Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering™

Chapter 2.22. Emotioneering Techniques Category #22: Revealing Complex Characters Through Their Actions

Talk is cheap—and sometimes unnecessary.

This chapter focuses

on giving different facets to your characters, even if they have little or no dialogue in the entire game.

Sometimes you need to be able to portray a character—either a character you play or an NPC—as being multi-dimensional, even without dialogue. We've already seen how to do this when dialogue is used.

In previous chapters, we've talked at length about giving major NPCs a Character Diamond, which is a colorful combination of three to five Traits. (See Chapter 2.1, “NPC Interesting Techniques.”)

We also looked at ways to get a player to identify with a role that has, as part of it, different ...