The Lives of Others: How NPCs Can Increase Player Empathy

hi thank you all for coming so before we begin there are a few official GDC announcements one of which is to please put your phones on vibrate unless you have an awesome ringtone in which case turn it up as loud as you can we want to enjoy it the second is that there are speaker session evaluations that have been emailed to you via your badge and we ask that you please fill those out so now that that's done and Richard sort of already introduced me so this might be redundant my name is CJ Kirchner I'm a freelance writer designer and the head of polyhedron productions and the talk is the lives of others how NPCs can increase player empathy and I ask you to forgive and advance my nervousness this is my first time speaking at GDC and there's very little there is very little that you can do to prepare yourself to stand up in front of

a room of your peers and make a total fool of yourself so yesterday make giant the writer on 80 days gave a fabulous talk called forget protagonists how many of you were there for that that's a good representation if you missed it it's now in the past so I can't recommend that you go to it but I can recommend that you check it out when it's available on the vault I'm told that will happen in a few weeks to quote Spaceballs when will then be now soon so let's get started chapter one I am born whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will be held by anybody else these pages must show that's the first sentence of Charles Dickens 1850 novel David Copperfield now I hope we all have enough self-esteem to confidently say that we are the heroes and heroines of our own lives but what

about everybody else we encounter this thought most often strikes me while I'm traveling or riding public transit I'm so focused on where I need to be and what I need to do that everyone else because part of the background but I imagine that's true of my fellow passengers as well they all have a goal destination complex emotions and social networks and short they have their own views on life the universe and everything but from this first-person perspective I'm the hero of my life I'm the main character I'm the player which makes them my non player characters and that's what I want to talk about today the lives of others I want to look at the ways that we can better recognize and respect the NPCs who populate the worlds we create I want to discuss how we can get their lives and their deaths meaning beyond basic gameplay or background decoration because I strongly believe that when production teams invest in robust NPC characterization the result is often increased player engagement and empathy I want to focus on three ways we can go

about bringing more life to randomly generated characters the first concerns ways that we rally our production to the call of more NPC focused content the second or techniques that my colleagues and I have employed in the past to bring characterization to those NPCs and the last details with the somewhat touchy subject of how we treat the enemies in our games and that our players encounter I'm gonna draw heavily on my work from the homefront games and titles I worked on during my four years at Ubisoft Montreal now over the course of my career I've been fortunate to be able to explore the narrative value of traditionally undervalued characters and systems were to put that another way I'm usually the guy who gets stuck with the job of writing barks versus the seemingly more prestigious role of working on the main campaign but here's the thing the barks are just as important in some cases moreso than the main story if you consider that a 60 hour open-world game with an hour of cutscenes the player spends just over 1% of their total playtime watching those

scenes now granted they're a captive audience unless there's a don't even get me started on that but the majority of the experience is spent outside of those sequences despite them commanding a large percentage of the developments budget and attention and before we go any further I want to just throw out a couple of quick caveats most of my experience has been in big-budget large team open-world game so a lot of production methodologies I'm going to describe are taken from and best suited for those games but I believe that the high-level takeaways are more generally applicable to projects of any size it's about what you're trying to achieve with the resources that you have and second people play games for a variety of reasons and it helps to accept upfront that a percentage of them might not notice or care about the extra effort that you're about to put in but you do need to care and you need to care deeply because otherwise nobody else will Tron fights for the user but we should fight for a bit as well so okay the

first thing we need to do is get the writers and the rest of the team on board with the idea that NPCs should be an integral part of the games world and the good news is that we can leverage a lot of pre-existing systems to make better systemic characters on Far Cry 4 we had the benefit of building off of the systems developed for Far Cry 3 but the world of kirat is more narrative lis dense and interwoven than the rock islands and additionally there were technical complications that shipped in Far Cry 3 that prevented or resulted in only a limited number of Bark's ever playing which is why everybody is so familiar with the urinary problems that the pirates on that island resolving that bug was one of our was one of our first tasks for the AI team and once that was done the writing team narrative team could get on the process of planning how we wanted to build upon the systems that we'd previously established but even with that advantage the current tools and design best practices mean

that the way that we build a living breathing systemic plausible open world is simply by throwing a lot of shitload of words into a database so for example it was reported in game informer that Dragon Age Origins released in 2009 shipped with roughly 62,000 lines of dialogue for their characters and Grand Theft Auto which was released a year Grand Theft Auto 4 which was released a year earlier had to look at it it's three New York City phone books stacked one on top of the other and those are four games that came out almost five years ago um you know I have a technical application you're sorry there we go so with nearly yearly release cycles and companies competing for player attention the expectation is that each new game needs to be begged bigger and better than the one that came before it and the content requirements have just continued to grow far cry 4 shipped with about 20,000 unique barks roughly 2,000 printed pages an assassin's creed

syndicate had about 300 crowd vignettes with between 1 and 6 acts one in six actors each and sometimes lasting up to four and a half minutes and those numbers don't reflect the entire game those are just those specific subsystems pardon me for a moment didn't spill it on myself off to a good start so that's a lot of words and if you're working on a game of comparable scale it's highly advisable to have a team of writers dedicated to the systemic narrative content rather than keeping it in a big pool that writers can pull from as they become available but you're going to need the involvement of more than just the writers because storytelling in games is a team sport the narrative team should drive high-level discussions with the producers designers AI programmers the sound Department casting director animators localization as early as possible in the projects life's spent and ideally when it's still in conception to determine what truths you want the NPC's to convey about your

world how the different disciplines can contribute to and support this initiative and build a production plan and that includes budget deliverable dates and recording schedules that accommodates this increased writing time and content this is an opportunity for you to get a head start on the situation and build from the ground up rather than sort of have it imposed upon you from the top down now common wisdom dictates that when faced with the sheer volume of barks - right generic neutral lines the players don't notice if they hear the same thing 50 times in as many hours and productions sometimes cut corners by asking their NPC actors to read from a bank of the same lines so that the voice rather than the line itself provides the variation one of the techniques that we used that not only simplified the writing process but also brought more color to the NPCs was the creation of micro personalities each NPC was given a very brief character profile that we could refer to while struggling to write the tenth

variation of any given topic and these were generally pretty broad attributes things like personality types are they aggressive are they a little bit more timid or they confident but there were very specific attributes as well like the details of their family life or their favorite food do they have siblings are they married do they have children did my slide just advance itself do I have a mouse oh God all right we're we're off the rails now so it should also be noted that under the farcry model barks are broadly divided into two categories combats and idles the combat lines cover everything from the genre standard reloading to individual and squad tactics search loops and damage and death states the idols are just that the things that they say when they're standing around doing nothing not in combat not even detected so embarking on four we established a broader range of conversation topics for

the idols like war I'm gonna try and scroll my notes here and it may just goes anyway more conversation conversation topics like the course of the war food their family their equipment and even things like rain or nighttime and midway through the production the system was modified to introduce a call-and-response system so NPC a would randomly choose one of those categories and play one of the lines that we've written and that NPC B would respond in kind now have we planned this from the start it might have spared us the shock of having to write a few thousand new response lines but fortunately we set up a system of informal weekly reviews with the sound and AI teams so that we would load up either a test map or the latest version of the build and poke the systems try and introduce the stimuli to get the lines that we wanted to fire to find out

if they were work properly to find out if the response has matched the calls and the slides now going off again whatever the benefit was that by the end any of our characters could have a short systemically assembled conversation on a variety of topics and it allowed us to communicate more about the world through them and for them to reveal their personalities to the player when the player was just hanging around by assigning hnpc a unique voice and a set of character traits in combination with hiring native language speaking voice actors we were able to create more well-rounded characters that players actually wanted to hang around and listen to or maybe they didn't mind the occasional repetition if it would reveal another line later that gave more information about that character and occasionally the in irreverent response garnered a chuckle and given the range of topics that NPCs could speak about any one of them could have been the player character in a different version of the game when they boasted about

finding a new weapon site or where their allegiances with the factions lay their thoughts echo those of the player so we made sure that everybody had something to talk about while they were standing around and hopefully that those things were worth listening to but also by respecting that we realized that any one of them could have been you in another life so you've decided you want to expand the scope of your NPC content you've Specht out a system for how the dialogue will play and you've built a production plan with your team to allow for the additional writing recording and reviewing the next deck is to determine what you want your NPC's to say how they will act and what their presence in the game should mean in narrative and design we lay sacrifices on the altar of player agency but rarely do we ever talk about non player agency their function is to simply spawn wander around play some lines or animations and then die or despawn as soon as the player is out of range but if we want to build compelling

characters from the common mobs each one of them should be invested in their own life and the outcome of their actions they should have wants needs desires as well as the means to attain those things one of my favorite pieces of writing at comes from Kurt Vonnegut who said every character should want something even if it is only a glass of water so let's assume the players needs are well taken care of either through the objectives that we give them or the ones that they set for themselves part of the benefit of creating the micro personalities each characters wants was at the top of that list in everything else that followed was filtered through that these can be simple or complicated and we should find ways to communicate them to the player even if it's an on the nose outright line it's not the most elegant way but it is fast and effective and beyond those wants we should ask whether or not their basic needs are being met I mean not as victims but his characters worthy of dignity Vonnegut's quote is doubly salient when we consider that 1 in 10 people in the world don't have access to

safe water or that between 6 and 12 thousand children in Flint Michigan have been potentially affected by the lead crisis they're the resource scarcity plays a large role in the homefront games both of which are set and occupied post collapse America the backstories tend to focus on the availability of cheap oil but the NPC's often talk about and work towards access to clean water and rainwater collection systems form a core component of our environmental storytelling but beyond just a glass of water which beyond water we all want different things and they can be tangible or not so determine what goals are important to your NPCs and what tools you've designed to give them agency to pursue them and if you haven't perhaps asked why not when I talk about giving NPCs agency and the means to fulfill their wants and needs I find that the current designs under serve these characters the player

who is typically an outsider has far more means to pursue goals and affect change in the world than those who actually live there and the task of giving NPCs this agency is no small technical undertaking but I believe it's one we'll need to meet if we're to continue to make games the way that we do today's talk mostly focuses on bringing the illusion of agency through dialogue and other narrative content but there is another Avenue that merits investigation and that is deeper social simulations I don't see the approaches being mutually exclusive I think they exist on a spectrum and can and should work in complement with each other I'm a writer and not much of a programmer so I'm not very qualified to speak about the social simulation side however Mitsuki and acre chorus at last year's GDC gave an excellent talk and that is available on the vault about her work and research in social simulations for games but even with my limited technical understanding in the future I can see the potential for layers of AI running

on top of a game which provides goals and directions and schedules for every NPC in the world our NPC should be able to perform the same range of actions that are available to the player as well as have the ability to embark on quests or activities without the players prompting or presence not dissimilar from the way that computer opponents in a game of civilization two strategies and make moves even when obscured by the fog of war now I'm not suggesting these needs need to overlap with the players goals but they can instead operate alongside and create a richer living world one in which the player can remain a central figure but that follows its own schedule for example why is it in a game like Grand Theft Auto 5 the only time I ever seen an illegal street race is when I've agreed to do one myself there's one other thing I want to talk about it's a corollary to all of this but in terms of character building I want to talk about possessions Tim O'Brien's book The Things They Carried is a great resource for writers who are looking to bring personality to characters through

everyday objects because each of us carries on us certain items that say a lot about us like if you were to lose your backpack today and somebody generously were to find it and not scavenge it what would its contents say about you there are a few games with very deep worldcentric loots Skyrim being up what does that say about this player where everyday objects are used to communicate truths about the characters the environment and it's just one more tool that we can use to bring that life to our NPCs but many of the current loot systems unless there are also McCann for theft or pickpocketing rely on a character to well be dead before they can be searched which sort of leads into the next section I'm going to get a little dark and ranty here because the subject of killing death and enemies and games is one that I don't think it's discussed often enough when we created

the micro personalities for the NPC's in Far Cry 4 and ac syndicate we didn't stop with the friendly or neutral characters both of these games feature strong stealth mechanics so there are a lot of times when the players will be in proximity to enemies but not engaged in combat so what are the enemies talk about well they're just standing around in the example of Far Cry 4 the gameplay takes place during a fictional civil war and like any war each side and every soldier bring that brings their own motivations to the battlefield it's overly simplistic to think that because we're opposed to them they are necessarily evil the micro personalities allowed us to explore the reasons and emotions that drove the enemy soldiers to do what they did some of the set-piece atrocities were a little outside of our control but if you hide in the bush for long enough you might discover that the people that you've been shooting for the past few hours are remarkably sympathetic

in his book on killing lieutenant-colonel Dave Grossman who I don't think is any relation to the game designer of the same name talks about the techniques the military has developed to dehumanize the enemy part of this is conditioning designed to desensitize soldiers and allow them to overcome their innate reluctance to kill another human and part of it is a coping mechanism those same soldiers have to deal with the psychological trauma of taking another life he writes I'm I'm gonna need my notes for this how do I make this work nope come on anybody know how to advance the notes section in PowerPoint weird no this is this is all just gonna break it's so fragile he writes that the burden of killing is so great that most try not to admit that

they have killed they deny it to others and then they deny it to themselves and he further writes that part of this ability is a function of the language used something we call other Aang and I would quote but it is now cut I'm a deer in the headlights now basically we assign other names to our enemy NPCs we cover their faces we mask their voices we create epithets for them and he says that the language of men at war in order to facilitate this killing the enemy is not killed they're neutralized they're greased they're knocked down and it's not a human being you're killing it's a crowd it's a it's somebody else we do this

in games all the time we have orcs we have norc's we have middle-eastern extremists from nowhere Stan so why on earth would we want our players to feel bad about shooting people I mean we've worked so hard over the years to make the act of killing fun I mean we've perfected the inputs and outputs to enable players to shoot or stab thousands of human-like figures for hours on end and we've been successful because we as developers have refused to accept responsibility for it and have shielded our players from feeling anything that doesn't also come with a release of dopamine at an NYU Game Center lecture in 2009 war inspector said and I'm paraphrasing from my own notes here the game's excel at the emotions of triumph and guilt but only ever really explore the first it's a very subtle difference between I did that and I did that and I think guilt is a very powerful emotion it's central in theater it's it's a key component of catharsis and I want to make a

distinction before we go further between guilt and gotchas which was a narrative tie that was in vogue a few years ago my notes are cut off but basically the gotcha is an unwinnable situation that the player needs to complete before they're allowed to progress and by doing it often the designers then condemn that action and when the player asks well what other choice did I have the response is usually you could have taken the disk out and brought it back to the store I don't think that's necessarily an effective method for getting players to feel things guilt on the other hand is something that players arrive at themselves without the developer needing to pass judgment it basically asserts that performing violence against characters who share an emotional investment in the outcome of the story will naturally lead players to recognize and take responsibility for the destruction they cause it acknowledges that the act of killing is necessarily an act of trauma in short it creates

empathy and that empathy is dissonant with the act and we never explore that but observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that this empathy can crack even the hardest of gaming's hearts Rob Bottin one of the writers on battlefield hardlines said in an interview with polygon about the games felons I wrote this one guy getting back together with his ex-girlfriend and someone on the team pointed out hey idiot this is someone you're about to shoot in the head not deliver flowers too so we decided maybe let's not go down that route we had to cut the dialogue and make it more informative we had to make sure that the bad guys felt like bad guys so the player isn't as emotionally conflicted about the gameplay no disrespect to Rob I believe his initial impulse was correct just as I believe that whoever asked him to change it was also operating from our current best understanding of what needs to be done to make a mass-market shooter for a publicly traded company but the

compromise that was required speaks to our continued inability to create mature nuanced work and why we keep recycling the same action movie tropes and now that I've brought the entire mood down with all of this death and destruction here's a puppy was not a polar bear that was totally the audience is always right my next slide is going to be bagel or dosh and so in conclusion for the high-level takeaways use your npcs to tell truths about your world and have a production plan to accommodate the increased writing give them their own personalities and agendas because players gravitate towards well-developed characters regardless of whether they're in like directly in front of them in a cutscene or whether they're operating

independently in the world around them and offer those characters a degree of agency because they will add life to the world in interesting and emergent ways acknowledge the humanity of your enemies because violence without consequence is meaningless and allow players to feel responsible for the actions because empathy and complex emotions will help this industry to mature special thanks to people that offered feedback on this talk even if they couldn't save me from my own technical gaffes and thank you for coming and I don't know how much time we have but I think we can take some questions if there huh 4 minutes ok we can take for one minute questions one four minute question or two two minute questions to the polar

bear yes of course hi there from a game design and the AI design standpoint like what do you have any ideas of things you wish you could you know convince the the higher-ups to put in the framework to allow you to have more you know chances to give the AI to be more empathetic well again I think we can we can take a lot of the systems that we already employ and modify the content in them to achieve again sort of the illusion of this the discussion about how you bring that more robust like agency is again a conversation that used to happen at a project level with animators with designers because as writers we can put the words down but anything that we put down creates more work for other departments and so they really need to know what we would like to achieve they

need to be on board with that they need to believe it as strongly as we do I think we were making progress toward it and I hope to see more games coming out in the future that offer NPCs that same degree like I want to see an orc war camp in shadow of Mordor to where they aren't just there to get cut down where they go off and have their own orc lives and orc wives and work babies and they sing orcs that you'd thank you thank you oh hi first thing I would say was this is by far like one of the best talks I've been listening to so far so thank you very much thank you but from an execution standpoint one of the things I just had a little question about was on far cry 4 you were talking about how you wrote kind of dialogue lines centered around war or family or food and how you would have two NPC's

talking just from a purely execution case was that would that be one NPC moving from a pool and then another NPC pulling from the same subject matter but not necessarily elated but close enough that would feel organic or was that you would have to literally match up to your lines that you would have a call-and-response exactly so that's actually a very good question the call lines word that we're about the topics of food or whatever you know you would have something like I miss my mother's cooking or you know my father makes the best naan and the response lines were generally a bit more generic but again because we had those micro personalities we could provide generic responses that would suit the calls reasonably well so you know my father makes the best naan somebody else will just chip in from that same bank of lines about food or family and say I haven't eaten in days or you know I don't think I've ever actually enjoyed that meal as much as

you have were you know I'm an orphan right thank you right so it wasn't a specific no no they didn't it wasn't like if you play line a then you will necessarily play play line B it was if you play one of these ten lines then you will play one of these five responses and those five responses were generally in the range of things that would work well with the calls again it was it was all found through reviews we did initially write that one to one and found that the repetition wasn't working and that often times even the responses didn't work and so it was by constantly iterating and looking at it and you know minor course corrections here and there that we were able to sort of arrive at lines that were generally applicable but still functional flavorful and tailored to that particular topic okay thanks a lot Heather I like the polar bear by the way I it's not up I'm going back I got it I got a no forget forget the take it's a

polar bear it's a toe polar bear it was um so you're talking about the many personalities and the : responses and sorry maybe I miss I didn't hear about it but I was wondering if you were able to create specific animations to go along with these : responses and if you didn't do you think that would be something that you would be able to do in a few in future titles so with regard to the animations that was one area where because the operations were happening in parallel the writing was happening at the same time they were shooting a lot of the new gameplay idols the animation team put together a list of things that they wanted design included things that they wanted and then we also got to include some things

that we wanted but in terms of like very custom one-off animations for specific lines of dialogue I don't think that we necessarily had those though again if you start early enough in the process it would not be too particularly not not uncomplicated but you could easily include those in the production plan to have people sitting around having a meal you know people trading cigarettes people doing whatever again it's about getting on board early and then making your wants and needs known and then getting the rest of the team on board with them okay great thanks I think that's it thank