What makes a good character? It’s not necessarily one you can engage with and sympathise with because some of the most memorable characters there are are villains. A tragic villain who has some sort of dark past that led him to his evildoing is often the most interesting, but sometimes villains who are just plain evil in a variety of creative ways can be memorable, too.
On the “good” side of the spectrum, distinctive, likable characters are fun to “hang out” with. Even slightly irritating characters can be memorable in their own way — though perhaps not for the reasons their creator intended. They don’t necessarily have to “do” much, but they have to be more than a sounding board delivering lines in a flat, dry sort of way.
In the world of video games, characterisation may be frequently exaggerated, but it often leads to memorable encounters — particularly if you spend a protracted amount of time with said characters, as you frequently tend to do in RPGs. JRPGs, for all their faults and linearity, often present the strongest characters in all of gaming, even though many of them tend to fall into the cliché trap. Despite this, though, if you’ve engaged with the gameplay sufficiently over the course of the 20/40/50/90/100 hours it takes to beat whatever RPG you’re playing then you’ll probably find yourself missing those characters when the time comes to leave them behind.
On the Western front, BioWare are often regarded as masters of characterisation, and indeed characters such as Mordin in Mass Effect 2 and Shale in Dragon Age: Origins are pretty memorable. But very often when I beat a BioWare game, I don’t find myself wishing I could spend more time with those characters in quite the same way I do when I beat a Persona game, or as I anticipate I’m going to feel when Xenoblade Chronicles eventually comes to an end.
Video games are, in some ways, a more unrefined medium than other formats. Technical limitations often get in the way of being able to make use of techniques used in, say, film or writing. Writing in particular allows the author to explore a character in a level of detail arguably unrivalled by any other medium. Of course, said author has to be careful not to give away too much too soon, otherwise the pacing of the character’s story is thrown out of whack and the reader might not feel inclined to go on. Getting to know a character should be a gradual process — that doesn’t necessarily mean that a chapter of their “dark past” comes to light at a time, since a character doesn’t need a dark past to be interesting — but each hour the audience spends in the company of that character should be like getting to know a real person. You start to recognise that character’s traits, their likes, dislikes, foibles, weaknesses and the forms of adversity in which they find they can stand the strongest.
There’s an occasionally-mentioned piece of writers’ wisdom that states that to make the best stories, you have to be as mean as possible to your main character. While following a protagonist’s struggles is often entertaining, it doesn’t necessarily have to involve them being kidnapped, tortured, raped, mutilated and all manner of other things. Psychological torment can be profoundly affecting, too — and different characters have different triggers by which they can be psychologically traumatised. For one strong-stomached character, it might only be the most depraved and horrendous images imaginable that could torment their mind and keep them awake at night. For another, it could be something as simple as the fact that the guy at the coffee shop didn’t pay them as much attention as they would have liked. Characters are people, after all — and like people, they’re all different.
Inventing your characters is one of the most fun parts of creative writing. Figuring out what to do with these characters is the challenging bit that comes afterwards. Get your head around that and you’ve got yourself a story.