C-Can you feel it?
SAMURAI, Chippin’ In
Approaching the end, this blog series literally got more emotional. We’re ending this on a high note: Empathy not only as a tool for good storytelling, but also as a principle.
The Empathy Principle
Good ol’ German Wikipedia differentiates three kinds of empathy:
- authentic – feeling with someone else / the same as them
- functional – understanding how someone else feels
- compassion – feeling for someone
Here we are interested in the authentic kind, more specfically: Authentic empathy towards the work’s part which most obviously drives it, carries its story at a given moment. This is usually the main character, but may be so much else: A certain movement in a scene, an object, a city, etc.
In itself, authentic empathy can be understood as resonance, vibing with something, being on the same (wave-)length.
To me this implies already what Kiingo Storytelling confirms: Empathy is key to the audience’s attachement, immersion. Check out this quote from the exquisite article I linked just before:
if we can’t empathize or identify with your story’s main character, we won’t actually care how your story turns out
Ross Hartmann, The Secret Ingredient: Empathy – Kiingo
Now to me this isn’t a requirement only but also a chance. Because, as Hartmann notes further down by quoting in turn William C. Martell
good story has some sort of a fantasy (although it doesn’t have to be a positive fantasy) that we want to explore in our life
William C. Martell, Screenwriting Tip Of The Day
Empathy as part of a principle allowing you to spread something good in the world… This, I think, is a beautiful note to end this last theory section of One Quest Design A Week on.
Quest Design Iteration: Introducing Leonora
Ocularis, so I’ve concluded, doesn’t create enough of a bond between player and avatar, whom is Leonora. Players are interested in side characters (fairies and Palli) but I didn’t feel a more than merely sympathetic connection to Leonora. I think there are a few reasons for this:
- the intro cinematic – showcasing Leonora and several quite cool scenes as a leader and strong person and lastly how she fails at the very end – is missing and merely readable in text form
- Leonora has amnesia and thus isn’t that strong at the game’s beginning (in the Kiingo article you can read how and why audience’s are easier attached to strong characters)
- the main menue emphasizes the landscape + crystals/magic and doesn’t show Leonora at all (note that the main menue creates the first impression!)
- in dialogues there is little way to express yourself (although I’ve been starting to revise this already)
- the tutorials, which add some background information on Leonora, are written in third person about here, creating a distance to the character
Having identified the problems, here are some potential solutions I came up with:
- produce the intro cinematic ( :))) ) – this also solves the second point, since after viewing the intro the audience will know that Leonora usually is not weak, but rather a quite powerful character who has fallen
(I wish we as a society wouldn’t be drawn that much to stronger characters.. But let this be my trick to hook the player onto weakness) - add a Warframe-like camera rail portraying Leonora, the Ocularis relic and the distant Mundus Omnium (the world we are thrown into) in the main menue when the cinematic hasn’t been played yet
- at the gameplay start: a choice to wake up instead of Leonora waking up all by herself, more ways to understand her – by interactions?
- rewriting the tutorials in first person?
I realize there is still some work to do here. A lot of my ideas hinge on the cinematic, I guess this needs implementation then. It is interesting – I can easily imagine people bonding more easily with her when her rise and fall are shown more explicitely, but on the other side – from text to cinematic there is but a change of representation, not of information. This, then, is the power of the concrete versus the abstract.
Feedback Suggestions
- Have you ever written a main character? Did you think about how the audience bonds with them?
- Do you, too, think the cinematic will do a lot of heavy lifting regarding the bond to Leonora?
Conclusion
While this surely is no last goodbye, it does be a minor one: This post concludes the core of my One Quest Design A Week project, started ca. one year ago. I’ll write a reflective post when christmas has passed, to wrap things up, but already now I can say: Doing such an enterprise has been a propeller and a heavy stone, an achievement and a failure, well – all in all, a success. I can only recommend this experience.
I’m happy to conclude the 52nd post with the things I’ve written.
Until next time – a merry merry christmas!
Gregor Sönnichsen 