Generating Screen Time

The most underestimated element of characterization is screen time. How much time a character has in front of audience eyeballs.

The reason it's underestimated is because it's usually mostly automatic. You write characters for a story, you give them traits to help tell the story, you let them help tell the story. Even a first draft will have a fairly suitable amount of screen time for the various characters.

When generating characters randomly, this doesn't happen.

There's an urge to generate characters similar to the ones you might write. Similar traits, visual features, and so on. But this is 'cargo cult' character design: you're emulating the sizzle of a character without understanding the meat.

The meat is screen time. You have to generate screen time.

In fact, I'd wager generating screen time is cheaper and more powerful than generating characters. I bet you can radically extend and punch up a game by adding in generative screen time without any generative characters.

Let's show some quick examples:

In Mass Effect, all of the characters are designed to support the fiction of the universe. As such, even if they aren't chosen to be in your party, their plot arcs still play out. Their roles in the universe are distinct (at least in ME1 & 2), and therefore it's easy to remember who someone is even if you don't pay any attention to them after their introduction. In addition, they are frequently given 'tidbits' of screen time even when not in the main party.

We can break these methods into a few specific types, each of which can be generated algorithmically. I'll use Liara T'soni from Mass Effect One as an example: she's not a very good character but lots of people love her anyway. Thanks to screen time.

Concerns
The first, biggest mistake is to think about character traits.

Traits are not what you need, and never have been. Instead, you need concerns that create screen time.

The two are very similar, but thinking about "concerns" instead of "traits" should help to drive your planning. Concerns can be things the character is concerned about or things the universe is concerned about, or both.

For example, Liara has a lot of very dull, stereotypical traits: she's cute, inexperienced, has a crush on you, likes Benezia, Spocky, a pureblood Asari, is clumsy, etc.

Converting these traits over into 'concerns' instantly helps us give her screen time related to them.

The concern version of that list might be: doesn't realize she's cute, very nervous about her inexperience, nervous about her crush, respects Benezia, wants to use logic to help, is both proud of and ashamed of being pureblood Asari, gets stuck in a lot of awkward physical situations.

By restating her traits in this way, we can quickly see a lot of scenes suggesting themselves. You can inject 'very nervous about her inexperience' into almost any scene she's in, turning her from a background character into a foreground character - giving her screen time. Any scene. You could be fighting monsters, and you could find some way to use it. "I've... I've never seen mufflebats in person before! They didn't seem quite so... vicious... in the holotapes!"

In more focused scenes, you'd probably want to use multiple concerns simultaneously - for example, she can be nervous about her crush on you and her inexperience at the same time. Or you can use contrasting concerns - she respects Benezia, but Benezia no longer respects anyone. She wants to use logic, but she has a crush on you. Etc.

Core Concerns
Notice I didn't mention Liara's core character trait: she's a nerd.

Core concerns are concerns like any other, but they're unique because they exist specifically to drive the story forward, to draw the player into the universe.

Liara's core concern is her obsession with the ancients. This is a many-pronged concern which allows her to help the player understand the ancient psychic visions, drive the player to explore new ruins, and just generally try to get the player enthusiastic about the plot by being enthusiastic about the plot.

Unlike more personal concerns, core concerns might be too hard to really generate or embed in scenes on the fly. They're too deeply tied to the story or the universe. It's probably best to simply assign them rather than generate them.

For example, if you randomly generate some royalty for your fantasy game, you can give them the core concern to pull the player into the world. King or queen, good or evil, old or young, they give the player an excuse to go various places and give the player an introductory letter to important locals. They drive the player's experience regardless of their other concerns.

Screen Time Types
Once you have concerns figured out, you need to convert them into screen time. Keep in mind that screen time requires that a character have the attention of the player. Being in a crowd shot doesn't count, nor does just randomly standing around in a room without having any interactability.

In-party commentary is probably the most subtle and reliable approach. The character simply has something to say over the course of the player's normal adventuring, without interrupting the player's normal adventuring. For example, they might comment on the place, or an enemy, or banter with another party member. These can be injected seamlessly or they can be queued up by interaction spots - for example, a nice view, or a burned-down house.

Radio commentary is a more aggressive version: the character has something to say about something, regardless of whether they're in the party or not. This is typically reserved for core concern stuff - Liara will chime in to tell you that the obelisk has been moved even if she's not in your party. Particularly good radio commentary might involve having the out-of-party NPCs doing their own, parallel thing, then radioing to report their own conclusions to their similarly-paced adventure.

Third-party commentary is when the character isn't necessarily around, but is being discussed anyway. It could be other NPCs talking about them, or a wanted poster of them, or an interview of them, or a note they left, or even just finding a relic and saying "hey, I bet Liara would like this."

Downtime commentary is a powerful and relatively new technique: between adventures, there's a base of operations, and the NPCs are scattered around in it. You can chat with any number of them before moving on with the story. This is a powerful approach because it allows you to remove most of the rest of the world's context: the chatting can progress the same way regardless of which sector of space you're in, regardless of which planet you just visited, regardless of who's in the party, regardless of who the player likes.

Fuzzy focus scenes are scenes where an NPC is obviously tangentially involved, but it's not really about them. For example, whenever you meet another Asari in ME1, it will remind you of Liara, since she was the representative of her race at the time. Or when you step in to help a doctor, Liara might step forward with good advice and back-pats, perhaps even have some scene-specific sub-branch such as manufacturing extra medicine. The focus is still on helping a doctor, but Liara is getting some screen time.

Focused scenes are when the NPC is the focus. Downtime commentary is the most common place to trigger these. It's not necessarily them solo, but they're the focus. For example, Liara might chat with you about your newfound psychic memories, or about her crush, or about the nature of the Asari... or maybe she has a scene where she and Tali are laughing at a technical joke nobody else understands, or she's helping Dr. Chakwas with some basic medical duties. As always, these scenes are built out of the concerns of the characters.

Arcs are when a series of interconnected events happen which focus on the character. Typically these are contiguous. Liara's introduction is an obvious example - most introductions are arcs. You spend some time chasing her around a facility while learning what's going on, and then you team up with her to finish the facility off. This extremely typical example is something that can be generated (or at least customized) for nearly any character, but make sure their concerns show.

Rogue Arcs are when an NPC switches sides, usually temporarily. For example, a hero might become a villain for a short while, or a villain could join the hero's side. Or maybe someone just takes some personal time and things get out of control. Because of the impact of this, the focus is usually on the rogue character. It has no other special features, though, and can be treated as an ordinary arc in every other regard.

Schedule Elements... well, a lot of generative games aren't so big on having a central plot arc, and instead focus on cyclic challenges. A character should have a distinct schedule during these cycles, making it possible to run into them in specific high-context ways. Also, they may choose to change their schedule to react to player activities. The two things to keep in mind are that their schedule should reflect their concerns, and participating in their schedule with them should result in progression, not just repetition.



Anyway, those are my thoughts:

When generating random characters, you should put a lot of effort into generating how they get in front of the player's eyeballs. Just giving them traits won't make the player care about them.

Your thoughts?