Characters are the heart of every well-designed story. Designing them presents a number of challenges, it’s a careful balance of psychology, storytelling and alignment with what you are trying to teach.
When learners identify with the characters, they are more likely to engage with the content. They show interest in what characters do and say, and care about the choices they make for them in the interactive story.
So our job as designers is to design characters that our learners care about.
Characters demonstrate wants, actions and traits
The imaginary world of your story contains a hierarchy of characters. Let’s look at the elements we need to determine for each character. Top of the hierarchy is the protagonist, who is most likely the learner’s avatar in the story, so it is critical to create a connection between them.
The Protagonist
We need three critical elements to make a strong protagonist:
- Their need or goal: what is their primary motivation, what is the “why” behind their actions? Do not confuse this with the learning goal. Nobody’s goal is to go forth and apply a company policy. Their goal is to accomplish a task, have a conversation about a topic, help someone etc.
- Their actions: how do they pursue their goal? The actions of a character should align with the plot, led by their goal, and the flow of their decisions.
- Characterisation: what are their defining traits? Do not confuse traits with facts. Ages, waist measurement, and job titles do not make an interesting character. Are they impulsive or thoughtful, trusting or suspicious, assertive or passive?
The key to each of these elements is emotion like fear of something new, lack of confidence, overconfidence, being overwhelmed, or maintaining a friendship, are very important.
One common mistake is overloading the learner with a detailed backstory. It is not as necessary as we think. While it makes sense to align our protagonist’s backstory with the proposed learner, research shows that learners identify more with a situation and the emotional turmoil a character experiences, than with them being a close replica of themselves. Instead, focus on conveying “why”, an emotional driver, a situation and allow the learner to fill in details with their imagination. Add a layer of complexity, like conflicting desires or goals between characters, and you’ve got a recipe for the dramatic that drives both engagement and learning outcomes.