The Smart Game: Building the Perfect NPCs

Pretention alert! Here comes a Descartes quote, in Latin no less.

Quid autem video praeter pileos & vestes, sub quibus latere possent automata? Sed judico homines esse.
(Meditations on First Philosophy 2.13)
"But what do I see apart from hats and cloaks, under which machines may hide? Yet I think that they are men."

There aren't many things I enjoy in games quite as much as cool towns with good NPC interactions. Something about going into a town and finding people there who are living their lives and will take a minute or two out of their day to talk with you, or maybe—heavens to Betsy—go on a quest with you, just really appeals to me. I want to enter a world when I play a game, and with the obvious exception of games like Metroid, where the overwhelming sense of isolation is part of the point, I'd like that world to be populated, thanks very much.

Twenty years ago, we were all younger and newer to gaming, and gaming itself was newer to us, so game designers often used NPCs as if they were walking bulletin boards. Think of a game like Zelda II or Simon's Quest: the other characters you meet say something simple and straightforward that advances the plot, for instance. Sometimes they'll sell you something or, as in Zelda II, they'll take you into their abodes and through some invisible, possibly dubious process, they'll restore your health. These are, in other words, NPCs who are simply means to various ends.

I don't know about you, but I was always taught to treat other people as ends in themselves. So much more interesting to me are the NPCs who have something going on that isn't just mechanical in nature. For instance, there's the crazy old man who lives all by himself in the final town before Dracula's castle in Simon's Quest. He doesn't do anything in the game except set the mood, but he does a great job of that. Here's this abandoned town where the last inhabitant has cracked just from living too close to the castle. And he wants you to stay and keep him company. Forever!

Yuck!

By and large, though, NPCs are vehicles. They don't set the scene, they propel the game. This is why it's both funny and true when, in Series 2 of the Penny Arcade/PVP D&D podcast (featuring Wil Wheaton!), Scott Kurtz talks to an NPC, finds himself rebuffed, and says, "Oh, this NPC has no quests for me at this time." That's what they are, usually: vending machines for quests. And sometimes stuff.

I have this theory that I'll explain some other time that the best way to create a really great game would be to teach the game how things work in the real world. Let's call it a Smart Game. The idea here is to bring computer games as close as possible to the wonderfully creative options available to players of pen-and-paper RPGs. The beauty of D&D and old school games like it is that players can opt to have their characters solve problems any way that ought to work, not just some way that the game's designers thought out in advance. I remember searching all over the worlds of games like King's Quest for simple tools to accomplish simple tasks when any damn old stick or rock would have
done the trick in real life. But see, in those games, you don't have the option of using damn old sticks and rocks. You have to look around endlessly and find the one knife in the entire game before you can solve the puzzle.

Anyway, that's mostly another story, but one element of the Smart Game that is relevant is the way I think it should treat NPCs. Again, the comparison to pen-and-paper RPGs is useful. The cool thing about NPCs in those games is that they're dynamic; the DM gets to create their responses to things that happen in the game, and even (if it's a creative DM) the kinds of lives they're leading while the PCs aren't around, and that makes for some interesting, realistic NPCs. So, I'd love to see NPCs who live in real-time in an in-game world just as they would in the real world. If you leave town and, I don't know, go kill dragons for five years, those townspeople should be up to something else when you get back. They should have died or had children or left on their own journeys. In other words, the NPCs would have their own little personalities and wants and dreams, and they'd follow courses of lives that weren't pre-scripted but were created as the game unfolded using a mixture of algorithms and random number generators. There would be tiny little NPC stories crawling all under the surface of the Smart Game, and it might be just as interesting to visit a single town over the course of a game and see what the NPCs ended up deciding to do with their lives. Maybe, maybe one of them could even turn into some sort of town slumlord whose empire of crappy properties you had to bring down, or maybe one could even amass power and become a horrible tyrant by the end of the game. Some NPCs' stories could grow beyond the scope of the main quest and become the main quest themselves.

Like I say, I love towns in games, and I want to love the people that inhabit them. What if those NPCs could live their lives for themselves and change over the course of a game? It sounds good to me.