Creating Characters Your Players Care About
My friend and fellow designer Andy Ashcraft believes that video game developers don’t care about telling the second act of their story. He points out that developers love telling the setup and background of their game, and they love getting to the big finish of the game. What they neglect to concentrate on is the middle of the story—the second act—where character and story development happens. I tend to agree with Andy. However, games that skip the second art are missing an important part of the storytelling process.10 In games, the first act is this is usually told with a cutscene or, even worse, the game’s manual—which no one ever reads!11 The second act is the grind that moves the player toward the third act, which is the completion of the story, usually the last level and a boss fight. This is a mistake. In the first act, the player should be given an opportunity to find out about and care about the character...