Preliminary note: This is a post meant to provide insights and provoke thought about the character creation process, by outlining a different approach to the problem. It's also fairly image-heavy.
Start with this maxim:
Quote:
"Every character is best defined not by what he or she does, but by their relationship with the characters and environment around them."
The above is my own paraphrase of a few statements by Orson Scott Card, author of the Ender's Game sci-fi saga, writing about his experiences in creating meaningful, impactful stories. I know there's some problems with that maxim, but for the sake of argument, let's assume it to be true for now. What this means is that, when creating characters for stories, the most important thing to define is NOT what types of physical traits or personality quirks they have, but rather what relationships they have with the other characters in the story.
One of the problems I see in the current batch of VNs being produced is that there is a lack of depth and complexity in the characters. And I trace it largely to this underlying problem - that we focus too much on the individual traits of a particular character, and not enough on the social and relational environment around them. I think, in order to progress into deeper and more meaningful stories, we must start thinking more about relationships in the VNs / KNs that we create. Let's look at a few diagrams to show what I mean.
Basically, for any story, I look at three things:
1) Can I, as the player, control the decisions of a character in the story?
2) Can I, as the player, affect the relationship
between characters in a story, based upon my decision?
3) How much are the characters in a story affected by the decision made by other characters? (i.e. how strong are their relationships to each other?)
Now, take your typical "My First Project" story. This is likely to be a 2-person KN or VN, focusing sharply on the single relationship between two characters. This is what they look like:
As you can tell, both of these are very simple relationship structures, nowhere near the complexity of a novel, say, or sometimes even a short story in prose. The main difference between the two is that in a VN, you can control the decisions of the character in blue, and this can affect your relationship with the other character. However, because of their single setting in space/time, chances are you can't really show the depth of the relationship between characters to a great extent, so the ties isn't aren't strong as it could be (indicated by a thinner thread). To strengthen the relationship between these characters (and therefore add depth and complexity to the characterization), you need to either show them in multiple situations at different times or places, or bring other characters in that could affect them.
Compare "Ripples" to "Metropolitan Blues", for example. Both are good examples of the 2-person VN relationship structure, but the difference is that Metropolitan Blues allows for more variety and complexity of situations to exist, therefore adding depth to the characters as they are affected differently by different situations (this could actually form a separate topic on its own, so I won't go too much into depth on this.) Alternatively, you can bring in other characters which can affect the two main characters. This is what Tying Threads and Songs of Araiah did, effectively.
Here, the decisions of a third party character affects the decisions and attitude of the protagonist character, adding more complexity and depth to their characterizations. However, these effects must be made visible to the player, clearly and explicitly. Tying Threads has a good example of this, because the relationship with the middle-school boy, although it cannot be affected by anything the player does, has a profound effect on Allen's future thoughts on relationships, and actually can affect the player's decisions (and ending results) when it comes to Cheryl. Without that scene, the player would not understand Allen's problems as much, and hence the character would have less emotional depth. Likewise, Denz's decisions affect Jason's decisions very strongly in Araiah, and that provides additional insight into Jason's character.
Then, look at the typical harem VN or dating-sim game relationship structure:
You have your typical protagonist, with relationships to three (or more) girls. There's a best friend who usually gives advice / jokes based on his own understanding of the three girls, and usually a rival who is also pursuing the girl(s). You can control the actions of the protagonist, and his relationship with the three girls. However, that's about it. There's not much control over the relationship with the friend, the three girls are usually unconnected from each other, and the rival and protagonist don't really affect each other much. Plus, you don't even see what happens between the rival and the girls, so effectively, the relationship between them looks weak to the player. That's why many dating-sim games seem to end up having shallow characters. Every decision you make only affects one character, and one relationship. There's no knock-on effects like you would get in a real life situation, except in terms of opportunity cost (spending time with one girl means you don't spend time with another).
Frankly, not much has been done to improve in this area. Big budget commercial VNs usually have something more complex than this, which is why they perform better. You can have rivalries and relationship problems among the girls themselves, or between your friend and the girls, or there could be problems between you and your rival. Our closest example to approaching this would be Ori, Ochi Onoe:
(Note: It's also possible that Heileen might fit, but I haven't played the full version, so I can't tell. Elven Relations also comes fairly close, but still not quite, I think.)
In any case, for O3, it's interesting because there is a strong tie between Ori and Ochi, thus, Ochi's moods and attitude are shown to be strongly affected by her relationship with Ori. For those of you who've played the game, you can see how this affects the mood and depth of characterization quite clearly. However, there's still potential untapped in this genre. Onoe isn't really connected to them, and the decisions of the player towards Ori or Ochi don't really affect the relationship between the sisters much (ie. the relationship between Ori and Ochi cannot be affected / controlled by the player).
So here's my thoughts on the matter. It would be very interesting to see if someone can create a powerful, tightly-bound relationship web, where ALL the characters matter to each other, and ALL relationships can be affected by the player's decisions. The classic example of this in traditional storytelling is, of course, the love triangle. However, to make it stronger, the two rivals should also be closely connected to each other, to give a more compelling story. If any of you have read or seen the manga/anime Touch, by Adachi Mitsuru, you can clearly see the emotional power that can come out of such a triangle.
Challenge #1: All characters affect each other strongly, all relationships affected by one person's decisions
I don't think this has been really done yet in our community, but it seems like the logical next step for VNs to make in terms of progress in storytelling techniques. Examples of this would be something like two best friends / siblings falling for the same person, or two parents and their child struggling through divorce proceedings, or three shipwrecked survivors in a lifeboat trying to decide who to kill and eat so that the other two can survive. The theme doesn't matter - it's the intensity and complexity of the relationships between characters which is important.
And then, after that, you could try a few things, such as either letting the player control multiple characters, to affect multiple relationships, as shown in Challenge 2. Here, the player can control not just the decisions of one character, but the decisions of all characters, and the combined effects of the decision should affect the relationships between all three characters, in a strong way.
Challenge #2: Multiple-perspectives on a relationship triangle
Alternatively, instead of providing multiple perspectives, you could try expanding the cast list to harem-standards, while still trying to keep the same level of depth and complexity in the relationships between all the characters. Now, here it's obvious that the player's decisions in one character may not be able to affect ALL the relationships in the game, but the point here is to show that all the characters are closely connected to each other, and can be affected by each's other's attitudes. So what would be needed here are scenes
without the main protagonist, that instead show how two other characters affect each other. This probably can't be done in first-person view, so you may need a disembodied narrator instead. But this would roughly approach the level of complexity of a typical novel.
Challenge #3: Strongly-connected harem characters
Of course, if someone was really ambitious, I suppose they could try duplicating Clannad's relationship web:
(And this is still the simplified form, with only the main characters and some supporting ones, and not taking into account the two separate situations of the High School and After Story arc!) But I think this clearly goes to show the gap between what we're doing now and the complexity of modern-day VNs. As authors and storytellers, we have much further to go before we can reach the heights of the medium. Let's not be satisfied with still keeping to the same tired structures, but push for greater depth and complexity of characters, by thinking about how relationships define them, and working on those.
Thoughts, opinions, arguments?
-Dizzy-
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