I usually define myself as a "character-driven" type of writer. But while studying screenwriting more than a decade ago, my characters were often deemed too complex, if not downright incomprehensible. I guess it was a mix of twenty-something-me being in love with sophistication (one of the many avoidant/defensive strategies I used to have, to avoid exposing myself and my vulnerabilities through my writing) and an environment that was not equipped to understand me (as a person of color in a Western world, whose ways of expressing themself differed from your average white and wealthy person).

Throughout the years I've learned to be a bit more direct in my writing and designing -- especially when working on games and collaborating with very different people, with various understandings of storytelling. I don't think the characters I make are simpler now, but I know a bit more about how to make them more legible to others. I think three things can help me make my characters come across as compelling, yet not too overly complex or unfitting to the medium I'm writing for: Contrast, Contradiction, and Friction.

To be clear this is the first time I'm actually phrasing things this way -- I usually write and design characters like how I cook food, by iterating a lot and adjusting things by play-tasting (heh) along the way. But while cooking is a lot about balancing flavor, texture and aroma, making interesting characters to me is often about contrast, contradiction, and friction.

Usually a story has not just one character -- and even if they're on their own, you can usually split parts of themselves into different parts, or have them interact with something that, while not being presented as directly human, may still behave as a character -- hence there's always more than one. I am thinking a lot about what a character is or can be these days; in my mind, what shapes a character primarily (and makes one distinctive from other characters) is maybe about a driving force they have (the need to do something; or there is something in them that colors their relationships in a particular way).

Then you need to limit the number of characters you have in a story. I read many classic novels with loads of characters in them, and while this is somewhat possible in books, it quickly becomes less sustainable when writing anything else (movies or games, for example). Even in novels or lengthy shows, if done poorly having too many characters can be very disorienting. The rule of thumb is, I think, that people can usually remember about 7 things at a time? In storytelling I'm usually narrowing the number of characters appearing in a scene to 2 or 3 maximum. If there are more people involved, I need to group them -- and these groups form "a character" (hence they all want the same thing, at least in this scene). Unless the intent is to disorient the audience, you don't want to present too many new information at a time -- or the audience just won't care for them. The way we engage with characters is quite complex, since a character often carries much more than one information, and is always entangled in a relationship with another "character" in a narrative context. When you see, hear, play a character, various parameters can help you understand them, or even relate to them -- social cues and clichés, symbols and other outward signs, how familiar they are to something or someone you know IRL, etc.

In the context of interactive storytelling, creating compelling characters may seem even harder at times. It's possibly because some folks have the assumption that a player's agency can go in the way of a character's personality and story. Like you need to give players choices that matter vs a character with a strong personality can only have a limited number of things they actually want to do in a given situation. As if you need to not only write a cool scene with 2-3 characters, you also need to take into account an invisible extra character whose drive is only about getting more -- more power, more things to do, more agency in how things unfold.

To me, it's not even about a supposedly clash between linear vs branching storylines. Challenging these assumptions is in fact one of the objectives of this research-creation project. At the moment I am exploring how what we call "narrative choices" (often a list of actions or dialogue options a player can choose at various points, which can lead to various outcomes) can be used as dramatic tools for a character's expression, rather than a player's expression. The consequences and outcomes are less about a player's agency, but about a character's agency in a given situation. So of course, if a character is an almighty tyrant who can decide the fate of entire worlds, their conflicts and dilemmas may decide the fate of many. But I don't think having big choices is the only interesting thing that can happen in a story (interactive or not).

In my small lil' interactive vignette currently named "Not interested", I decided to create two contrasted characters (one sets clear boundaries overtly; the other is in conflict with themselves and cannot utter a thing until the very end). Romantic rejection was my starting point -- and I wanted the whole experience to be somehow... tenderly cringey. The awkwardness of the situation is high, but it's also not the end of the world. No one will die because a thing is said or a choice is made. I bounced various ideas as to where the player may have some input and how; I narrowed my options since I really want this to feel like a sketch someone would have drawn on a little notebook (raw, incomplete, but hinting at a larger story). I'm also pretty much interested in contradictions, about what we say or do can be at complete odds with what we think, and games have a unique way to showcase this (I'm still haunted by the Fish Cannery sequence in Edith Finch).

I thought briefly about that scene in Annie Hall I think? Where two characters talk to each other on screen but the subtitles intentionally say something different. Then I saw a brief reel about Brennan Lee Mulligan's NPC being rejected by another player character in the latest season of Dungeons & Drag Queens, which really unlocked the whole idea about this "anxiety goblin" and this "whack-a-mole" situation. Choices, in my vignette, are not life-altering moments, and they won't impact what the other character says since it's all in someone's head. The story is about an anxious character who needs to deal with a very awkward situation, while having their inner voice shouting random stuff in their head. It's a whack-a-goblin situation but the goblin can't die -- the player can only temporarily whack them.

I find it funny to use "choosing an option" not as "I want this" but as "I want to shut this down". Writing this, I'm still playing with how these goblins show up and how, to find the appropriate pacing, but I'm already finding it funny and tenderly cringe, which is what I was aiming for, hence I might stop working on this very soon and move on to the next vignette. I'm using Godot and Ink as tools, and may elaborate a bit more on this in another post.

Anyway to sum up:

• • Contrast here is achieved by 3 characters behaving in opposite ways: One states their boundaries, being not romantically attracted to the other, trying to explain thoroughly why. The other is just living an inner battle with their anxiety goblin who cannot say anything before the very end. The anxiety goblin(s) is obsessive and playful and snarky. Contrast is something I'm seeing more on the outward side of things -- how characters express themselves to others.

• • Contradiction is at the core of the interaction, and will especially shine at the very end, once the character answers to the rejection with a simple "It's okay." with their head filled with voices saying the opposite. Contradiction is inward, a bit like inner conflict in my mind, but the character does not always need to be fully aware of how contradictory they are, or even to resolve such conflict.

• • Friction happens between what is said, what is wanted, what is thought and what is lived. These dynamics evolve in an enclosed space (a scene, a plot) and create frictions. I guess it is a bit akin to the idea of conflict. But conflict is often loaded with power dynamics (with one force needing to overcome another). Friction is a bit more in the moment in my mind, and does not need to be resolved, especially in the context of a vignette or a small game "sketch"/micro-prototype like this one.

Pro-tip: Always reduce the number of characters you have down to 2 or 3, especially when you start a new project. Merge existing characters -- chances are you are using one idea per character, and I think it's often more compelling to deal with multifaceted characters that have maybe one core trait, but are actually riddled with contradictions that can arise depending on context and their interactions with other characters.

I've watched a lot (ahem) of reality-tv shows these past months/years, from Selling Sunset (about a real estate agency in Los Angeles) to Love Village (about Japanese folks in their late 30s/40s/50s refurbishing a house and trying to find love). I've also played various games featuring romantic storylines, from niche otome/amare games to recent blockbusters à la Baldur's Gate 3. I've also worked on a wide range of projects over the past decade, on many characters' stories (playable and non-playable).

The rules I've set myself for my research-creation project are as follows:

• • Design and attempt to make series of "game sketches" or vignettes -- not only prototypes, but everything around them. With a drawing analogy, it would be an annotated drawing that would leave all the construction lines visible, all the moodboards that helped to find inspiration about said drawing, and all the journaling with my doubts and ideas. It is more about learning purposes rather than the simple enjoyment of the audience at the completion of a piece. It's more focused on practice (praxis) rather than the output (poiesis) in very broad strokes. (Maybe I won't finish any of these prototypes during the process.) Using a sports analogy, it's more about recording all the training steps and planned tactics, rather than focusing on a championship's match and its results.

• • Each of these sketches will be focused on a micro-level social interaction, so-to-speak. A very small interaction where a relationship becomes enacted. The idea is to leverage aspects of interactivity to scrutinize details, gestures, emotions, and give them more space/time to unravel and reveal their complexities. For example, my first vignette will be about a character hearing, processing, and reacting to someone saying "Sorry, I'm not interested" in a romantic context.

• • A storytelling component -- these tiny moments are full of mundane drama, and interactivity may shine some interesting light to them -- something a bit different than what you would see or read with a different medium. Movies for example can use montage to highlight details, that won't feel the same as an elaborate sentence written in a Proust's novel, etc. One of my hypotheses is that games often highlight patterns, dynamics and structures in unique ways compared to other media.

Some of the reasoning behind these ideas:

• • There are some capitalist/essentialist/colonial Western trends with storytelling in games that I'd like to challenge in my own way. There's an obsession with growth, power, and commodification, that often goes against lots of stories I wish I could tell interactively. Modern games tell many stories about saviors bending the world to their will, using grand gestures -- anything small, anything mundane, anything not quantifiable is often either discarded or glossed over.

• • Whether it's a chicken or egg situation, the player is a client/king and, as narrative designers/storytellers, there is always an implicit urge to cater their needs above anything or anyone else (Meghna Jayanth has written a lot about this already). Because these things are implicit, expectations are rarely challenged, or even understood by all the parties involved in the making (for example, what "choices that matter" do really mean in the context of a narrative game? I still have no idea, and maybe we could think about this differently.)

Why have I watched or consumed media such as reality-tv and romance-related games, where the question of rejection is often, implicitly, the worst thing that could ever happen to someone?

Even if I'm sometimes conflict-aversive in real-life, I do feel some nefarious joy watching drama being turned into a spectacle. Or maybe joy is not the appropriate word; catharsis might be one, but honestly I'm not too sure. If I'm being fully honest, I think there is something comforting in watching fucked up people doing fucked up things, because it brings me some sense of personal validation. As a marginalized individual, I've been rejected so many times in so many different contexts, I often need to treat this as a non-issue to cope with this; but if these people can get angry, sad, desperate over the mildest rejections, then maybe I'm allowed to be angry about it more.

Rejection is not that much seen in games at large -- or at least, not from the playable perspective. As a player you are often allowed to reject others at will, without consequences; you are not often rejected though (unless the NPC is pretending to reject you, but ultimately still wants you -- the "tsundere" trope). If you want something and work hard enough for it, you'll get it -- you either earn something/someone or discard it/them.

Hence I'll flip the script on its head for funsies (and learning purposes).

At first I was tempted to have a "two-sides" scenario, where you could play as someone who needs to reject someone vs someone who needs to accept rejection. Then it felt very binary, and going against some of the rules I set above (which I will keep refining over the course of this whole PhD experiment).

It was also missing the point actually of what rejection can feel like and why it is complex to navigate for both people involved in that sort of relationship. Rejection is not simply just the act of one person discarding someone else; I've seen people intentionally chasing some sort of rejection for very different reasons; I've also seen other people putting themselves in situations where their boundaries are constantly challenged or even trampled and it's incredibly hard to say no; lastly I've seen people who keep pushing others away for reasons that had nothing to do with the other person.

So I've decided to treat the thing slightly differently:

It is very hard, writing-wise, to create an interactive conversation where one of the parties involved does not actually want to talk. It gets awkward quickly. It might be because it highlights how the actions of a "playable character" are always supposed to be welcomed by the world around them; if you break that implicit rule, it creates some strange friction that we (both creators and players) are not used to deal with, especially in the context of a conversation. (Because conflicts in games are often solved in a binary way -- with something being either available or not available.)

So I might cheat a bit, using a few tricks I learned about inner voices. A playthrough now looks as follows:

1. 1. A start menu where you can "Choose your love interest" with several portraits of different characters, who are conventionally attractive. I'll probably use free assets as a start.

1. 1. Then the game starts. It borrows the aesthetics of a traditional visual novel/otome game, but your love interest quickly says: "Sorry, I'm not interested." Of course it's a bit of a provocative hook. Below the love interest's portrait and dialogue is a text box that is not about what they say, but what an inner voice says -- about doubts, fears, pain. Choices are about how the rejected character responds to that inner voice (with a range of options going from "what the hell" to "I deserve this")

1. 1. Nothing one can say to their inner voice can change the decision of the love interest (the inner voice might falsely allude that you can, but actually you can't). At the moment, I'd like to have each of these love interests have a different reason for rejecting the other character (who won't appear on screen in my current idea, but we'll see). No matter their reason, the other character cannot challenge them. They can only deal with their inner voice.

1. 1. The game should conclude rather quickly with maybe, one final thing the character can say to their love interest. But there is no "branching" per se, no way to do anything but to process and accept this rejection.

In terms of tools, a combination of Calico/Ink should be enough to do all this, I think I'll start something in Godot/Ink so it's more scalable with the other vignettes later on possibly, and I need to setup a new git repo a bit more properly for this vignette.

So there are actually more than two characters involved if we count the inner voice. Also, the conversation between the love interest and the other character is probably just a couple of lines, with the love interest doing most of the talking -- the main conflict is between the character who is listening to this and their inner voice.

Why am I interested in this?

• • Romantic rejection is not the worst. Or, we could challenge why it can feel the worst, and why that's maybe not helping. Why romantic rejection feels so humiliating/soul-crushing vs being killed in games is mundane. There is a lot to unpack about why staying friends is considered a letdown, the sexual aspects of romantic rejection etc. (and the politics of putting "romance" as the ultimate goal)

• • Rejection and isolation -- rejection is hard because it creates a sense of isolation. It actually atomizes things because of how we're used to deal with what we want vs what we get, but there might be other (not so binary) ways to read this. More importantly, isolation happens because the capacity to listen to someone else's needs is threatened, somehow (in these moments we may listen to our inner voice more, while ignoring what the other party is trying to say).