Character Voice Exercises and You

One of the most challenging aspects of writing NORA, from the perspective of a writer and a narrative designer, is the fact that we’re looking at a closed environment with thirteen different characters, including the player character and the eponymous artificial intelligence. A ship needs a crew, after all, and even in the far future, these things still can’t pilot themselves with any sort of finesse.

That means that we have twelve men and women that the player can interact with. And because we’re trying to get the player to want to interact with these people, they have to be interesting enough to talk to and care about. More than anything, we want these characters to be memorable.

To that end, we've had to develop twelve characters who each have their own wants and needs. They have their own ideas. They have different backgrounds— they’re from different places across the galaxy, and they’re from a good range of socioeconomic situations, which means they’re all going to have different opinions and ideas. They’re all going to approach problems in distinct ways.

One of the ways we’re working to express that is in their voice. Not just how the actor reads the character, but in the character’s literary voice. How all the things about them shape the way they talk and how they react to other characters and situations. So we have to make sure they all don’t sound like the same person.

This is a common problem writers have when they’re first starting to develop the unique style that sets them apart. It’s difficult enough to figure out how you sound, let alone how make-believe people that exist only in your head sound.

One of the exercises that I have found helpful is to write out a character's personal history and some of the important aspects of their personality. Are they extroverted or introverted? What are their hobbies? Are they loud? Quiet? Funny? Thoughtful? Clever? Get it on paper (or a word processor, as the case may be), so it’s all in front of you.

Next, I make a list of things I want to figure out about the character. This is subjective, but I like to include some things such as:
Cadence: How quickly or slowly does the character talk? What is their diction like?
Vocabulary: What kind of words does the character use? Do they use a lot of slang? Are they well-read? Are there any personality traits that might affect that (An arrogant person might use demeaning language or show off their larger vocabulary, for example)?
Verbal Tics: Does the character have any verbal stopgaps (Um, er, uh), and how would their mental state affect that?

I find it’s also helpful to look at a character’s temperament or their thought process and how their language informs that. You could also look at how their language might change depending on who they talk to. You don’t talk to your professors the same way you talk to your friends, after all! Try and think about what you need to know about the character and extrapolate from there.

After all this is written down, I like to do a “dry run” and think up some monologues or quick lines of dialogue to see if I can write something that sounds unique to the character. It’s kind of fun to see how I can make sure all the things I just learned apply to their dialogue now.

The best thing to do is to make at least a few of these for different characters. While you go through them, keep in mind the other voices you’ve already developed. Once you’re done, you've got a bunch of people who all sound different from each other in natural ways.

These are exercises that have helped us while working on NORA. I recommend trying it out and seeing if it works for you. Hopefully, you’ll get a sense of the effort it takes to take thirteen people, place them aboard a ship, and make sure they all actually sound like individuals.

--
Annie Craton, Design Lead for NORA

Character Design - Amplification Through Simplification

There’s an interesting concept called “Pareidolia” that’s been on my mind lately. Essentially, it’s the word for how humans can perceive significant imagery in vague stimuli, like seeing shapes in clouds and faces and/or rabbits on the moon. It’s part of this amazing human propensity for creativity and interpretation. The most interesting way I think it tends to pop up is in our ability to see vague faces in everything, as long as we can identify anything that might be construed as two eyes and a mouth (this facet tends to fall into the term "matrixing"). We have this innate need to caricature things so that we can see ourselves in them.

I first heard of the concept in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a textbook that analyzes the way comics are built and how they utilize visual storytelling in a wholly unique way. It’s a great, approachable book (told, of course, in comic format), and I recommend it to anyone who’s interested in comics in the slightest. In chapter 3, McCloud looks at how character design and details can bring you into a story. He looks at what’s so intriguing about cartoons.

McCloud suggests we latch onto simple designs via a concept he calls “amplification through simplification.” In his own words: “When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details.” Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. Because we all have those very basic figures (give or take), we can all see ourselves in, say, a stick figure. “Thus, when you look at a photo or a realistic drawing of a face… you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon… you see yourself.”

I feel like this is something we’ve had to pay more attention to as video games have become more complex. See, since their inception, games have been tied to the strength of technology. We started off with very simple strategies, like with Spacewar and Pong. As the tech got better, we were able to design more complicated games that often had more complicated stories. The better we could render characters, the more detailed their designs could become. We had to rely less and less on box art and concept art to see detailed characters— all we had to do was look at the character models in game.

Credit

 Here’s why I’ve been thinking so much about McCloud lately. It all ties into diversity and representation in games. When games were newer, when technological constraints could barely handle any kind of detail in character design (I’m looking at the early arcade era through the industry crash and up to about the middle of the NES’s life cycle), art design tended to veer towards simpler, cartoony looks. Even more “realistic” designs, like in Metroid, had simplistic in-game sprites so you could easily identify a human shape. And because they were all cartoony to varying degrees, the “amplification through simplification” concept went into effect. We could see ourselves in these cartoony shapes without too much trouble, even if we weren’t mustachioed Italian plumbers. The simple design meant they were blank canvases. Not to mention, their motivations were so simple (“rescue the girlfriend,” “beat up that guy,” “punch the dinosaur”) that we could place ourselves into the game at the drop of a hat. After all, I, too, want to punch a dinosaur. Who doesn’t?

Credit

But over the years, our games have gotten a lot more involved. Character designs have become detailed, as have backstories and plot. It’s harder to see yourself in someone photorealistic, no matter how well his arm hair is rendered. It’s just a facet of design.

The ultimate goal of any game is immersion. You want your player to tune out everything else and totally place themselves in the game you’ve created for them. And an easy way to do that is to help the player feel connected to their avatar, often through character design. But since we’ve strayed so far from simple, cartoony characters (In many genres, at any rate-- simple character designs still thrive in all-ages titles), players have had a more difficult time placing themselves in the situation presented in a game.

This is just one reason why the continual use of Grizzled White Guy with Brownish Hair as a design in games has become so frustrating for anyone who doesn’t exactly fit that description. We want to see ourselves in the media we consume, and we can’t do that easily when character designs are so photorealistic. It breaks our immersion and keeps us just a few steps away from the protagonist. Which is enough to break flow and lose enjoyment.

Credit

The need for new, distinguished and diverse characters has grown exponentially since we’ve become able to create realistic avatars. And it behooves us all to fulfill this need. Not necessarily to fulfill a quota, but to bring immersion to players that haven’t been able to fully bring themselves into a game for almost thirty years.

--

Annie Craton

Design Lead for NORA