Games are poised for a major evolution, driven by growth in technical sophistication and audience reach. Characters that create powerful social and emotional connections with players throughout the game-play itself (not just in cut scenes) will be essential to next-generation games. However, the principles of sophisticated character design and interaction are not widely understood within the game development community. Further complicating the situation are powerful gender and cultural issues that can influence perception of characters. Katherine Isbister has spent the last 10 years examining what makes interactions with computer characters useful and engaging to different audiences. This work has revealed that the key to good design is leveraging player psychology: understanding what’s memorable, exciting, and useful to a person about real-life social interactions, and applying those insights to character design. Game designers who create great characters often make use of these psychological principles without realizing it. Better Game Characters by Design gives game design professionals and other interactive media designers a framework for understanding how social roles and perceptions affect players’ reactions to characters, helping produce stronger designs and better results.
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12 reviews for Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach
3.4out of 5
★★★★★
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★★★★★
Andrea Bøe Abrahamsen –
I have read a lot of writing books about crafting characters because I want to write and create great characters for my games, but I have struggled immensely planning how to execute on those ideas through game mechanics. This book has given me solutions to those problems and given me even better ideas on how to craft rich interactions between the characters.
Don’t be discouraged by the age of the book either, it is full of tips still not being capitalized on to the fullest in modern games. The examples are a bit old, but these are still great games that are still inspiring current games, getting remakes, and series still receiving sequels.
The core content is a quick and easy read as well, one actionable tip coming right after another.
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★★★★★
Miss Jen –
I am a game design student who is researching for my dissertation. I found this book truly amazing and captivating. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in character design and the theory side of games. I believe this book will also be relevant to film and animation professionals/students too. It also comes with a DVD of clips to help demonstrate the topics that the book covers. Very pleased!
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★★★★★
DavidStrife –
The book breaks down the complex methods used in creating memorable and interesting characters, and offers a refined outlook on how to go about emulating that effective pipeline yourself. There is no perfect formula for a great character, but this book creates something incredibly close. By helping you understand characters through psychology, it offers a more definitive and effective method of teaching you the best way to get the results you want in your character. These are things you will understand and grasp instantly, as they are things that have been floating around subconsciously in your mind but with you never having been able to put your finger on the precise reason why you felt this way about a character. The book tells us what we already know, even though we don’t know it. That isn’t to say it’s a waste of time! I’m simply saying that the book helps clarify what we already have a murky understanding of already, through our repeated consumption of films and games. The book deals with the character design on a more visual basis than their character’s traits and personality, but I would say this is more important as the problem many have is not that they can’t create interesting characters in writing, but simply that their visual design does not compliment those qualities when in visual form; this is where the book shines.
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★★★★★
A. Navarro –
Politics of Character Design. Most people will have heard about all the psychological ideas in this book, whether or not you believe some of it depends on your experience and level of intelligence. I didn’t read the whole thing, it’s not that interesting, but I skimmed through more than half of it. The majority of the book is really about how for many people their inherited politics will distort their interpretation of characters, you shouldn’t need a book to figure this out and if you know the principle then the specifics are easy to figure out on a case by case basis. Various conclusions can be inferred from this predicate, which don’t need to be written about here, but in short my advice is don’t be a politician. The only thing useful is that there is a pretty clear admission by the Japanese regional guys that they think African types, Polynesians, and very Asian looking people are ugly, it’s very difficult to find this type of statement from these types of crypto-white supremacists since they will usually try to evade the issue by referring to “demographics”. Demographics are meaningless in fantasy settings, the only questions that matter are how desirable is the fantasy to the audience and why but the answers to these questions can be obscured by clever political word strategy. For any beginners: all you have to know is that game characters are actors(I’m using this word in a very general way) defined by what they do – they do things to reach some desired goal, and that they are representations of some quality or idea. Their popularity depends on the appeal of their actions and the appeal of what they represent.
Andrea Bøe Abrahamsen –
I have read a lot of writing books about crafting characters because I want to write and create great characters for my games, but I have struggled immensely planning how to execute on those ideas through game mechanics. This book has given me solutions to those problems and given me even better ideas on how to craft rich interactions between the characters.
Don’t be discouraged by the age of the book either, it is full of tips still not being capitalized on to the fullest in modern games. The examples are a bit old, but these are still great games that are still inspiring current games, getting remakes, and series still receiving sequels.
The core content is a quick and easy read as well, one actionable tip coming right after another.
Miss Jen –
I am a game design student who is researching for my dissertation. I found this book truly amazing and captivating. Highly recommended for anyone who is interested in character design and the theory side of games. I believe this book will also be relevant to film and animation professionals/students too. It also comes with a DVD of clips to help demonstrate the topics that the book covers. Very pleased!
DavidStrife –
The book breaks down the complex methods used in creating memorable and interesting characters, and offers a refined outlook on how to go about emulating that effective pipeline yourself. There is no perfect formula for a great character, but this book creates something incredibly close. By helping you understand characters through psychology, it offers a more definitive and effective method of teaching you the best way to get the results you want in your character. These are things you will understand and grasp instantly, as they are things that have been floating around subconsciously in your mind but with you never having been able to put your finger on the precise reason why you felt this way about a character. The book tells us what we already know, even though we don’t know it. That isn’t to say it’s a waste of time! I’m simply saying that the book helps clarify what we already have a murky understanding of already, through our repeated consumption of films and games. The book deals with the character design on a more visual basis than their character’s traits and personality, but I would say this is more important as the problem many have is not that they can’t create interesting characters in writing, but simply that their visual design does not compliment those qualities when in visual form; this is where the book shines.
A. Navarro –
Politics of Character Design. Most people will have heard about all the psychological ideas in this book, whether or not you believe some of it depends on your experience and level of intelligence. I didn’t read the whole thing, it’s not that interesting, but I skimmed through more than half of it. The majority of the book is really about how for many people their inherited politics will distort their interpretation of characters, you shouldn’t need a book to figure this out and if you know the principle then the specifics are easy to figure out on a case by case basis. Various conclusions can be inferred from this predicate, which don’t need to be written about here, but in short my advice is don’t be a politician. The only thing useful is that there is a pretty clear admission by the Japanese regional guys that they think African types, Polynesians, and very Asian looking people are ugly, it’s very difficult to find this type of statement from these types of crypto-white supremacists since they will usually try to evade the issue by referring to “demographics”. Demographics are meaningless in fantasy settings, the only questions that matter are how desirable is the fantasy to the audience and why but the answers to these questions can be obscured by clever political word strategy.
For any beginners: all you have to know is that game characters are actors(I’m using this word in a very general way) defined by what they do – they do things to reach some desired goal, and that they are representations of some quality or idea. Their popularity depends on the appeal of their actions and the appeal of what they represent.
Mr. K. Vernon –
amazingly good, like it!!