Characterization Based on Choices

[PrettySammy09]

So here we are at a crossroads in our writing.

I'm curious, do you guys think it wise to have a character's personality change based on the choices made by a player?

For instance: We have a game with two capturable girls -- Susie and Jill. Jill has a boyfriend, Rolf.

Would you, as a player, be okay with the following situation: If you go for Susie, than Rolf, who was set up to be an antagonistic character, actually turns out to be a nice guy at heart and stays with Jill. Everyone's happy. You're with Susie, and he's with Jill.

However, if you go for Jill, then Rolf turns out to be a sadistic bastard who deserves to get dumped by Jill.

The question is the following: Is it okay to change a character's personality based on the choices that the player makes? Or would you say, "Hey wait -- in Susie's path, Rolf was a nice guy! What happened?"

[rocket]

Hm...

Sounds interesting. I don't know if it has been done before but it seems like the kind of unique thing that you could only narratively do with a VN, so I would be really interested in seeing it.

[papillon]

Critical Point did something like this - the 'bad guy' was different people depending on which path you were on - and while it was okay once as a novelty overall it's a little confusing. How're you supposed to get a handle on a character's personality if that personality doesn't stay consistent? Will you *remember* which path various things happened on, or will you be putting all the pieces together in your head and coming up with a confused and unintended overall picture of a character?

[Wintermoon]

It's a special case of broken causality, or the present affecting the past. It's a clever trick for messing with the player's head, which can be used in all kinds of different ways. Any individual path through the game seems to make sense, until you try another path and everything turns out to always have been different. The ancient prophecy accurately predicts the choice you made mere minutes ago. The lottery number you pick always turns out to be the right one. If you make one choice, the world is flat and always has been, but if you make another choice, the world has always been round.

Do not use this technique lightly. It draws attention to itself, and it messes with the player's head. Use it if messing with the player's head is your goal from the beginning.

An alternative is to have one true objective reality, but alter the player's perception by being selective about the information that is available to the player. Maybe Rolf only seems like a nice guy on the Susie path because you never see his true self.

[themocaw]

An alternative is to have one true objective reality, but alter the player's perception by being selective about the information that is available to the player. Maybe Rolf only seems like a nice guy on the Susie path because you never see his true self.

Or, alternatively, Rolf only seems like a jerk because he's (justifiably?) angry that someone stole his girl from him. You pays your money, you makes your choice.

[monele]

I agree with the last posts : make it *seem* like things are different but actually it'll only look different because of a lack of information. It happens in real life too ... My family looked to be all nice and stuff but there are things I've learned since then that change the light in which I see them.

[chronoluminaire]

Yeah, I really dislike it when this happens. Critical Point was guilty of it in a few other ways too: for example, at one point you get a choice whether to sleep with a certain girl or not. The next morning, a shuttle crash kills either one or two characters - whether the extra character gets killed depends on whether you slept with the girl. There's no causal connection, the game makers just decided the plot would work more easily without one character in one of those cases, and so killed her off.

That really irritates me when there are consequences of the player's choices that go far beyond anything that could actually have been caused by them. It's like there's no consistent reality - it draws attention to the fact that this is just a game, and it makesy ou lose faith in cause-and-effect. Anything could happen for no reason at all. It's bad.

So I would very much be one who says "Hey wait -- in Susie's path, Rolf was a nice guy! What happened?"

As has been pointed out, if you can include a causal connection between the player's choices and the way another character develops, though, even (or especially) a non-obvious one - ahh, now that's a good thing. (As long as the reason for the connection is shown on some path or other, obviously.)

Or, as has also been suggested, have it be that Rolf always has the same personality, but in only one of the paths do you actually get to see his true personality; on the other routes you only see a facade.

[Alessio]

I tend to disagree, but then again I'm a weirdo.

In my book, the nice thing about VNs is that they unfold and develop as the player progresses, and the plot adapts to the player's choices. Nothing is written and anything can happen. That's like Schrödinger's cat principle applied to VNs: As long as you don't look into the box (= as long as you don't reach a certain point in the story), the outcome is not yet definite.

Admittedly, the example chronoluminaire mentioned (killing a character to make the story easier on one path) is a bit extreme - but nevertheless a legitimate choice consciously made by the author.

A much better application of this trick is to support the player's experience. The story can be made to adapt to the situation. If a VN needs to convey the feeling that the main character is in mortal danger, and a wrong choice will mean sure doom, it can still make all choices lead to a good ending.

Assume: Our hero rushes into a room, pursued by foes. Two escape routes lead out of the room. Whichever exit the player chooses, the other exit will reveal itself as a deadly trap (e.g. more foes pour in through the door the player did not choose). Result: The player thinks "phew, I just made it", and it adds to the excitement.

And that is only one example. My point is: By making choices, the player is writing the story. No matter if Eileen is a psychopath in one path, and a caring mother in the other. As long as both scenarios are realistically possible and the storytelling is consistent, that's fine in my opinion.

If the player decides to play the VN again making different choices it might feel weird - but so much the better, then there's something new to discover.

[mikey]

Alessio >> Indeed - I'd add to this that as you pointed out, in order for this concept to work, the approach of the player or of the VN itself should be different . It should be ensured somehow that the player either understands (or even likes) the concept, or the game should be constructed so that the negatives of its approach would be put away... well, I don't know how that can be possible, maybe the VN should be like... self-destructing ^_^ - say by blocking or deleting its other paths - so instead of a multipath VN you would be "choosing your own KN". But that's probably a silly concept - most importantly it's very wasteful and still doesn't ensure that the player will only play one story (even if the game would delete its branches, the player could still reinstall and such...). Plus, this would not be the greatest idea for a commercial VN, I can imagine.

[DaFool]

I think the term for these types of games is "God Game" because some Miraculous External Force seems to affect the outcomes beyond the evident results of your choices.

[dreamer?]

? I thought god-games were games like Black & White where you get to play god.

[DaFool]

? I thought god-games were games like Black & White where you get to play god.

[Thread Hijack]

Back in 2004-5, an active Japanese forum member in Animesuki by the name of kj1980 advocated everyone to stop using the term "H-Game" and use "Eroge" or "Galge" instead. Many people followed that lead, so we have the term 'eroge' spread even to these forums, although recently I've been going back to 'h-game' to refer to games with H in them.

This is a blatant attempt to define a new category as it applies particularly for Visual Novels. Another example is the term 'Kinetic Poem' to refer to very short linear works using a VN engine.

Lakeside Sunset is a god-game; Colorless Day is a kinetic poem.

This is the internet; one can throw tomatoes at will and hopefully one will stick and redefine everything else (as well as be the term to be registered on Wikipedia).

[/Thread Hijack with Apologies]

[Jake]

Hmm. I'm kind of with Alessio, really. In either case, obviously, if you only play through the game once, then it makes no difference at all because you're only seeing one option.

However, to me the obvious determinism displayed in most games of this type reminds me far more surely that they're a game.
On one hand, if two characters are in a shuttle and it crashes, then they both stand a chance of being killed - I wouldn't think any more or less of a game because in the playthrough I happened to do this one character died and in the playthrough I happened to do that two characters died, because hey - sometimes it happens. Making the arbitrary assumption that it happened entirely because of the choice I happened to make beforehand is to bring the understanding that I'm playing a game to the front of my awareness.
On the other hand, on a second playthrough I shouldn't be expecting X to happen just because it happened the last time I played the game; the character I'm supposedly playing - the protagonist - has no foreknowledge of what happens next, so in theory neither should I. Acknowledging and basing my playthrough on things I know which the character doesn't again highlights that it's a game. If I don't know what to expect on a second or third playthrough than that second or third playthrough is far more like the original knowledgeless playthrough than if events played out the same just with a different girl.

Fundamentally, so long as each story - no matter what happens - is a valid and well-structured story, it doesn't matter to me how much they diverge based on what kind of choices or even random chance. To go through exhaustively ending-collecting is already violating your suspension of disbelief and forcing yourself to treat the title as a game as well as - if not instead of - a story, there's little that the game could do to make it worse. I really don't think that it needs a separate classification, because again - that forces the player to understand something about the way that the game is structured which they shouldn't [need to] know, and it's largely irrelevant to both the gameplay and the storytelling.

[mikey]

Hmmm, I think god game isn't such a great term, to be honest, it does indeed clash with Molyneux's games. Maybe "adaptive" or "variable" or "dynamic plot VNs" or something like that would work.

Hmmm, btw, I didn't know how eroge and galge came to be used like this. I'm in favor of h-game, to be honest. Though I always accept when someone creates a game that he has the right to call it whatever he wants - I called Black Pencil a "manga game". In its day it was called a ren'ai game, now it's most often referred to as a visual novel. And I now file it as [TP]-alt, [AV]-none, [OR]-MxF... just to avoid confusion ^_^

I really don't think that it needs a separate classification, because again - that forces the player to understand something about the way that the game is structured which they shouldn't [need to] know, and it's largely irrelevant to both the gameplay and the storytelling.

Hmmm, I think this is still a valid information - not that I would really want to divide games according to this, but the fact that people know about "these types of games" is already an indicator that they realize it's a bit different to the standard approach. And it really is messing with your head... or what you perceive as reality. Knowing this you can probably prepare better for what's coming. It's true that it doesn't change the gameplay and for that one playthrough it doesn't affect storytelling - but considering the title as a whole, a replayable VN, this is one information that can be interesting. Similarly, you could say it's not relevant whether a game's choices just give you points (EbG), or they take you to another path (MilkSwim). For the first playthrough it makes no difference. That I agree on. But people do play more paths and this approach to storytelling instantly hits you. The first playthrough is always fine, but the value of the subsequent ones may drop significantly for those who dislike this reality-altering way. I enjoyed being with one classmate and ending up happily ever after with children, and when I play the alleged alternative with her best friend, and I discover I'm an alien and we end up raising little aliens on planet Zogra, well... the story as such can be okay even this second time, but it kind of invalidates the reality of the first one - so in the end, you have two realities, instead of two alternatives. I think that's the main problem that people don't like (if they don't like this type).

[papillon]

In the text adventure world there were some experiments with 'puzzleless' IF, where no matter what you did the game would adapt itself and keep going, while still trying to present the illusion of interactivity. Key differences, though - first, the game was really only meant to be played once, it was one story you were experiencing. (You could go back and explore to see some of the variation, but you'd always end up at the same place.) Second, during at least one phase of the 'game' you were a small child playing let's-pretend, so there was a good reason the story was adapting itself to your actions.