With friends like these, who needs enemies: the affordances of game mechanics for the development of affective relationships
Creators: name: DEOR, Antimony
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 330310
subject: Interaction and experience design
classificationCode: 360502
subject: Computer gaming and animation
classificationCode: 360504
subject: Interactive media

description: Nonplayer characters are some of the hardest game elements to get right. A lot is demanded of these otherworldly counterparts. From their origin as stand-ins for absent human players, nonplayer characters have become distinguished as their own entities, and codified into many distinct categories. Excellent progress has been made in terms of the resolution of their graphics, the subtlety of their movement and the breadth of their perception. The diversity of humans and relationships represented by nonplayer characters has also improved immensely in recent years. However, there is still work to be done.

Nonplayer characters have been studied through the disciplines of game design, psychology, AI and robotics, and media and cultural studies. These investigations touch on the emotional impact nonplayer characters can have on human players, but mostly focus on the perceived humanness or believability of nonplayer characters as mechanisms for affect. However, even when a player is not immersed in a game or finds a nonplayer character unrealistic, they can still have an important experience. This thesis addresses the inherent non-humanness of nonplayer characters and focuses on one of the persistent problems with nonplayer characters: their affective capacity, or their ability to modify the player and be modified by them in return.

Affect is a useful lens through which to view nonplayer characters, as they are things that can act, and be acted upon. Their bodies, such as they are, are changed during gameplay. The ways in which bodies can change in games are determined by mechanics. So a study of how nonplayer characters can act on the player, the game world, and each other, is a study of the kinds of relationships game mechanics can afford. As the name implies, the position of the `nonplayer' character is always tied to the position of the player.

In Chapter One we explore the limits of player and nonplayer actions and the affective implications of these limits through the philosophies of Spinoza and Plumwood. Chapter Two examines game enemies and their unique relationship to the player. In Chapter Three, friendly nonplayer characters are interrogated about why they are so hard to design. The final chapter looks at the representation of animals in games and how this representation of familiar beings can influence human-NPC relationships. In concluding, this thesis explores a number of queer, experimental, and indie games that use strange mechanics and uncommon roles to demonstrate more interesting relational possibilities.

This study of affect between players and nonplayer characters in games necessarily encompasses the power dynamics of player-nonplayer relationships. To fully appreciate the nonplayer character, then, involves decentring the player and viewing the single-player game world more as an ecology of experiences than a singularly human fantasy.