn't mean that your player is automatically going to additionally real life bonds don't just spring to life fully formed like they do in a narrative that you've written like when you're born and a baby you don't immediately love your family you you they take care of you in a very pragmatic way which I'm going to touch on later in the talk and over time with emotions you know emotional experiences shared with all these people in your life you learn to to love them over time so in The Walking Dead it was a very specific choice to not make uh Lee and Clementine be related to each other really early versions of the story actually had them related with each other but we realized that we wanted Lee and the player uh to encounter Clementine under the exact same emotional circumstances so neither Lee nor the player know who Clementine is when they meet her which means that they go through the exact same emotional bonding steps at the exact same time as a to

appreciate her want to protect her and eventually sort of come to love her I call this emotional parity and I'll touch on it later in the talk the problem comes in is when the player and their Avatar have offset emotional experiences such as a character liking another character or or even like being in love with another character while your player is a stranger they don't understand why your their character loves these other characters uh it makes it a lot more difficult to sort of emotionally merge themselves with their Avatar in the game this severity is compounded by by how drastic the difference is between the two emotional states being a stranger as a player and a character liking another character is much less drastic than a character loving another character and you being a stranger to them um in these instances it's really really important to spend the time up front to catch the player up kind of emotionally with where the character is in the game so the opening sequence of tals from of Borderlands this actually breaks this rule uh because it introduces Reese with previously established friends

but it still works because it immediately spends all of that opening letting you get to know why he cares about his friends vau andette you get to know their personalities you get to know why they're important to Reese so you can sort of emotionally catch up to where Reese is when you start the game you very quickly learn that they sort of support him and thereby the player when he goes through a painful loss and they all devise a plan to get revenge on the villain who caused it this allows you to quickly appreciate them on the same level that Reese does before before the game goes really anywhere before it takes more than the first few steps you were there with Reese you saw and experienced that pain firsthand which means that you also experience the sort of consolation that his friends give him when they're consoling Reese they're also consoling you the player so the big secret really if you take one take away from this talk is emotional connection will always take time that's the big secret that's the secret sauce of emotional connection thanks for coming

so it it isn't to say that uh it must be the same amount everybody sort of has is everyone's unique and different and players will bond to your characters at different speeds over different times everyone warms up to real people in real life at different speeds so you have to understand that what happens in the digital world is exactly the same as what happens in the real world it's crucial to give people time to get to know a character learn their quirks and their turns of phrase and little you know details that they can fall in love with and give them time to fall in love so we learned lesson the hard way when we worked on The Walking Dead DLC episode 400 Days uh if you haven't played it it's kind of an experiment in short form storytelling it's all centered around a specific location in Space over the span of 400 Days the idea was to sort of laser focus on very small specific stories give the player just enough time to emotionally bond with the characters make one big emotional decision and sort of end the story there the problem is that only 20 minutes long is just not enough time to do any of that stuff um it it means that we only had 20 minutes to tell a story we only had a few characters to we could

introduce which is just not enough vectors of exposure to get to know who your character is um and a lot of that running time was spent doing the very important tasks of setting up the characters getting to know the characters setting up the specific scenario like the choice scenario that you were going to be given and then give all of that context so we just didn't have enough time to really get you emotionally invested on top of that players could feel that choice coming like they' played an entire season of The Walking Dead they can they sort of began to predict that emotional Crescendo leading to a big Choice moment and they knew after completing a few of the stories that the story was just going to end right afterwards you know the the choices themselves are interesting on a morally academic level but the consequences are always more interesting than the choice and that kind of goes for every like narrative game that gives you a choice like thinking in your mind what the consequences could be while that timer is ticking down is what a Telltale Game is is that choice moment is like where all of that value comes in so there just wasn't enough time to get you emotionally invested in these characters of their stories so for what

it's worth I'm really still proud of 400 days I think we really came up with some interesting uh Innovations on our way we introduce interesting characters and interactivity I think it's totally worth playing as an experiment and sort of a mental experiment but this just comes back to why it's so important to give your players the space and time to get to know your characters I want to add an extremely important supplementary lesson to this that not all time spent with a character is created equal a player who spends their time s of sharing ing experiences with a character will find themselves sort of attaching themselves much closer much faster than if you just sort of passively occupy the same space in the world as a character just like in real life which is going to be a running talk or running theme throughout this talk is that sharing experience regardless of the emotional flavor whether it's sort of sadness or Triumph or fear or whatever it is it connects you to that character in a very emotionally resonant way you have now shared something with this person that you can talk about that you that no one else will understand because you were the only two people sharing it so time spent with a

character is important but quality time spent uh sharing an emotional experience or striving to accomplish something together as a group or as as two or three people is is way more important so lesson number two is emotional and motivational parody so a player is not their Avatar we all know that but it's our jobs to be as successful as possible at getting them to feel like they are their Avatar as often as possible this we want them to sort of share the same emotional space as their character because it makes it a lot easier for them for just a moment to remember to forget that they're not Le Everett that they're not Reese that they're not Fiona just for a moment we want them to think that they really are that person I know it's a really obvious observation but it's really important for the rest of this point so back in the early days of video games motivations were super simple right stay alive kill or be killed Victory or defeat that's all it took to get a player motivated and survival is a pretty strong motivator for us as sentient beings uh and it's a really clean through line between what the

player's Avatar wants is which is to stay alive and what the player wants which is to keep the game experience going and not end and not have to put more quarters in the machine um I'll go into this in a little bit more detail later but for now remember that a player's motivation when they first start a game is to do whatever it takes whatever the game asks them to do to continue playing the game and preventing the game experience from Ending by the way this specific motivation is super legitimate and you just need to take that into account when you are making a game that this is not something to discount at all so the introduction of tal from the Borderlands you learn about your main character reys you see the explicit motivating event that sets up the rest of the story um you are expecting a big promotion your friends have helped you get here it's been a long SLO and you're really excited it's promotion time except your antagonist Vasquez kills your boss and steals your promotion so the shock hits Reese the player at the same time it hits the character or I'm sorry as as yes it hits a player at the same time it hits a character so as vasque sits there and continues to be little you and your character your ey

and your hate for this character grows at the same time Reese's ey does as well naturally so when the game says all right it's a Revenge plot you and Reese are like yep that sounds awesome you are in complete sync with your motivations you don't need expository dialogue from things that happened off screen you don't have to explain motivations not only did you see it but you experienced it with the main character Reese Wants Revenge and so do you so it's really important to remember that the Avatar or the the main character of the protagonist of of the story and they're written to be interested in completing the main quest of the story to complete the game that's because it's that's what they're written to do right the player initially is not motivated to do that they know it's a video game they're thinking about I want to play this video video game because it's a video game and I spent $60 on it um and that's completely fine that's completely okay because at first you haven't introduced any reason for them to not just go along with what the game is telling them to do um however it's vital to remember that as a game progresses you're going to be introducing obstacles whether emotional

or physical you're going to be asking questions of the of the player and every time you do that they're going to reevaluate how they feel about their motivations and how they feel about what you're asking them to do if their motivation and their Avatar is motivation suddenly sort of become separated they're going to completely disconnect from the scenario so here's an example if you tell the player that the Avatar wants to save I've loved one from a scary house uh their the character's motivation is I want to save my love them from that the scary house their motivation is to go all the way to that goal the player's motivation might range somewhere from like yep absolutely let's do that to yeah okay fine let's let's see where this goes um regardless of that there's a sort of emotional inertia made up of a combination of the character's motivation and the player motivation that sort of pushes them forward into the story Into The Narrative now you encounter something scary and now they're going to reassess the Avatar's motivation stays the same I still want to save my loved one from the scary house uh but the players reeval they might be like nope

no way I'm out I bail uh now the emotional inertia isn't pulling the player as strongly into the game it might even be stopped or pulling them away from the experience uh the emotional inertia is a combination of the player and character's motivations but the player's motivations is always going to Trump everything because it's real um and this is where you get into experiences where you like are playing a game and you're like why would I do that this seems really stupid I'm going to a haunted house why don't I just call the police this seems really dumb my avatar is really dumb so emot and motivational parity remember you need to keep the player in the Avatar's emotional states and motivations in sync as often as possible it feels risky to spend the first 10 minutes of an opening sequence of a Borderlands game just talking you have to take that risk it's super important you will not regret it and you will if you don't uh and be aware when your game is asking the player to make a judgment call or puts an obstacle in their way that's going to make them re-evaluate their emotional attachment to what you're asking them to do

the next lesson is balancing pragmatism so earlier I mentioned at the start of the game players are sort of focused certainly on the focused purely on a purely pragmatic task of ensuring that the game experience continues uh to that end they're going to make choices based on those pragmatic needs alone so we as game developers have been sort of taught and rightly to think of our characters as you know we don't want to objectify them as abstract game mechanics and flowcharts and state machines and stuff like that we really want to imbue them with life and personality and hide their artificial nature and allow the player for the moment just to believe that they're real people right um but I argue that it's really important to allow the player to begin the player's relationship with a character by leveraging their mechanical value because this immediately builds initial pragmatic investment now I'm not saying that you should stop there uh pragmatic value alone is a really shallow kind of investment it's it gives you a lot up front but doesn't last but it can much more easily transition that player into a deep kind of emotional attachment that we're looking for so I'm sure you you've played

Walking Dead you know the Doug Carly choice at the end of episode one um but if you don't at the end of the first episode you're you're forced to choose between which of these two characters you want to save um you can only save one and the game is sort of tutorial ised at this point that your choices are permanent and there's going to be consequences that are going to last for a while based on this choice so you understand the gravity of your choice at this point um so at this point you haven't really had a ton of time to emotionally invest in these characters you just kind of met them like half an hour ago 20 minutes ago you might have a beginning of an emotional investment but for the most part you don't have tons of emotional investment but this moment is super super resonant why is that well it works because you've only spent some a short amount of time with these characters but you've also gotten a ton of pragmatic reasons to keep either of them alive which sort of feeds into an overall investment of of either of those characters the first time you meet Carly she's saving your life by shooting a bunch of attacking zombies uh and she also proves that she's trustworthy because she knows Lee everetts the main character secret who is a convicted

murderer and he hasn't she hasn't told anyone she agrees to not tell anyone uh Doug solves problems and shows how resourceful he can be by sort of helping build and fix things he's also shown that he's willing to put himself in danger to protect other people so all these elements provide strong pragmatic reasons for the player to keep either character alive during the choice moment the player might ask themselves which character do I like emotionally like more but for the most part they're going to weigh the continued pragmatic value of each of their character against their survival of their Avatar and therefore the continuation of the game experience right uh the the majority of early emotional investment is sort of calculated by players trying to figure out which Choice gives them the best chance of winning the game even emotional and sort of like narrative game like uh Tails or or Walking Dead as you can see 80% of people chose carlay and 20% chose Doug um and this is just because the gun was so overwhelmingly powerful in a game about zombies funny um and and Doug was more of just a promise like he's he might protect you in the future but there's no nothing like hard to really pragmatically invest

in there it was a promise it's also important to recognize that even though the choice itself is super pragmatic the outcome is super super emotional it's that emotional connection that I was talking about earlier where their the the player and their Avatar and this character you've chosen to save have all now shared that quality time that emotional moment together um it's an extremely potent moment after the choice after at the end of Walking Dead episode one they ask you why did you save me why did you do that and you have moments with them that sort of over this shared experience if you didn't feel a bond with either of those characters before that you certainly start to feel one now all players are going to bond at different speeds and to different degrees of intensity so pragmatic value can sort of help support or reinforce weaker emotional attachment by to a specific character U by starting a sort of player like farther along the investment ladder by just adding pragmatic reasons you sort of can help speed up how long it takes them to emotionally attach to that character as well so there's also another use for this kind of pragmatic balance uh once

the player has had enough time to form emotional bonds you can actually force them to make emotional decisions against their own pragmatism um it's a really interesting way to uh mix up the things that your player cares about so here's an early idea I had an early idea for tailone of Borderlands we were going to get unlockable weapons so when you played tailson of Borderlands you could unlock certain weapons you could put them in Borderlands too and you'd have like a unique gun or whatever um and I my design was to actually tie them to specific choices that you made Within tals Borderlands so for example you have a friendly character you can choose to help him and save his life or he dies if he dies you get a sweet shotgun you can play around in Borderlands 2 with but if he lives you get nothing um and your friend's alive and you have to decide what is more important to me is it the emotional value of my my friend or is the mechanical value of this shotgun uh what's more every single time you played with that gun in Borderland 2 you just had to see your dead friend's face uh and you had to live with that decision forever and everyone in the game would know what you had to do to get that shotgun you had to be a jerk

who let their friend die to have the shotgun I just be reminded of this Choice she made over and over again so this got scoped out of the game for a number of reasons but um it might sound familiar to a few of you who've played Mafia 3 because completely independent of me the system was sort of designed into Mafia 3 within the sit Downs mechanic so in Mafia 3 when you complete your takeover of a specific District a specific piece of the world map uh you sit down with your three lieutenants who are all criminals and you decide who you're going to parcel it out to and all the sort of mechanical rewards in the game all your sort of tech trees are locked behind this mechanic so each character has their own Tech Tree one of them might give you a better gun another might give you a faster car or explosives or that kind of thing so if you want to dive deep into one character's Tech Tree you had to give them a disproportionately larger amount of property which eventually would piss off the guy who got the least property and he will actually turn on you and you have to fight them and a whole thing where all of that property goes away what was really interesting though is that 63% of people did anything it took to keep everyone happy um which is

really really interesting because this is a super systems heavy game and you get a really really tangible mechanical benefit for basically screwing somebody over to get like a super red sniper rifle or crazy explosives or whatever but it was more important for them emotionally to keep all their friends happy than to get a super super tangible mechanical benefit which is really interesting and just goes to show how super hard it is to balance pragmatic versus emotional choices if you're interested in how the system was built there's a talk tomorrow 11:30 it's an hour talk by really talented systems designer uh Remy who's going to be doing a talk uh about how all this stuff was made so if you're interested in that you should definitely go to that so balancing pragmatism remember there's there is value in allowing to players to find mechanical value in characters it doesn't overwrite emotional value over time their emotional value will sort of like supplant the pragmatic value and and the pragmatic value is much less important but the pragmatic value can help you get in in in the front or earlier and give your players

opportunities to wake pragmatic versus emotional okay so the last lesson is depth and specificity so the more specific a character's personality is the more believable they are as a person everyone knows someone who has a quick temper or says sort of accidentally says the wrong thing at the wrong time or is addicted to 18th century Victorian architecture or whatever uh real people are impossibly varied and unique and you need to allow your characters that same luxury because it allows players to find those little endearing qualities that they can really fall in love with I mean think about XCOM or a game like XCOM for example where you all you can do you can just name your soldiers but think about how much more emotional investment you have in those soldiers once you name them after your family or friends or you just name them anything that's just the tip of the iceberg that's just a name like that's how much you get from just that so as mentioned earlier as a player gets to spend more time with Douger Carly after they make their choice you get to spend time getting to know them you get to learn little quirks about their personality like Carly was a a correspondent a news correspond wanted in war zones and Doug likes to make

robots in his spare time these are little details that can flesh out a character and let characters let let players have another sort of Avenue to connect with them the most memorable cherished and beloved characters tend to be the ones with the most specificity written into them but that specificity should not come from dialogue alone it has to come from their actions as well uh for example Kenny from The Walking Dead can tell you all day he was a fisherman and give you his like backstory but what you really learn from his actions is that he's really short-tempered but he's really loyal to his friends and that he'll do anything to protect his family he never tells you those things but he definitely shows you them through his actions so I don't mean the quantitative depth of their backstory uh but just the amount of unique traits or quirks or turns of phrase that really sort of Flesh a character out to be more of a full person like ree idolizes Handsome Jack or Sasha despises the hyperian corporation but sort of is curious about what that life is like or Lily loves her absolutely awful father why like makes you ask why why do the characters do

these things why do they feel these way what is what what is it about them that makes them this way it makes you want to dive in and learn more about them it's also super important to be careful where you place these moments of narrative you know the these character depths in a larger narrative without them being sort of introduced apropo of nothing or ignoring the tone of the scene as a whole um yeah I've seen this actually happen in games before uh no scene is worth a line or exchange so just save them for where you get the most bang for your body so while adding this detail to your characters remember that it's important to allow your characters to have flaws and have weaknesses and make mistakes power fantasy is not emotionally deep on its own it's fun but it's not emotionally deep um it limits the amount of emotional investment a player can feel if their character only has good traits I mean how can you empathize with a character who doesn't feel rage or loss or sadness or defeat we feel empathy for these characters because we too know it it feels like to want something and never get it Lee is not the leader of the group of

survivors in The Walking Dead for a long while because there was a very specific reason for that which was allowing the players Avatar to the power to dictate the sort of goals of the game goes in direct opposition to the tone of the narrative the specific goal of the narrative in addition giving the player that much control is way less narratively interesting than forcing them to make difficult decisions so here's an extreme example but I'll make it anyway in Walking Dead episode 2 season 1 2 uh you have to choose how much or who gets to eat there's four pieces of food and like seven or eight or nine people in your group so you need to choose out of those people who gets to eat spread across all players it was it went down this way right Clementine was first obviously and then duck so the two kids number three was Mark who was a new character who was just introduced 15 minutes ago you know nothing about him and number four is Larry Larry is a racist old man who hates you he's never been nice to you once so like why is that why like people don't like Larry but they want to get to know him right it's it's the two kids

are clearly not at all pragmatic choices as far as like the pragmatic versus emotional goes they're not helpful to the group they can't really protect anyone but they're a very easy emotional choice you protect the Innocents right Mark is a complete vacuum of information so the player's curiosity sort of leads them to him uh and Larry well people want to understand him people want to know what his deal is like why is he the way that he is uh they want to maybe change his mind they know he's not a nice character but he's got enough depth to his character that people wanted to sort of understand him on the other side of the coin it can be just as valuable to leave intentional empty space about your character uh not mentioning specific things that aren't sort of narratively important allows players to speculate and fill in missing information themselves it gives them a feeling of mutual ownership over the character this is where sort of head cannons and fan theories and stuff like that it's an extremely easy and good way to give players their own ownership over the characters remember players will always imprint what they want on your characters regardless of what you want um and that's a super easy way to leverage that because it's just going to let the charact let the players sort of see themselves reflected back in those

characters so I've run through a ton of stuff let's wrap up really quickly time spent together is a prerequisite for emotional connection time spent sharing an emotional experience or striving to accomplish a goal is the most valuable time spent pre-established emotional connections do not shortcut the player into caring earlier it can actually have the opposite effect because their character and them have a very different emotional place your player and their character should have emotional parity to ensure that the I moves them forward not backwards if your character has previously established relationship spend the time to emotionally catch the player up spend the time to let your player build the same primary motivations as the character let them experience the events that kick off the story together if you can give players pragmatic reasons to invest on the ground floor start with pragmatism but don't stop there it's really short term try and find Opportunities to force your player to choose between their emotional attachment and their pragmatic needs weaknesses and flaws are make a character more relatable they are

relatable ensure that moments of character exploration fit the tone in the intent of the scene don't shorn them in leave undefined space in a character to allow players to see themselves in them and focus on what the characters are feeling and how they're reacting over their backstory thank you very much so I think we have time for a few questions um and again I'll I'll hop over to the Overlook afterwards if you guys just didn't get a chance to ask your question so feel free to step up to the mic and ask some questions hello um I was really interested in what you're saying about uh pragmatics uh leading up to uh more emotional connections later on uh what can you say about pragmatic elements of the character coloring your the the story that the characters place

on top of them for example a bodyguard who isn't actually very like pragmatically good and you're sort of like you're bad at your job you know like where it's coloring the emotional situation to the point where you're like well this guy's just a joke or something along those lines I think that that if he's pragmatically bad at his job by pragmatics I mean like mechanical value like in the game like he's a swordsman he's a magic user that kind of stuff um and if he's a bad character pragmatically that's going to make it a lot tougher to emotionally like you know fire like the new Fire emble mobile game I have a bunch of crappy characters but I like them anyway because they're cool but I'm not going to use them in battle I just don't do that because it's a game first and foremost it's a game uh and that's a mechanical mechanics heavy game um but again like walking dead it's not a mechanics heavy game so like the pragmatic value still had a lot of weight in that moment um but I think it's important to remember that the pragmatic value if there if there's like negative pragmatic value or they like a liability like Ben was in The Walking

Dead it's going to really hamper how much you can care about that character you can you can empathize with them like a lot of people empathize with Ben but they didn't like him they didn't want him around uh they dumped him the first chance they got for the most part so like you have to be careful of sort of shooting yourself in the knee with negative pragmatic value um I would ensure that if he's not good at his job he has some other pragmatic value like he he's like a historian he know a lot of stuff about something like he's got something some core that he's got use he's got some sort of use if he's not his primary profession or something so thank you yep hey thanks great talk thank you um I'm working on spy party which is about a ton of characters in it but no linear narrative and I'm wondering if you've thought about stuff like I mean one of the things I liked about your talk was very Concrete in terms of like here's some advice about you know these specific things but a lot of them tied into like you're going to have time with these characters in an emotional way so game like tf2 or OverWatch or things like that can you have you thought about how character development and and like kind of emotional attachment works in those games yeah it's definitely different um and I don't have experience making those games so I can't speak to experience but I think about stuff a lot

um you know it time spent still counts as just like I play a ton of games with a specific OverWatch character and I feel emotionally connected to that character and I love his little turns of phrase and I love his little charact like torbjorn's cameras closer to the ground like I love that the first time I saw like just stuff like that that's just detail that is lovable um and and they have tons of characters so I don't like even like rounds spent in a game still counts as time spent with a character so I don't think you need to have overarching narrative in those instances because you can just care for those characters purely because you are them or you're around them and they have interesting things to say and you get to know like I wish there was a way and OverWatch for me to just talk to the characters and ask them questions about themselves or just like even just like spouse more of their backstories and interests and cares and loves like in their barks U which they kind of do but yeah I think that that kind of thing it's it's just um it's just like inch by inch you gain the yard uh and you can get that emotional investment over time if you just give players time to spend

with those characters and give them interesting ways to get their personality to the player okay cool thanks hello oh well thank you for the talk it was very interesting so all of these apply to uh non-player characters but have you um any advice on how to use this with your player characters um because you know for me at least um the fact that I'm in their shoes doesn't always make me feel feel attached to them or even care about them so any advice on that sure yeah I think a lot of this advice can actually do the same thing like you know Lee Everett is a character Rees and Fiona are characters they're not ciphers they're not like silent protagonists that you just embody entirely and become you they have their own desires like there's a there's a moment in The Walking Dead where you try and like tell the cop like you and like Lee goes to do it and he changes his mind we don't do that very often because you don't want to subvert what the player wants to do but like Lee is a person with a personality he can you know he can get overly enraged he's very passionate um he cares about these

things and not these things he likes 18 like like American history like he Geeks out about American history at one point in the game um and so all the same things can still apply where you just need to give the time with the the character and you're going to get that because they're the Avatar but just give them a unique voice like Lee when when the four options pop up each of those is one of the things that Lee would say there's we don't have to explore options what I think Lee would never do we don't have have to present those options to the player because Lee would just never say screw this Camp screw this girl I'm taking a bus to New York like you just would never do that so we don't have to Pro provide those options so I think just making sure the player feels like they're getting to know the character um it it because you it's a weird mix of feelings right because you are Le Everett but you're not like he's still you're he's you because you're the he's your avatar but he's also his own person so just making sure they have their own strong personalities that can come out in dialogue in moments um in actions uh even if you're telling the player smash that zombie's face in like the way like the voice acting like how raged he is the animation like a lot of that gives you a lot of like understanding of who

that guy is and so it's just very similar um um examples to to these these examples thank you you're welcome I don't know if we have any more time or we out of time no one more okay so I'll be I'll be outside U you can follow me out there so thank you guys so much for coming