When our team was assembled to create a game set in an emergency room that exemplified racial diversity and helped players understand the roles and responsibilities of medical professionals, we knew we had our work cut out for us. The timeline for the project was short and the needs were real. If successful, our game could encourage middle school students to pursue careers in the medical field. If it failed, middle school students would have to rely on Call of Duty to teach them about emergency medicine. We had to succeed.

A partial cast of character shot. Such happiness.

We were seven devoted developers, intent on using what little time we had to make a story-based experience that would draw the player in. The game was called Day Shift and we knew creating an informative game wasn’t enough. We had to follow the fun. No one was going to learn anything from a game they didn’t want to play.

I want to talk about one of the approaches we took in making Day Shift fun: the characters.

Creating Characters

Day Shift used a dialogue branching system similar to what you may find in many modern RPGs. The player could use a medical professional to interact with patients and lead the conversation in a variety of directions.

Yes, those are cat ears and a tail. It’s a costume. We don’t have cat people.

See those boxes at the bottom of the screen? Those represent your dialogue options. While Lorem ipsum isn’t the most edge-of-your-seat drama one can imagine, I can promise you the actual dialogue was filled to the brim with characterization. More on that later. For now, let’s talk about what makes a good character. After all, if we were going to get players interested in our characters, our characters needed to be interesting.

We have an acronym for character creation I want to share with you now.

HSWRWC

It’s a mouthful, but it’s what we used to define our characters for Day Shift. It stands for History, Strengths, Weaknesses, Relationships, Wants, and Change. Let’s take a second to talk about what each of those mean for a character.

History: This is all about backstory. No good character is born the day the story takes place. Usually, there is a full and interesting life that took place before the player ever meets that character. You need to know how full it is and why it’s interesting. To be clear, the most interesting part is yet to come. We have a story to tell after all. But if you know how many years Betty spent in the Air Force and how many kids Linda has at home, it’s going to create organic interactions later.

Strengths: Everyone is good at something. Sometimes a person is good at a lot of things. Sometimes a person just makes a mean roast beef panini. Or maybe they’re very good at being a very big pain in the neck. Whatever it is, you need to know. The Day Shift characters had the advantage of being career-focused for the purposes of the game. That gave us a solid ground to stand on as it pertains to strengths and weaknesses.

Weakness: Likewise, everyone is bad at something. I’m not talking an aversion to kryptonite here. I’m talking about how our surgeon, Charles, simply can’t smalltalk to save his life. Aleja has no patience when it comes to kids. Benny has a really hard time inserting catheters. Knowing weaknesses allows you to play with those weaknesses to create dramatic conflict.

Relationships: No one exists in a vacuum, especially not a group of people working together in an emergency department. Knowing whom a character calls friend and enemy speaks volumes about them. These relationships are what fuel our conflicts and create our tension. Drama requires two or more opposing forces. Establishing character relationships is all about informing those forces.

Wants: Everyone wants something. If a character doesn’t want something, there is really no reason for a story to be told about them. Maybe our nurse wants a promotion. Maybe a surgeon really wants to be seen as a hero to a family. Maybe an administrator wants to be seen as “one of the girls” instead of the boss. Whatever it is, knowing the “wants” will inform how characters act.

Change: If you ask me, there is no story without character change. If a character does not emerge from a conflict having changed in some way, there is no meaning to that conflict. Even in a game where the characters are meant to be founts of career defining information, they still need to explore, discover, and change.

Creating Characters for the Demographic

I like the word “demographic.” It’s such a powerful buzzword. In this context, we’re talking about those middle school players we’re trying to inform. Turns out there is this entire subgenre that has slowly been defining itself recently. Young Adult fiction has brought a renaissance to the world of fiction and writing for teens has become an art form all its own.

On Day Shift, we really wanted our characters to resonate with that demographic, so we did some research. What makes a character click with teens? It’s not really that different from making a character resonate with an adult. It’s always about relatability.

Having sweet weapons is relatable, I guess.

To achieve relatability, we needed to be very clear with our characters’ motivations. Young adults are internally focused. That’s not to say they’re narcissists, but that they’re at the time in their lives when they’re discovering who they are and what they can be. Making their desires and what motivates them as clear and explicit as possible is important. Relatability comes through understanding. If we obfuscate the character’s “wants,” teens aren’t going to take the time to dig.

Creating Characters for the Demographic in a Hospital Setting

So here’s the issue. The above pictured Harry, Katniss, and Thomas have many things in common. One of them is their age. They’re all approximately 16. Our hospital is filled with medical personnel who are decidedly older than 16. So our issue was creating believable older characters with whom young adults could still relate.

When we first sat down to solve this problem, we actually tossed around an alternative story. A story in which teens were forced to work the hospital in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where all the adults were gone. A cool story with relatable characters but we also needed to familiarize our players with the modern emergency department. I don’t think most people are working in wasteland hospitals.

No one works here.

So our characters need to act in a way representative of the profession, take part in issues surrounding the emergency department setting, and still be relatable for young adults. That’s a tough one. Conflict in which adults take part are not necessarily the same conflict a teen may find interesting. Many young adult stories revolve around resistance and rebellion against corrupt powers. It’s something we can all relate to at that age. However, that wasn’t really the story we wanted to tell at this hospital. We wanted to paint the place in a positive light.

Not only that, but we needed to get across a good bit of information in the process. We needed people to know the difference between a triage nurse and a bedside nurse. We needed people to know what a respiratory therapist does, and probably what the word “respiratory” means.

So this is what we did…

• Our characters needed to be fun AND informative. At Schell Games, we place great importance on a fun-first approach. Creating characters that were lively and had immediate “curb appeal” was a priority. It may not get us the relatability by itself but larger-than-life exaggerated personalities are easily approachable.
• We needed to emphasize one archetypal trait. We didn’t have a lot of space to get players interested in these characters so we tried to play up a single appealing trait. Katie only talks like a pirate. Dustin is so insecure, he can’t look people in the eyes. Kiku has an abundance of Halloween spirit. They don’t need to be positive traits. They need to be something players can latch onto and say, “Oh yeah, Dustin was that dude who apologized all the time.”
• We needed to stay away from preaching. In an information-centric game, sometimes you can come off as trying too hard to teach a lesson. We don’t want our characters to be teachers, we want them to be representations of what players may someday become. So we stayed away from telling players to stop eating cheeseburgers and exercise daily, even though these are things you may find in a games focused on healthcare.
• We needed to pay attention to character voice. This is a given but it’s worth calling out. Betty calls everyone “honey.” Dustin’s dialogue uses a lot of ellipses to show he isn’t confident. Charles does not use contractions. Benny sneaks sarcasm into everything he says. It’s these quirks that portray a vivid personality. We had to be careful though. They’re only vivid if players can associate with them personally. If they don’t know anyone sarcastic in real life, they have a harder time relating to that personality.

Day Shift has a diverse set of characters with many different traits and qualities. We cast a wide net in an effort to catch as many different fish as possible. For anyone who doesn’t live near an ocean, that means we tried to relate to as many people as we could. Relatability is so important for players. If they can’t see themselves in your characters, they just aren’t going to care. And the way you achieve relatability is by creating characters who are not only believable with the HSWRWC system, but by understanding your demographic.

Research and development for this project was supported by the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43OD021302. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and developers and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.