Let's say that the game involves you taking on the role of an FBI agent.

A major part of identifying with a role involves learning the skill set of that role. If you can do a heart transplant, there's a good chance you'll feel like a heart surgeon. Of course, this education works particularly well if it takes place during early missions or training programs that offer genuine suspense and lots of fun.^[1]

What are the skill sets of the agent? Surveillance? Hand-to-hand combat? Mastery of a variety of weapons?

As we master the skills and tools of a trade, we begin to assume the identity that goes with them.

There are a number of other ways to encourage a player to become emotionally caught up in a role. The following sections describe a few. I'm certainly not saying you should use every one of these. But, while some of these can be used in combination, you'll note that many of them can't.

In real life, there are all sorts of obvious and subtle rewards for doing a good job in certain roles, such as the roles of friend, father, mother, citizen, and so on. Rewards can encourage players to adopt a role as well.

These rewards can come in a variety of forms, such as:

The illustration on the left is of an example game scenario. You play the bad-ass gunslinger who just rid the city of its worst villain—the leader of a heavily armed crime ring.

And now you're being rewarded with the red-carpet treatment and a choice of great, high-tech weapons.

The scene shows several rewards:

All of these work as Role Induction Techniques.

A badass is a character who's able to stand on his or her own, without the need of a social network, and who is willing to take on incredible odds. It's a role players are often glad to assume. The character might be out for the social good, as Batman is, or just out for himself, as is Mel Gibson's character in The Road Warrior is.

Even people who, in real life, are politically correct goodasses, will secretly confess over their fourth beer that there's nothing like playing a badass.

Make the character the best at something, or at least a master at it. For instance, in Thief, you play a character who is a master of stealth. If the player doesn't start the game as the best, make it known that he or she can rise to that level.

We have a natural propensity to identify with someone who exhibits leadership abilities and attitudes. These include being:

Remember, some of the techniques in this chapter are incompatible with each other. For instance, a number of qualities on the preceding list wouldn't jive with the badass personality described in the section “Against All Odds.”

In massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), you often see people congealing into guilds and getting very involved in roles like my experience at the Renaissance Faire.

Even if you're not the leader, occupying a valuable and appreciated role can be a powerful Role Induction Technique.

In some ways, curiously, this technique is the opposite of the leadership traits mentioned earlier in this chapter. In this technique, your character can enjoy taboo thrills that would normally be frowned upon.

We're all indoctrinated into a cultural straightjacket. Break the rules at your own risk. If you don't believe me, wear a bright orange jumpsuit and walk along a downtown sidewalk, playing with a yo-yo. Strangers will shun you like the plague.

The straightjacket begins from the moment you wake up in the morning, and many people are only freed from it when they're dreaming.

Now, perhaps the word “straightjacket” might be a bit harsh. Certainly reigning in some impulses is critical for the greater good, or real life would resemble the chaos of the Internet.

But a game that allows us to take on a role in which we can ignore or break many of those social conventions and strictures can be quite involving. Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City bear testimony to the power of this Role Induction Technique.

Part of the previously mentioned cultural shackles involves submitting to a personality lock-down.

At the Renaissance Faire, there was one young woman who played the Queen of England, year after year, at Faire after Faire. As she was carried aloft in her traveling palanquin^[2] by a dozen young men, all others at the Faire would fall silent and bow when she passed by.

I remember observing this one day, as I stood alongside a cynical news reporter. He leaned over to me and said, “How sad that this woman feels she has to pretend to be a queen.”

I can still remember my response. “How sad that she lives in a society that doesn't see she has the nobility of a queen.”

A role that allows a person to take on a beguiling new identity is a role the player will assume quite willingly, of course modified by individual taste. Even at the Renaissance Faire, those who enjoyed playing nobility wouldn't dream of playing a peasant, and visa versa.

In a game, we can escape our cultural shackles and become:

Or we can choose hundreds of other roles that normally aren't available to us.

Abilities Beyond the Norm can certainly make playing a character more enticing. Who didn't enjoy being undetectable in Thief? Or juggling an enemy in the air with blasts from your duel pistols in Devil May Cry?

If something great happens that makes the player exalt, the in-game character should do the same as well. For instance, if the player gets an awesome power-up that gives him exciting new abilities, the in-game character should be excited by that as well.

However, if the character has a large exuberant response to every little reward you get in the game, but the player doesn't feel the same way about receiving those rewards, the player will start to break his or her emotional connection with that central character.

The opposite also holds true. If you feel excited about a big accomplishment but your in-game character has no reaction, that can also diminish or break the bond.

The exception is if part of your character's Diamond is to show no reaction to triumphs or setbacks.

Earlier we looked at ways to use a single line of dialogue to reveal insight into a character. Self Auto-Talk and Self Auto-Thought^[3] can be used to reveal some of the character's Character Diamond or unique traits.

These techniques can enhance identification with a role.^[4] For example, Self Auto-Talk is used effectively as a Role Induction Technique in Thief.

As we saw in Chapter 2.4, “Dialogue Deepening Techniques,” a lot of meaning and emotion can take place beneath the surface of few words. Using fewer words can also create a sense of mystery.

If we hear the character we're playing talking, it's helpful if the character isn't overly talkative. A less talkative character allows us to project ourselves into the character.

A character who hints at what he or she is feeling, instead of spelling it out, also allows us to project ourselves into the character. It forces us to fill in the pieces, and thus draws us in.

Also, if we hear the words of the character we're playing and the words are slightly mysterious, we are similarly pulled in as we fill in the pieces.

In the game Final Fantasy X, we're supposed identify with Titus, the teenage hero, who leads a group of comrades on a fantastic journey. Most players identify most strongly, however, with his elder protector, Auron, because he's the one who speaks few words and has an air of mystery.

Many game designers prefer to have the character you're playing be silent. This technique has also been shown to be effective in creating Role Induction.

Grand Theft Auto III is just one of many, many examples. By not giving the character a diamond or even any speech at all, each player can take the badass role and make it his or her own. Still, most players I've spoken to preferred playing Tommy Vercetti, the character in Vice City who does have a voice.

In Final Fantasy X, you play the role of Titus, a young man who is angry because (as far he knows) his father deserted him. But unless your own father deserted you, it might be hard to identify with his anger.

However, if Titus complained about the unfairness in life—the fact that one person is born rich and another poor, that one person lives long while a child might die of some dread disease, and, in his case, his father deserted him—then his anger would have been generalized and thus be easier to identify with.

Opening one door means not opening another. There is a tradeoff with every choice of Role Induction Techniques, and the tradeoff with keeping the character silent is that you can't create and define a complex and fresh new character, like Garrett in Thief, for the player to identify with.

Thief, in fact, uses a number of techniques discussed in this chapter:

Because of the preceding five techniques, when you play the game, you're willing to identify with Garrett, the character you play. And because you're willing, that identification is then enhanced in the game with:

By the end of the sequel, you begin to develop some empathy.

How emotionally involved will you be in a game where you don't identify at all with the character you're playing?

Well, perhaps a lot, if many other Emotioneering techniques are used.

However, to cast the player into a role and then not try to make the player identify with that role, is to actually diminish the player's emotional engagement in the game to a greater or lesser degree. It also means passing up a superb opportunity for increasing the player's emotional immersion in the game.

Role Induction and First-Person Character Arcs (see the next chapter) are two of the biggest hurdles in game design. Games that conquer these challenges and that also offer intoxicating gameplay will become signature fixtures in the next generation of games.