Introduction

This paper takes the example of emotional attachment to non-player characters (NPC), representing game’ function to convey emotions, for it is essential for emotionally rich experience. The paper will explore how game mechanism can contribute to shaping players’ emotional attachment to NPC.

The majority of games can be considered to consist of “pericarp” and “kernel”. These two words derive from fruit. In games, “kernel” represents core game mechanism, including interaction, system, goal, rules, strategies, etc. It significantly influences what we called gameplay. “Pericarp” means narrations, audiovisual effects, etc. Game designers utilize “pericarp” to make games immersive, impressive and touching. Usually, “pericarp” and “kernel” are made separately in the game development process.

For example, the core mechanism of The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 is shooting with third-person perspective and role-playing. But they bring very different emotional experience because they have dissimilar stories and audiovisual effects. However, as games and game industry develop, the traditional way of game narration and distinction between “pericarp” and “kernel” have more and more shortcomings to convey emotions and create emotional effects.

Emotional attachment to NPC

Emotional attachment to NPC is “an umbrella term for the sense of liking, connection and closeness a player feels to NPCs”. Emotional attachment can provide with ample emotional character experience and willingness for suspension of disbelief, having players more emotionally engaged in games.

In fact, emotional attachment is often considered as the key element for emotionally rich experience, because it can “enhance the player experience through increased autonomy and immersion” [19].

Emotional Attachment represents emotional bonds that we form to objects or others throughout our lives, adding “richness and fulfillment to our existence” [9], such as our love for parents and our gratitude for who help us.

In the research project about emotional attachment conducted by Bopp et al. they analyzed the results from a survey and found that emotional attachments could be classified to seven types: cool and capable (players feel amused, empowered and excited about characters’ capability), respected nemesis (respect and awe towards a bad guy in game), admired paragon (players aspire characters who embody virtues such as kindness), crush (players have endearment on a character), concern for one’s protégé(players have deep “concern, worry and a sense of responsibility for a character”), sympathetic alter ego (players feel empathetic towards a character), trusted close friend (players feel “trust and gratitude” towards a character) [9].

In this paper, I will firstly analyze how narrative usually triggers players’ emotional attachment to NPCs and provide some critical thoughts on the shortcomings of narrative. Then I will explore the possibility of arousing players’ emotional attachment to NPCs through game mechanism. In this paper, the types of players’ emotional attachment to NPCs resulted from game mechanism are mainly cool and capable and concern for one’s protégé.

How narrative works

It’s important to figure out how traditional way of narrative work and then extract the essence and apply to game mechanism.

In How to Write Game Script written by Sasaki Tomohiro, he suggests playwright giving characters weakness, attracting appearance design, detailed background stories, personality that against stereotype, etc. Nonetheless, he said that these are unable to make characters vivid until they have their own positions, that is, social roles. With clear social roles, playwrights are more capable to design reasonable actions for characters. And players can perceive emotions conveyed by what characters say or what characters do better (89). Sasaki took the example of The Lord of the Ring [23], in which the protagonist went through a lonely but dangerous trip with one friend. The protagonist could reply on his friend and told his anxiety and worry. His friend served as a social role as listener and sidestick, without which players are less able to fulfill emotional requirement because there is no character receiving protagonist’s negative feelings. The readers’ emotional attachment to his companion in The Lord of the Ring is mainly “trusted close friend”, because the companion is loyal and trustworthy. Readers feel glad that he is always on protagonist’s side.

Katherine Isbister has more detailed theory explaining social roles of NPCs in Better Game Characters by Design:

Social roles are mutually recognized sets of expected behaviors and reactions that a person will engage in with respect to another person. These roles develop in social situations in which there are predictable patterns of:

• interdependence because of overlapping goals and complementary abilities,

• power dynamics within and between social groups (hierarchies and in-group/ out-group status), and

• obligations in the form of kinship or other group relations that bind individuals together. [7]

Independence results from that characters have their own goal, from selflessly supporting players or dominating the world, and from that characters may be able to provide companionship or moral support. Characters have power dynamics because they either have agreeableness with you (for friendly NPCs, player’s success is their success; for enemies, player’s success is their success), or embodies “dominance or submissiveness” [7]. Last but not the least, it is clear that players have obligation and investment on characters because in stories players have close connections to characters, and in many cases player need to take care of these characters.

The Limitation of Traditional Way for Narrative in Games

It is very simple for narrative to trigger player’s emotional attachment to NPCs by touching stories and vivid character designs. Nevertheless, as advances have been made in game industry, relying only on narrative to create emotional experience are showing more and more shortages.

In the game industry, using white box to iterate level and system design is one of the most common way to assure efficiency. For example, when design a map in Overwatch (Blizzard, 2016), which is a team-based first-person shooting competitive game, designers will use simple geometry to build rough constructions, testing every possible route. After testing the gameplay of the map, they will make art assets and write the background story for the map. (Overwatch GDC Talk).

For some games, designing narrative and game mechanism run in parallel. For example, in the development process of Divinity: Origin Sin 2 (Larian Studio, 2017), the playwrights were writing stories and scripts while game mechanism designers were trying to improve rules and mechanism in Divinity: Origin Sin 1.

No matter what kind of sequence is, narrative is attached to levels and systems. Chris Crowford said in Chris Crowford on Interactive Storytelling that “each new fragment of the story is earned by successful completion of a game segment. It’s rather like watching a movie on DVD except that the DVD requires you to jump through hoops before it will show you the next chapter of the story.” He described this kind of narrative as constipated story. Constipated story results in several defects.

One crucial disadvantage is that it leads to “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, which is coined by a former designer in Ubisoft named Clint Hocking. It means the conflict between stories told by narration and stories told by gameplay. He created this term to criticize Bioshock 1. In this game, the protagonist is selfish and egoist, as designed by the story. However, in the gameplay, player needs to complete a mission, in which the protagonist is required to help another guy to kill his enemy (this is one of the most commonplace tasks appearing in nearly every role-playing game). This mission is against the design of the character’s personality. [5] The designer of Bioshock 1 didn’t react to him. But this phrase, “Ludonarrative Dissonance”, has soon been widely discussed by designers and scholars [20, 21, 22].

Take recent Call-of-Cthulhu-style games as an example for “Ludonarrative Dissonance”. Players are told by scenarios that they are weak and trivial when facing the monsters which generate universe or came to the earth million years ago. But in the gameplay, players kill monsters with guns. Thereby, players lose fear to monsters. In the case of companion NPCs, players may be told by narrations that these NPCs are important for protagonist. But in gameplay, players may let them die, knowing they will revive after battle finishes. Apparently, due to ludonarrative dissonance, Players’ emotions to NPCs and NPCs’ believability are weaken.

Game mechanism

Then, can game mechanism produce social roles of NPCs? It is obvious that narrations like scripts are able to create vivid social roles such as “companions” and “sidestick”. Whereas the rules and mechanism are abstract. It seems that mechanism cannot depict a friend who sacrifice his chance to revive his country, helping the protagonist to become the God (Divinity: Original Sin 2).

Nonetheless, the abstraction in games could provide with another interpretation of social role by extracting the essence of it. As Juul said, “Furthermore, it could be argued that the role of abstraction is not simply to make the game different from what it represents, but to make it different for specific purposes.” [3] Also he quotes the comparison between game development to the aesthetics of Japanese gardens by Chaim Gingold:

A miniature garden, like a snow globe, model train set, or fish tank, is complete; nothing is missing, and nothing can be taken away. Clear boundaries (spatial and non-spatial), overviews, and a consistent level of abstraction work hand in hand to make the miniature world believable, complete, and tractable for both the author and player. [3, 13]

It can be seen that the abstraction in game mechanics extracts the core of real world rather than providing details and depict whole things. And what the abstraction represents highlights or magnifies something, usually very few aspects. For example, in the experimental game named Marriage by Rod Humble, there are only simple geometries like circles and squires falling in the screen. The game represents the relationship in marriage as “the size of each square represents the amount of space that person is taking up within the marriage. So for example we often say that one person’s ego is dominating a marriage or perhaps a large personality. In the game this would be one square being so large that the other one simply is trapped within the space of it unable to get to circles and more importantly unable to “kiss” edge to edge.”

In short, the abstraction in game mechanism could represent the relationships in real world. To make NPCs believable social roles and evoke players’ emotional attachment, game mechanics should be able to provide some of the factors mentioned above that lead to role formation (“interdependence because of overlapping goals and complementary abilities”, “power dynamics within and between social groups”, “obligations in the form of kinship or other group relations that bind individuals together.”).

This paper will take several games as examples to illustrate that game mechanism could provide emotion attachment. In order to focus on game mechanism, these games are too short to tell a story, or have very week narrative elements.

The very essential factor to this ability is feedback, because “Actions with consequences—interesting choices—unlock a new set of emotional possibilities for game designers…Emotions arise in the context of these appraisals, and help guide quick and appropriate actions.” [2] In the case of emotional attachment to NPCs, players will feel that they have strong influence on NPCs if with enough feedback. And according to the type of feedback, the emotions vary. For example, if players keep getting positive feedbacks from NPCs, they will consider they are doing good things.

Take Tamagotchi as an example. Tamagotchi is a digital pet, played by a small handheld device. The very first versinon of Tamagotchi is very simple. The player feeds it and takes it to shower. If player didn’t fulfill the requirement the pet may die. Unlike other version which contains complex entertainment and more properties, the game mechanism in the first version is so simple that it almost has no narrative element. Basically the game produce the feelings of raising pets with by give a lot of feedbacks. Players increase some values on a regular basis (hunger, clean) and if they do not meet the requirement, the game is over. Although there isn’t any description about how the pet likes its owner and how much it relies on its owner, the feedback still shows whether the player is taking response. The game creates the social contract “between player and pet is that of a caretaker—the player will attend to the pet’s needs and will expect loyalty and obedience, within reason” [7], and thereby generates obligation and investment. Tamagotchi becomes so popular that “as of 2010, over 76 million Tamagotchis had been sold worldwide. As of 2017, over 82 million units have been sold.” [15] It demonstrates that players’ emotional attachment to NPCs can be aroused by mechanism.

In the example of Tamagotchi, the type of players’ emotional attachment is mainly “concern for one’s Protégé”. The values of Tamagotchi’s properties (health and hunger) rely mostly on players’ interactions, as shown by feedbacks. The social role of Tamagotchi bears the feature of obligation and investment. Players need to take care of Tamagotchi and increase values on a regular basis, or it may die. Thus, players devote their time and emotions on Tamagotchi, and they feel a sense of responsibility to do it.

Another important element for establishing social role and emotional attachment is NPCs’ functionality. In the GDC Talk about Final Fantasy XV by Square Enix’s Sun, he mentioned a “character experience” framework to design engaging and emotional characters. According to him, “only if players first experience AI-characters as functional and useful in gameplay, will they eventually perceive them as believable and become emotionally attached.” [9, 16] Also according to several studies, players may prefer useful characters other than charming or friendly characters [17] As Bopp et al. point out, there is a specific type of emotional attachment named “Cool and Capable” directly related to NPCs’ functionality. Usually players would feel “cool and capable” to NPCs at first, and then have other types of emotional attachments according to the gameplay.

Take Journey as an example. Though Journey is a multiplayer game, it still provides referential values because players cannot talk to or directly act to each other (like killing other players). What players can do to each other is helping and accompanying. Player sometimes meets another player and they work together to solve a puzzle. In some cases, player may meet players who have already had some experience in this level and stay to help other players. These players helped by others are impressed and moved, and they often stay to help other players, too. In this example, the functionality of others makes player feel grateful and warm.

Passage is a very engaging game which combines functionality and feedbacks, arousing very strong emotional attachment to the character from players. Basically, Passage is a simple and 5-minute-long maze game. Players could choose to explore the maze with a spouse, but they get less dexterous and they need to give up some treasures because some passages are too narrow to accommodate two characters. As time goes by, both of them will get older and player’s spouse always die before the protagonist. Then the protagonist will be too sad to continue moving. If players decide to explore the maze alone, they can go wherever they want with high dexterity. But they will find many treasure boxes empty and they get much lower scores per box compared to adventure with a spouse. Still, they will inevitably die in the end, possibly feeling empty.

This game is surprisingly touching by simple mechanics and short gameplay. It well combines functionality and feedbacks. In terms of functionality, players have emotional attachment to the spouse at the beginning of the game because she helps players to get higher scores and avoid empty treasure boxes. Players first think the spouse is capable because she helps players gain more scores. As players find that in the maze full of twists and turns, her companion make player feel more secure not lonely, other emotional attachments such as “trust” appear. The social role of the spouse embodies “power dynamics” because she has agreeableness towards player — she is always on player’ s side and supporting players. As a silent companion, she does not have a specific object.

Conclusions

This paper mainly explores the possibility whether game mechanism can arouse emotional attachment to NPCs. The paper firstly lists the common types of emotional attachment, and then analyzes how narrative works. Besides moving and touching plots, narrative trigger players’ emotional attachment mainly by shaping various kinds of social roles. There are some important patterns of social role: interdependence, power dynamics and dominance. But as game industry develop, if designers only reply on narrative, a problem called “Ludonarrative Dissonance” probably appear.

Thus, designers are supposed to turn to game mechanism. Game mechanism has potential to arouse players’ emotional attachment because rules and mechanism are abstraction of real world. Designer can utilize feedbacks and characters’ functionality to achieve players’ emotional experience.

Citations

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