Category list

Accomplishment

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.

Leadership Attitudes and Abilities

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

Ambitious
Daring
Original
Confident
Respectful; treating others as if they're important
Responsible
Ethical
Not shaken easily from a path
Able to handle tough situations instead of being overwhelmed by them; not shirking from situations that would intimidate others

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."

A Valuable and Appreciated Role

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.

A Story About Bread

I was speaking to a designer of MMOGs who was talking about the roles played in his games by NPCs. He said, "No one would want to play the baker who makes bread." Thus that role, he reasoned, would best be played by an NPC.

I took up the challenge, and suggested he imagine a society in which:

Bread offers not just sustenance and health, but, if you eat certain breads, they give you superhuman abilities , at least for a time. For instance, you could gain the ability to see through walls.
The Lead Baker controls the flow of bread and decides who gets how much.
The Lead Baker is the most respected person in town. He gets more attention even than the Mayor. People offer him free goods and services wherever he goes.
Bakers from this and other towns gather for secret ceremonies in which they renew their abilities to make magical breads. No one else knows what goes on in these ceremonies, but everyone is dying to know.
The tradition of being a Baker is a long and rich one, and pieces of that story are engraved on the front of City Hall.
Bakers, because they can eat their own breads and gain special powers at will, can, when required or when they feel like it, exhibit extraordinary abilities—speed, strength, or even wilder abilities like the ability to walk through hills.

The game designer looked at me and nodded. Who wouldn't want to be a baker in that game?

License to Break the Rules

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.