What makes a game compelling and emotionally involving? The answer may vary with each player, but are there some core game-design principles that will make the majority of players “bond” with a title?
We threw those questions to Guild Wars 2 loremasters Ree Soesbee and Jeff Grubb. Here’s what they had to say:
Jeff: The question of emotional connection in a game is a tough one to answer, I think. How do we keep people from saying, like in Alice in Wonderland, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards”*and dismissing the game entirely? How do we engage the players and make them care?
Ree: I think one of the first things any game has to do is to encourage the player to connect with their avatar in the game. In order to get the player to invest in the game world and think of the NPCs as compelling characters, the player has to think their own character is interesting and worth spending time with.
Jeff: Yeah, it really does start with the player’s avatar, with their character in the game. You have to like yourself in order to like the greater world. And one of the challenges I see for creators in an MMO is that you want the character to be as accessible as possible to a variety of players, without*making them bland and forgettable.
People are equally repelled by viewpoint characters that have no substance and by those whose entire development is mapped out step by step—you aren’t playing a character so much as following a well-trod road of others.
Ree: There has to be some middle ground between the two.
Jeff: And I think we find that middle ground with your initial character creation in Guild Wars 2. We give you choices beyond just race and profession, and we make those choices meaningful for your experience in the game. If you’re an Ash Legion charr, your experience will have a different feel than if you’re Iron Legion. If you’re an asura from the College of Synergetics, you get different life experiences than if you’re from the College of Dynamics.
Ree: Of course, after the biography, there’s still a lot of work to do—to keep the player invested, and to continue to remind them of the choices they made for their character, while not subdividing the game too much.
Character creation is a big part of fostering a connection between player and character, but it can’t do all the heavy lifting. The more choices a player can make during the game, the more that avatar becomes theirs.
Dynamism, from internal storyline choices to the direction of a world event, gives the player attachment. Knowing that “such a thing” happened because they chose that option is like an investment in the character, and the game. It means you were important to the world, and the world recognized your decisions.
Jeff: There are some basic design assumptions we make—we think your character is at heart a good person and a hero. Your first immersion into the game, regardless of race, is a situation where you can act heroically and bring yourself to the attention of a more powerful hero who becomes a mentor to you in*those early levels. You have some darkness in your past, but your general character arc is positive. You’re kind of a big deal to the people around you, so you have an initial investment in your larger world.

Ree: In the first stages of production of Guild Wars 2, we discussed what we wanted from the character’s choices. Would we allow “evil” actions? Villainous characters? What about anti-heroes? In the end, we decided that we wanted to follow in the footsteps of the original Guild Wars game. Much like Jeff said: the player character is a hero.
Now, in some cases, your hero can be faced with tough decisions, or decisions that have no perfect victory (a “Kobayashi Maru” scenario), but we never wanted to imply that the player character was a bad guy. That’s appropriate in other games, but ours is specifically a good vs. evil fight for the dominance of Tyria. We’re willing to promote different “shades” of goodness (asura vs. sylvari, for example), but we want our players to be on the good side of that fence.
Another thing we took into account is the visualization of the character. Although everyone knows what a human looks like, could we get the player invested in the furry, burly charr? How about the diminutive asura, or the Viking-like norn? Most of all, what were we going to do to make a plant race visually familiar enough to feel attachment, but distinct enough to be their own unique race? Our artists are amazing, but I’ll admit—ArenaNet went through a lot of trial and error on faces, costumes, details, and silhouettes in order to create the races we have today.
Jeff: Identification with your avatar is a key to emotional investment. To create that bond, a player has to evolve from “this is my character” to “this is me.” Some of that is done graphically, with customized appearance and equipment. But a big part of it is to create options that allow the player to engage and identify with his creation. While we work from the basic assumption of “I am a hero,” we provide enough variance to allow a variety of playing styles. In addition, those choices will have effects, ranging from how the story progresses to unique items within your home instance and even to conversations and scenes that reinforce your choices.
In addition to that, we have to consider the world around the character. Not only does the character have to be accessible but the world that character lives in needs to promote emotional investment. Each of the five races in the game has some redeeming virtues, which helps players identify with them. The charr are ferocious soldiers, but they are pragmatic and thoughtful. The norn live life to the fullest. The sylvari may be new to the neighborhood, but they have a strong and innate sense of nobility. Not every NPC you meet embodies their races’ virtues, but they all play with their society’s assumptions. This, in turn, should bring you deeper into the world and increase your emotional investment with the people you deal with.

Ree: The next challenge is to keep that world vibrant and engaging, and to maintain that investment as you play. Delivering content that has genuine appeal, that really makes a player care about the things they’re discovering or events they’re affecting, is the second half of our challenge. In some games, you can create a character you love but still get bored with the game around you—so we have to do everything we can to keep the world interesting and relevant. We want to keep calling back to the biography questions, through conversations and the return of early-game NPCs, so that the player continues feeling this emotional investment.
Making those NPCs feel alive, and encouraging a player to care about the world around them, really stems from keeping their ongoing interest. Clever gameplay can help with this, as can beautiful art. But really, the thing that makes an MMO emotionally different from a movie is the fact that you can interact with it, make your own choices, and alter the world around you. And that is the strength that we keep returning to as we design the game.
Jeff: I think that’s what it all boils down to in the long run—you become emotionally invested with the game because you become interested in both your character and the world. And you can do that by making choices and seeing those choices have an effect—and truly matter—within the world. That is one of our goals when we’re telling stories in Guild Wars 2.


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