Yeah, I need to customize mine as well. If I feel like I am forced to be too shy or too serious, I lose interest pretty fast. Why play if it doesn’t suck you in?
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The trouble with defined personalities is that I’ll inevitably come to a *choice where the option I’d want to take is either there but way out of character, or doesn’t exist at all, or a character acts way off of what I’m comfortable with (I’ve dropped a few games both on site and off for such things).
I don’t mind some voice (a character who is sarcastic but whose actions/motivations I can control) or a few defined personality traits/moods/behaviors at the beginning, given good justification (“Yeah you’ve been working yourself to the bone trying to cure cholera, you’re tired and miserable right now” “You’re an ex child-soldier, you don’t really fully grasp emotions right now”), and it can be fun in the right context. Just so long as it adds more to the story than it restricts, and I get some say in how I act on the traits.
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Game does predefined gender and personally Well is Divide we Fall. Which is the game about the Spanish civil war. How he handle you play as four very different people. And they all have predefined genders and personalities but the choices you make the dawn of War change who they are and effect changes their personality so in the extreme circumstances of the conflict you can make them different people it’s natural and fluid to narrative but then at the same time they are still their own character and not a blank template.
Another great example would be the Dragoon Saga. So what it does you it give you a a social and gender class and their archetype in that Society in this military officer and nobleman of Tierra. Incredibly slow burn I fell for the character’s personality but slowly and in the restraints of the class and gender. And any type if possible at all deviation from that is not done in one choice but over series of very small ones.
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I don’t mind if the built-in personality is strong and well-written for the most part, but I like being able to have input into my character motivation. So I can play a shy character who stammers and blushes, or a snarky asshole with a heart of gold, but I want to be able to define why I’m taking the actions I’m taking. For instance, I won’t play games where I have to be an evil, heartless villain - but I will play a game where I’m the villain if I get to define why I’m a villain (with a heart of gold, of course 
).
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I get what you mean. I guess it all comes down to which one that gives the best experience to us as player?
I know a lot of people like to insert themselves as the MC and to certain extend I do that too. Or at the very least, I can tolerate the MC and not gonna roll my eyes every second of playing it (which definitely ruin the playing experience).
shrug It’s fun when there is an option to have clear different personalities but it’s not a deal breaker with me. I tried incorporating a personality system into a WIP of mine, which would have changed certain text but a few people still complained it.
I don’t think that’s a fair statement. If you’re still able to change other elements (i.e. how certain events play out) of the game via your choices than it’s still interactive fiction, no?
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I prefer choosing the MC’s personality, although I don’t mind if the MC has a more set personality if it’s an interesting one (like Samurai of Hyuga, as others have mentioned).
What I don’t like is when it’s in the middle – where it seems like the player is setting the personality, but then the narration starts to take over and makes the MC react to other characters or the plot in a predefined way.
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My WIP, Mass Mother Murderer, has a very defined MC. While the reader can choose how they go about things (through stealth, magic, brute strength, etc) and how they act towards others in many situations (intimidating, diplomatic, charming, deceptive, etc) their core personality stays the same. They are always selfish, vindictive, rageful, hateful – all the good stuff.
All that to say, 99% of my testers have had no problems with this, and the MC is actually by far the most popular character in the story, easily outstripping even the ROs. So, as usual when it comes to questions like these, I think it boils down to this: is it done well?
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Normally, I quickly walk away from a game if it sets my MC’s personality too hard. Somehow, I still liked Fallen Hero. I think I just have to go in with the right mindset. That it could be one of two main archetypes, a blank slate where its completely my character or a more defined one that should in theory have a better story.
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I’m typically the same way, the MC’s from fallen hero and SoH aren’t the types I usually enjoy playing as. But they got me to care about the MC and the people around them so I didn’t at all mind and now love both!
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I think it’s nice in theory to offer readers the option to select the MC’s personality throughout the entire story and have their personalities have impact, but it puts an even heavier burden on the authors.
As Samuel’s and MultipleChoice’s success with their IFs (MMM & SoH respectively), it is proven that a pre-set personality isn’t a deal breaker with most readers. Bonus points if it’s executed well since it’s works!
An MC was a preset personality is probably easier to write throughout the entire process of the IF (I can’t speak from experience; you’d have to ask @Samuel_H_Young or @MultipleChoice) because authors only have to to write the reactions of the NPCs/the world to that specific personality.
I can see in certain contexts/worlds/settings where an author could offer the breadth/freedom to always be whatever personality they want throughout the entire IF, but that would need to be balanced out - for the sake of the author’s - with some (dare I say it) railroading.
Take the following examples from other interactive RPG media:
Hawke from DAII, Shepard from the ME trilogy, and Corvo/Emily from Dishonored and its sequel.
Both Hawke and Shepard are offered the choice to act in either pre-set personality (Diplomatic, Snarky, or Aggressive/Paragon or Renegade) but are ‘trapped’ in situations/settings that allow the players the freedom to play those personality.
Kirkwall is Hawke’s home, family is important to them (as part of their pre-set character), and Kirkwall is where their remaining family is staying, so they can be their Diplomatic/Snarky/Aggressive self to the player’s content, but their actions are usually confined to Kirkwall.
Shepard is trapped in the position as Commander and as a Spector and therefore has the responsibility to defend the galaxy from the Reapers.
In Dishonored, players can choose to play Corvo/Emily on a sliding scale of Chaos. The more people you kill - enemy or civilian NPCs - the higher Chaos and the worse the situation in Dunwall and Karnaca get.
So basically if an author/creator does offer the player the choice to play as one personality or another through the entirety of their game, it has to be balanced out somehow - either with the setting, the character’s motivations, the character’s job, or other factor - so that the agency to act however you want doesn’t cause possibly endless stories to happen.
If a diplomatic MC was allowed to avoid their nation going to war altogether compared to an aggressive MC that’s basically two radically different games an author has to create and that’s ignoring all the branching that would happen in the mini-scenes of those overarching diplomatic/aggressive plot lines.
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I like having the freedom to roleplay different MC’s. It’s a pretty big deal for me. If I can’t feel free to play around with the personality, I generally won’t play the game.
Saying that, I have played games where the protagonist has had a more or less defined and set personality. But the stories were really good, and I mean really good for me to keep going. But I don’t really go back and play those games. So it’s really a one-run-and-done thing, which I kind of see as a waste.
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I actually thought about Fallen Hero, too. That MC’s personality is definitely specific but there are a lot of other personal things we get to choose that affect them. Satisfying things like the sources of our angst and the manifestation of our personal trauma. somehow Fallen Hero’s MC has a distinct personality that is still very customizable.
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I need at least some freedom to select my MC’s personality. I’m okay with a protagonist that has just a few different ways (Dragon Age 2’s “sarcastic, compassionate, or aggressive” Hawke) to shape their personality: Wayhaven Chronicles probably has the widest range of protagonist responses that I’ve seen, and while I appreciate that diversity immensely, the fact that the nature of those responses doesn’t actually affect anything within the story is a factor, too. But having even limited freedom in personality–so long as that freedom affects something tangibly–is very important/necessary for me to play an IF! I usually only play a game once–or if I do replay, I usually roleplay as the exact same character who makes slightly different choices–so diversity doesn’t matter to me as much as having the option at all.
I flat-out won’t play any game that has an extremely locked-in, preset character whose life I’m only inhabiting for a brief time. Geralt in the Witcher, for example, is always unavoidably ____, and that kind of rigidity in character turns me off of most interactive games. Although I’m not a fan of “blank slate” characters, I still prefer them over inflexible characters whom I don’t feel I have much control over. I’d rather take bland freedom than almost none at all.
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I like fixed personalities a LOT more than bland ones.
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This seems like the sort of thing I’d ramble about, and it turns of I already have, a little bit, here: https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/what-stops-you-from-having-fun-with-an-interactive-novel/45093/86?u=regulus
I hope that link works properly, I have a way of messing these things up.
Anyhow, the point I was making there (among a bunch of other waffle) is that I really don’t like not getting to choose a personality. It’s not exactly fair of me, but I just feel like in such a medium where so much about the protagonist can be chosen, it seems reductive to restrict something so integral to them. (That being said, there is value in people who want to write in this medium starting small and controlling for most variables, so I respect that).
However, what I wrote about in that thread was about two games that have already been mentioned that seem to assign the character a personality that I also really like, those games being Samurai of Hyuga and Fallen Hero. And I came to the conclusion that it was because the MC’s personality wasn’t being assigned, their world view was. In SoH, the MC is always a bitter, taciturn sellsword who doesn’t scare easily. But whether they’re the sort of person who feels the need to defend the few they trust from the world they see as so corrupt, a killer who unrepentantly uses violence as a way to avoid dealing with their own issues, or just someone in over the head using humor as a coping mechanism is up to the reader. Similarly, the MC of FH is vengeful, distrustful, and at least a little arrogant. But they can be guilt ridden and terrified of the person they’re becoming, a quiet and thoughtful individual who is detached from the violence they perperatre, or someone who outright enjoys the fear and pain they’re responsible for.
And to be clear, I’m using three examples here because three is a satisfying number rhetorically, there are tons of combinations to try. See, I think what these games do is give your character a set of experiences (it’s not a coincence that both games have an MC with a defined past) and then has you react to the person created by those experiences.
In terms of the Nature V. Nurture argument, most CoG games implicitly take the position that a majority (if not all) of a character’s aspects are determined by their nature, as decided by the reader. The protagonists of Choice of Robots, Slammed!, and Hollywood Visionary, just to pick another rhetorically satisfying set of three, are more or less capable of making any choice the author had the foresight to imagine. They can have any set of morals, any set of values, no matter their background.
Fallen Hero and Samurai of Hyuga instead seem to say “No, there’s a certain amount of what a character is that they have no control over. Their experiences give them a worldview. They don’t get to choose to be good and noble altruists, they just weren’t taught to think that way by their lives.” And there’s a uh… certain amount of philosophical debate about the truth of that idea, but the point is, neither game assumes a personality, just a perspective that needs a personality (assembles by the reader from the author’s options) to be expressed.
That’s the best way I can think to put it anyway, I know I tend to get a bit twisted around in my scrawlings here.
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Personality is a tough one. As a writer and coder, I understand how mind-numbingly frustrating it can be to try to write a game with a character who has no truly set personality.
The best ways I have come up with are to either pick and set your personality at the beginning (easiest to code by far) or to treat it like Dragon Age II - dialogue changes based on how you normally respond, and, if, for instance, you’re more sincere than usual, your friends may side-eye you and wonder if something is wrong. This will also paint the non-choice dialogue.
Like…as a writer and coder, as someone who works full time and does this for 0 pay, I feel as though sometimes readers can be too demanding. I’m pretty harsh in my criticisms, as well, but you have to balance your demands with reality.
That said, as a reader, I do far prefer, if nothing else, to have multiple ways to respond to a character, which affects relationships and/or story events. Even if there aren’t any true personality variables & statistics.
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I like being able to choose your personality at the beginning like that, leads to a stronger voice.
That one game with the super heroes where you start off as a lab experiment did this super well in my opinion and I really enjoyed it.
This is really interesting. I’m only a reader here so I don’t really know the amount of works need to be done to provide various types of personality. I assumed it must be a lot but I don’t have any ideas how much work it is.
I guess I’m a bit harsh when I said if we have no said in the personality, it shouldn’t be an IF (in my mind when I wrote that, it should be a novel instead). But I realize there are many ways to make IF interesting even with preset MC personality. It’s about how much the player has a certain ‘control’ to the story rather than just being dragged along no matter what.
It’s a lot of work indeed! Say you have four personality traits (maybe friendly/easygoing, sarcastic, stoic, and sincere–but they could be anything, and you could have more). If you want to let players choose their response type, you have to write four different variations of every interactive piece of dialogue, and that’s only if you want to work with one trait at a time.
My game has 10 different personality traits, and I usually offer 6 variations in every dialogue tree. Not everything is completely different between each option, and some of the options are much shorter than others, but when you do this every single scene, it adds up. As the coder/writer, I think it’s worth it, and I hope my readers agree, but it’s a lot of work! After doing this myself, I have a new appreciation for the amount of work some of my favorite writers go through to make their awesome games
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