Rules for interaction with players & NPCs

What this element is

These are the rules governing how players interact with other players and with non-player characters — who you can talk to, what you can say, and how the game world responds. As Flanagan and Nissenbaum note, the way interactions are enabled can greatly affect the culture of a game, as can the way NPCs respond to a player.

Why it carries values

The interactions a game permits shape its social and ethical culture: designers are literally encoding their ideas about how people should treat each other. Notably, none of the games studied were online multiplayer — so player-to-player interaction happened in the physical deployment context instead, like students competing to finish first in the learner-driver game in a classroom. That means the designed interactions are mostly with NPCs, and every rule about them — cleverly written dialogue, adaptive decision trees, or deliberately removed interaction — is a values statement. Authenticity is prized, but it always gets weighed against other priorities within limited resources.

Patterns from practice

Authenticity

The youth social services game uses NPCs to "create the narrative of the game, creating situations where the player is forced to play a certain role and make decisions" (P10). The grey areas — what storylines and characters portray to the player — were worked through with a reference group: interactive content was negotiated with communities, including South Sudanese youth and agencies, to avoid stereotyping police or young people and to model constructive engagement over conflict. In one scenario a brother is released from custody "with active support from a youth worker" (P10) — a deliberate vision of a supportive community rather than one run by authorities.

Players are expected to get it wrong: "even the most wonderful child will say the wrong response at the start of the game... because that's the fun response, right?" (P10). Those responses build a profile of the player and adapt the ongoing decision trees. When the same developer built a COVID-19 vaccine scenario, players sceptical of vaccination got a more detailed story — the game engages the player's own moral and informational framework and tailors the narrative to their stance rather than lecturing past it.

The medical simulations pursue authenticity through consequence: learners can kill or maim NPC patients by applying the wrong treatment. Allowing wrong decisions — like the measles misjudgment in the South Pacific scenario — creates "a teachable moment" (P1). Professional realism, accountability and learning through failure are built directly into the rules of interaction.

Limitations

Every designer acknowledged limits to what interaction can achieve. The space game's creative director wanted authentic exchanges with mission control but knew that perfectly mirroring the real astronaut experience is untenable — "after four hours, it's probably going to get a bit old for the player" (P6). They framed the fix as "a compromise of the technical realism in order to get a kind of a greater truth... of what the experience of doing these things is like" (P6): procedurally accurate interactions compressed and stylised to preserve tension, engagement and accessibility.

Omitting interaction is itself a value-laden decision. The learner-driver developer "deliberately avoided allowing interactions between the players and other NPCs... by eliminating drivers altogether, and simply tinting the windows of other cars" (P4). Partly budget — but it also dodges the "negative 'uncanny valley' effect" (P4) and stops players turning collisions into comedy: "I can think of myself as a young kid and what I'm going to enjoy... so I tried to think about, well, what would I do to have fun and to make my friends laugh? And so stop all of those" (P4). The cardboard cut-out dogs, bikes and balls that must be avoided carry limited consequences when hit, taking the edge off the game and encouraging safer driving instead of crash-for-laughs.

The fire warden game is sparse by design: the learner is a silent protagonist with no dialogue with "home base" (P8). The minimalism prevents cognitive overload and keeps the focus on procedural correctness rather than exploration or creativity. Limiting NPC interaction ensures that the correct types of interaction are the only ones the game recognises and rewards.

Questions to ask your team

1. What model of "how people treat each other" do our NPC interactions rehearse? Would we be comfortable if players carried it into the real world?
2. Who reviewed our characters' portrayals? Have the communities being depicted — not just subject experts — negotiated the grey areas with us?
3. When a player gives the fun-but-wrong response, what happens? Does the game adapt and teach, or just scold?
4. Does our dialogue meet players where their beliefs actually are (as the vaccine scenario did), or does it assume everyone already agrees with us?
5. Where have we compressed or stylised realistic interaction for engagement's sake — and does the compression still convey the "greater truth" of the experience?
6. What interactions have we removed entirely? For each one, is the reason budget, safety, or preventing mischief — and does the omission create any blind spots in the learning?
7. Our game will be played in a shared physical space. What player-to-player dynamics (competition, showing off, trolling) will emerge around it, and do our interaction rules account for them?