Characters

What this element is

Characters are who the player is and who they meet: the playable character (can it be customised or selected, and what options are provided?), its attributes, and the characteristics and roles of non-player characters. This includes the decision to have no visible character at all.

Why it carries values

Character decisions are inextricably tied to the values designers want to promote. Whether to use an avatar, assign a fixed identity, represent or not represent certain groups, stylise or humanise, and consult the community — each choice commits the game to values like realism, inclusion, psychological safety, professional identity and authenticity. And because characters are expensive, budget quietly co-authors many of these decisions. Characters are the lens through which the player experiences the game and its values.

Patterns from practice

Player characters

Several games deliberately give the player no visible body. In the medical VR training games the player is the medic but never sees themselves — a visual body would create a disconnect between their real movements and their character's. The fire warden and biosecurity games use the same logic: the player is personally the character, carrying out the task. Omitting the avatar values a realistic, focused experience — what the player does in the scenario, not what they look like.

The learner-driver game shows how budget and representation politics get bundled into one decision. The team chose not to show a player character at all, avoiding the cost of building options for gender and skin colour. The designer framed it as a "no-brainer" (P4) — a choice that neatly sidesteps representation debates while keeping costs down. That's a real trade: the money went to safety features instead, but nobody gets to see themselves in the game either.

The space VR experience took the opposite path: a fixed player character, a female Australian astronaut, chosen because the team wanted both Australian and female representation. Full customisation with different voices and many ethnic backgrounds would have been completely impractical, so they picked one very well-chosen identity and fixed it in place rather than defaulting to something generic — helped by the fact that an astronaut suit's silhouette is essentially sexless.

The physiotherapy games sit between the extremes: players control weird and wonderful avatars — a sphere, a spaceship, a little hunter — via a balance board. The characters can't be chosen or altered; the team was interested in adding that but never found the time, a fair signal it wasn't something they valued highly. Here characters are tools for getting people moving and having fun, not to be taken too seriously.

Non-player characters

NPC decisions carry a second round of values negotiations. The learner-driver game keeps people and animals out of the scene entirely — partly an engine limitation, but mostly so learners focus on the road, not the scenery. Roadside obstacles are flat billboards rather than lifelike bodies, specifically to avoid traumatising learners.

Studios in the conservation, social welfare and social services sectors put conscious effort into NPC diversity. The youth social services game includes characters from LGBTQIA+, disabled, Indigenous and culturally diverse backgrounds, developed through in-depth consultation with experts in the field. The result is not haphazard — it's the product of careful, collaborative work.

The disability services game goes further, embedding actual photos of community participants in the game world. They're "not NPCs in the traditional gaming sense", but "a true and authentic representation of that community" (P8). Rather than abstracting or fictionalising, the game chooses direct self-representation.

The medical simulations root their NPCs in clinical reality with regional specificity: one South Pacific scenario features "a young islander boy who has a condition that is specific to that region" (P1), with his mother voiced by a real woman from the area. The developer was clear this wasn't multicultural showcasing — it was realism.

Stylisation can be a safety decision too. The physiotherapy game's main NPCs are "zombie teddy bears" (P2), chosen as "the friendliest way" (P2) to introduce a shooting element. Early boss designs were knocked back for looking "terrifying... really quite like, gaunt and lanky with these big long claws" (P2) — mechanically "really interesting and fun" (P2), but too frightening for the therapeutic context, so out they went. And the space game reduces NPCs to disembodied voices from mission control and relay stations, keeping the player immersed in being alone in space while still feeling part of something bigger — emotion and situation over visual presence.

Questions to ask your team

1. Does the player need a visible body — and if we omit one, is that for focus and realism or to dodge representation questions?
2. If we can't afford customisation, would one deliberately chosen fixed identity serve our values better than a generic default?
3. Who appears in our game world, and who is absent? Would the community we're depicting recognise the cast as theirs?
4. Have we consulted the people being represented — or are we guessing from inside the studio?
5. Could any character design frighten, trauma-trigger or shame our most vulnerable players? Have we tested with them?
6. Where realism and psychological safety conflict (injuries, hazards, scary antagonists), which wins — and is that decision written down?
7. Which character decisions are actually budget decisions in disguise? Name them honestly.