Ada Plays

A thinking post, so think along with me.

I propose that characters are made of two sets of constraints – external and internal, will explain more – and the relationship between them. External constraints are things like their income level, their place of birth, their appearance. Internal constraints are their values, their personality, their utility function if I put on my para-economist hat for a moment.

Generally, it’s interesting when a character overcomes their external constraints. They “rise above” where they started or some other constraint society has imposed upon them. But internal constraints are something characters can either hold to (“stand up for what you believe in”) or change (“become the person you want to be”). The goal is to align the constraints of values and personality in this case.

So we have:

• external constraints -> overcome
• internal constraints -> align

I wonder how different types of characters interact with these two sets of constraints differently. I read a recent fantasy series (James Islington) which is entirely about this dynamic. The characters struggle to align their internal constraints (this guides their behavior) and to overcome their external constraints (this drives their behavior). Much of both the protagonists’ and antagonists’ interactions revolve around the different interpretations and definitions of their constraints. What creates a villain in this story is their failure to understand the relative power of external/internal constraints and to align appropriately.

In games, we can model characters to have specific constraints and then unleash them to see how they manage these differences. In a game like Crusader Kings 3, characters have the external constraints of power (modeled as title, gold, prestige, etc.) and the internal constraints of their personality (traits). I am curious what other methods we could use to model these aspects and what we could learn. Games tend to have their own goals and purposes for modeling characters as they do. In CK3, characters are modeled in such a way as to have them behave “in character” but also occasionally make choices that are unexpected leading to some emergent story. This leads me to ask what the relationship is between constraints and expected/unexpected choices, and to what extent can we understand and possibly quantify this relationship.

Why is it so interesting when characters struggle to achieve these overarching goals of overcome/align? There is something intriguing about those liminal areas where constraints become not-constraints. It’s a kind of built-in suspense characters provide to a story. Time for me to dive into how its modeled in some games and try to understand its relationship to the narrative, whether scripted or emergent. Stay tuned for more thoughts!

Would love to hear your reactions and ideas. I’m especially curious about how you might see this frame being modeled in games (and what games).