Hypothetical Game Case Study: Choice of Player Character

In this game, the plot is unimportant to our purposes.

What is important is that you have a choice in the character you play. You can select either the brother or the sister in the illustration. Furthermore, you can play either of them in their human form, or in their demonic form. Pre-game, you choose to be either the brother or the sister. Once that choice is made, during the game itself you can switch between human and demonic forms at will.

But there are tradeoffs. Obviously, each character will have different abilities when they're in their human form than when in their demonic form. But, in games, characters who look different having different abilities is nothing new; this is standard in just about every game in which you can choose to play a variety of characters.

The real tradeoff is this: If you play either character in their human form, people (NPCs) find you charismatic. They help you in numerous ways.

In your demonic form, even your friends are afraid of you. People either flee from you or try and impede you. No one helps you. In that form, however, you're much more powerful.

Which form will you assume, or will you alternate? These are tough decisions. It's a First-Person Deepening Technique.

A Problem with This Idea and a Solution

You could argue that this is no different than a standard RPG (role-playing game) in that each character has different skills and abilities, and the decision whether to be human or demonic is simply a tactical one. Therefore, there's no emotion involved and making the decision about which character to play wouldn't generate any kind of depth on the part of the player.

This argument could be 100% correct. The solution would involve how emotionally painful it is to have ones closest friends fear you and shun you when you take a demonic form. Only if you like these other NPCs and hate it when they turn away from you would the decision as to which form to choose be emotionally difficult and thus be a First-Person Deepening Technique.

Therefore, the game will have to have been Emotioneered in such a way that you really like your friends and feel bonded to them. This means that NPC Rooting Interest Techniques (see Chapter 2.10) and Player Toward NPC Chemistry Techniques (see Chapter 2.11) must be artfully employed.