IF Seal: How can I get players to care about their MC's motivations?
Hello I am struggling with something a bit different. So for my story, I have my story, my charcters, my MC and their background and their motivations. But what I am struggling with is knowing if the player is going to care about the MC's motivations and what they have endured and what they want, etc. Like how do I know if the player is going to care about a character, etc ?
Dear Struggling Friend,
I am sorry this has taken so long to answer, and I hope you have found some ways to improve your writing struggles. Perhaps this will be useful to other writers many months on.
There is always a leap of faith that you need to make as a game writer, and a degree of hope you must hold that that players will leap too.
But you can make it easier for them to come along with you.
First it is helpful to figure out what sort of MC you have for your game.
Is it a Harry du Bois from Disco Elysium/Commander Shepard from Mass Effect where they have their own fully-fledged personality which you may move in different directions but which has elements that remain no matter what?
Is it a Hawke from Dragon Age 2 where you have a selection of personalities to choose from (whether they're explicitly visible to players, like in DA2, or not)?
Is it a Baldur's Gate 3 PC where you can have multiple backgrounds and classes and personality is expressed on the fly with dialogue choices?
Is it a PC from Choice of Games games where personality traits may be tracked and used like skills, but there are usually more of them than in DA2?
All of these are excellent ways of presenting an MC to the audience and all of them include an element that makes the MC different to that of linear fiction or kinetic novels: player choice.
Giving options around the MC will be helpful! As last week's Novice Friend mentioned, it can be overwhelming to try to account for a wide variety of options, but at the same time it can help draw players in.
As well, what I would say is that, sadly, you can never guarantee that a player will love your MC. But if you care about them, you can communicate that through showing the MC encountering such problems and endurances.
I am not a seal who necessarily needs to see everything onscreen that the MC has suffered, if it is a suffering type of game. I do not always love to play through a flashback, though that is a tool that you can use.
What I do love to see in suffering types of games is the impact the events have had and are having on the MC. How are they feeling right now and can the player choose the ways their suffering is manifesting in the present?
I especially love to see motivations that are choosable by the player, such as "I want revenge on the ones who wronged me!" or "I want to succeed to show those dreadful squid that I can do better than them!" or "I want to build a comfortable life for myself away from all that [and presumably "all that" will come calling at some stage]".
One last point - you do never know that someone is going to care, but you do not need to worry about the people who were never going to care. It does not matter that my own IF about yearning selkies will not be to the taste of players who do not like the sea, or yearning. What matters is that you communicate your excitement, and if you do that, you will reach those who care for it.