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Why do we love NPCs so much? Maybe my favorite characters have the answer.
A couple of weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas and I watched Ellie from The Last of Us win
Best Character Performance at the annual DICE awards.
Well, she wasn't actually there to claim her award.
Ellie is just a motion-capped version of actress Ashley Johnson who gave an incredibly lifelike performance.
She's multi-dimensional, displays character growth, and is a pretty good shot.
When I was playing The Last of Us, I found myself getting caught up
and actually caring about her well-being.
Some of you probably felt the same way.
Which is weird, because for the majority of the game, Ellie is what we call a non-playable character,
or an NPC for short.
NPCs are something of a hallmark for single player games, a computer-controlled character
who goes alongside you, guides you, and sometimes befriends you.
But why do we form such strong bonds and real emotions with NPCs when we know they're totally
fictional and don't care about us at all?
Alright, I know the companion cube isn't really an NPC, but
It's just so huggable! So there's a few reasons why we love NPCs.
For one, they're functional. They're what sociologists call "task attractive."
They help advance the story and give us instructions.
That's why we hate them so much when they are being unhelpful.
Another reason we like NPCs is that they're often the only sign of hope or sanity.
Lest you forget, everything in your world is trying to kill you.
Just like in real life. And many times, we have to protect them.
It's how you win the game, so naturally we care about their survival.
But sometimes something happens. Our like, well, it turns into
love. Not like romantic love. But it's weird to have intense feelings about
what is ultimately a helpful inanimate thing that doesn't really care about you.
Like a washing machine.
So why is part of my brain, even right now, wishing that Ellie is okay?
But I don't care one bit about my lonely appliances.
Well that's because we form what's called "parasocial relationships", with NPC's. In the 1950s,
social psychologists became really interested in how people relate to
characters and personalities that they saw on television.
Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term "parasocial interactions,"
which later became "parasocial relationships."
While their study was based on TV personalities, it applies just as strongly, if not
more, to video game characters.
They found that people formed the strongest parasocial relationships when three different conditions were met.
First of all, they use nonverbal communication like when Tails looks at the screen and yawns.
This adds to their personality and prevents them from feeling like inanimate computer algorithms.
Second, they're physically attractive and easy for the audience to relate to. Well,
that one's pretty obvious.
And finally, the onscreen performer
addresses the viewer directly, like when Glados talks to you when she's a vegetable.
It might just be a computer program that says the same thing to everybody, but it feels like
they're talking just to you. And this original study was just for black and white television.
Throw in the ridiculous interactivity of modern gaming and it's no wonder that we get so attached
to our NPC's. So now that we understand why you're completely justified for caring so much,
Let's get to the exciting part and let me tell you about my favorite NPCs.
Though no list can be definitive, my key judging criteria here
are creativity, innovation, influence, and most importantly, emotional impact.
First up are the purely functional characters.
Oh, the the dog in Nethack.
One of the most famous roguelikes of all time, Nethack had a pet feature which would allow
a tiny little D to follow you around protecting you from floating eyeballs.
Trust me, you just have to play it.
Admittedly this one is task attractive.
Although the fact the dog did occasionally eat corpses did add a bit of personality?
Another useful NPC for me were the security bots from Bioshock II. They made adorable noises
and I chose to use the Handyman gene tonic, that allowed me to give them names.
It seemed to humanize them, so when Patches was
destroyed in battle after hours of playing with him, I got a little upset.
Now for this next one, I know I ragged on
Navi from the Ocarina of Time a couple episodes ago for being super annoying,
Which she is, but that little voice is very helpful.
Many of us hadn't played a proper 3D adventure game before the Ocarina of Time
So without her we would've been completely lost. Alright alright you won me over. Don't rub it in.
Next, let's talk about some truly innovative NPC's.
When I first met Lucas Simms, the mayor of Megaton from Fallout 3, I shot him dead.
Not sure why, and I closed off a third of the game, but hey, I didn't like how he looked at me.
Lucas was an NPC, who, depending
on how you treated him, drastically changed the nature
of the game, which was a bold choice.
While you might not think of a game's narrator as being an NPC, the
narrator from the Stanly Parable clearly cares about you.
That's about it. It's just you and that charming English voice.
And Wheatly from Portal 2 addresses you directly,
but you're free to ignore him.
The Portal series completely subverted our expectations about what NPC's were supposed to do
which is what made them so revolutionary.
Also, Stephen Merchant. Awesome!
Next up, best personality. Anthony Prince from the Ballad of Gay Tony episode of GTA 4
is one of the few openly gay characters in all of gaming. He's super loyal and pretty funny.
As we mentioned in the previous episode, it's kind of unfortunate that Tony's a non-playable character.
But he is the perfect foil to Luis Lopez's buttoned up demeanor.
Also, he's a good dresser, so I guess that puts him in the attractive category?
And finally, let's talk about the feels.
Because sometimes it's the small gestures that get you.
In Ico, holding Yorda's hand felt so...important. It was the fundamental mechanic
of the game and it felt like the game's designers were reaching out to you.
I never wanted to let the controller go.
And finally, there's Clementine. Who could forget those big doey eyes that just
welled up with helplessness. But it was her subtle changes in facial expressions
depending on your actions that were truly impressive. This was a huge deal
and fostered parasocial interactions like never before. It seemed like she was expressing emotions
just towards me. And it built a truly meaningful bond.
Clem is an artistic and technical marvel. She shows the potential of what
games could offer in terms of emotional investment in fictional characters.
And that's why she's my favorite NPC of all time. I'm sure you could name
a lot more. Some of my honorable mentions include Chop Chop Master Onion,
the pessimistic instructor from PilotWings, that persistent shopkeeper from Resident Evil 4,
the Grizzled Boor from Sword and Sworcery, and, of course, Claptrap.
This is not a definitive list, but it's one based on research and
my personal preferences. I'm sure your list will be quite different.
Let me know in the comments who you love, or you love to hate, and if you like what you saw
please subscribe. I'll see you next week!
Last week we talked about whether we should get rid of the word gamer. Let's see what you had to say.
Paul Bills points us to the 2011 book by Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost
titled, "How to Do Things With Videogames". It's excellent, excellent. You should read it. We'll link to it
in the description. Bogost makes his point that he thinks that the term
gamer will become obsolete in the future because more people will
start to play games. I can't wait for that to happen. We'll be so excited when we get rid that word.
To Viva Juego, thank you so much I also
thought it was a great video but of course I'm biased. But they also point out
something that many other commenters identified as well, is that the term gamer implies active
participation. So we don't have movier-ers or musicer-ers the way that we had gamers
right, so when you're a gamer it's more akin to like being
a dancer because you're doing the thing itself. So that's an excellent point. Maybe the term gamer
will always have a slightly different connotation from other mediums because
of its interactivity, because you're doing the thing itself.
Jeremy Gable is apparently writing a play about game developers
which sounds amazing please leave a note in the
comments or hit us up on Twitter. I'd love to see what you working on.
But Jeremy asks why there isn't good art about video games. There's good music about film,
there's great movies about music, why aren't you seeing the same type of
participation by other creatives engaging with games as a medium?
And to that I would say: well that's not totally true. Here in
New York we have something at the Brick Theater Where they do all these different plays
about video games. You might wanna check that out. But you see this in other places I mean
I guess chiptune music would be something that kinda moves in the video game
oeuvre. You're seeing it a little bit in art from time to time. But certainly film has
been one place where you're seeing a lot more great art about the
nature of games. In fact Seth Rogan's production company just picked
up a new film on the console wars, there's Indie Game the Movie,
that new documentary about all those ET cartridges that were buried in the Nevada
desert. So yeah I think there's certainly a bright bright future, but I look forward to more people
reflecting on games as an art form.
Thomas Voth says that the term gamer is kind of like the term hacker which is that people
don't really understand it. And that you could argue all day long about who
a hacker is or what a hacker does but at the end of the day people just think
of the movie Hackers. The big screens with code in front of it or the operator from the
Matrix or something like that, but yes, Thomas makes an excellent
point that perhaps the term gamer will not be defined by gamers but by
other people outside of that community that instill values into it and I guess that's kinda a
dangerous thing but maybe it's a good thing also. Maybe people
who don't play games can notice things about gamers that maybe gamers themselves don't actually notice
Aaron Pangilinan, I'm really really sorry for butchering your name, asked
whether I would include major league gamers in my definition of gamers.
Back to the point I was trying to make in the video is that maybe the term gamer should imply
sort of like the highest expression, someone who has a well-rounded
interest. And I think it speaks to this point that we're
trying to get away from. This whole binary where you're either a gamer or you're
not a gamer and move into this world where there's a spectrum. So maybe
on that one end will be like people who cultivate deep interest in games or
people who play them professionally and on the other end is kind of like everyday
hobbyists. But yeah I would totally consider pros as being gamers.
and yeah, maybe the fact they're pro gamers implies a certain commitment to
the form that not everybody else has.