Human Psychology versus PC Psychology

[HereticalFaction]

I have been trying to effectively mine this forum for the past few weeks, but the sheer mass of archived material is defeating me.

What I want is to explore the differences between the motivation patterns of flesh and blood humans and those of the PCs which we create in games to satisfy whatever motivates us to play RPGs.

I realise that this question really applies most specifically to games which do not have a clear "motivation mecahnic". In those games which do, I immagine charachter motivation is more a reflection of the authorial process and motivation of the human designer than a reflection of the playing process of the human player.

Anyway, can anyone here point to resources (on the forge or elsewhere) which discuss the way that the Psychology of the "PC species" diverges from the "Human species" which it is most often meant to simulate.

[zephyr_cirrus]

If you think about it, a human's behavior is much more difficult to predict and overcome.  This is because a PC is based upon the thoughts and logic of humans, and their behavior is scripted by certain rules (i.e. If a given PC is 'good', then that PC will behave in a 'good' manner, given that good roleplay is very important to the game, and the players/GM cares alot about such things).  Humans overcome such rules much more easily than PC's do in some games.  

However, in other games, the opposite is true: because the players/GM feel that the actions of the PC's are not as important as decisions people make in real life (this isn't true, really, but people see things this way because our world is usually VERY different from our world, and people will therefore have different opinions on things and different priorities), and because the players/GM are not really in that situation (which makes things very different), therefore the PC's are able to escape the confines of law and ethics/morality because of the presence of human logic.  At its greatest extreme, the game resembles a play or movie in which everybody is always in character (well, a good movie or play), and do not do things that their character(s) would not do.  At its other extreme, it resembles anarchy, with all the players making their characters do what they would do, or what they want to do, and not necessarily what their character would do in the same situation.

Mind you, this is only my opinion, which is also based on human logic.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi HF,

You might want to check out this recent thread:

http://indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=13742&highlight=

I don't know if its exactly what you want. But it does address the matter.

Christopher

[jdagna]

There are many articles discussing issues  like people who say "I only did it because that's what the character would do."  A lot of those address how the character is a vehicle for the player, even when you're not in pawn/actor stance because ultimately the character can only do what the player wants/makes him to do.  I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for, though.

Also, just consider the amount of history a character has compared to a real person.  Even really prolific players rarely write up more than ten pages or so for their character's biographies.  Most real people can fill up a few hundred with their memoirs and even then they're leaving a lot out.  People who keep diaries can easily write a page every single day so that a character with 20 years of history could have something like 7000 pages.

Given this, there's just no way for a PC to approach the complexity of a real person.

And, finally, real people get driven by urges that are sometimes best described as "chemical".  For example, a player can calmly sit back and say "Well, my character's not going to get seduced by that naked woman" but every guy I know of would be sweating and struggling, regardless of beliefs and convictions.  There's lots of other things like that: fear of heights, fear of embarassment or public disapproval, the temptation to steal and so on.  

In fact, in a Freudian sense, PCs are almost all ego (the conscious), but almost totally devoid of id (base emotion) and superego (guilt or conscience) unless players work (through logical processes of the ego) to put it there.

[Joe J Prince]

I would say that the PC vs 'human' psychological decisions can be easily reduced. They're essentially the same desires in a different context.

The most obvious application is that of game theory - PCs will seek to maximise their in-game rewards as anything else is essentially irrelevant to them. The players of PCs generally have a good idea of what developments are effective and meaningful within the confines of their particular SIS (see glossary article).  The PCs will thus seek to maximise their effectiveness.

PCs and players alike will generally seek to maximise their own gains in terms of game effectiveness. Often this means the absolute disregard of NPCs - who aren't real anyway.
Whereas real human interaction tends to have much longer term implications, especially with regards to the treatment of other individuals.

If you're talking about the psychology of killing it's a very different human issue, but not really different in a rpg context, 'cos NPCs aren't real and only have value relative to the game world.

Of course a specific social contract can counteract these selfish player urges - by replacing them with obligations to the group - but the urges are evolutionary and the contract not so.

In the grander scale of things, attempting to apply psychological realism to characters of literature, film or gaming is a nonsense. These characters are designed as myths - exemplars - part of the narrative - and will never truly represent the depth inherent in real human psychology - the only way to achieve that would be for everyone to play themselves as themselves. But that's therapy not rpging ;-)

Cheers
JJ - a psychologist

[HereticalFaction]

The question that moved me to start this thread was more like the following:

Who or what is this species we call charachters? In most games, PC's start out as simucrum humans with a few "creative" touches to matchthem to the setting or genre of the game. The vast majority of behavioural detail is left to the player to determine except for that small fraction of human activities for which the game deems a resolution mechanic to be neccessary. The assumption (and implicit social contract) in most games is that participants will immagine the PC's to be fully three dimentional (though fictitious) human beings and will treat these constructs as having at least the credible substance of movie charachters. The option of course is left open for a player to simply "roll-play" a charachter as a set of numbers on a sheet of paper.

So why do PC's so rarely exibit what we might think of as normal human motivation patterns? Most humans, most of the time, seek security, a productive and meaningful existance, and to establish a positive legacy, most often in that order. When a human engages in violence or takes risks  to aquire wealth and aclaim, their motive in doing so can most often be tied to a concern regarding one of the aforementioned goals.

Humans formulate identities and associated self-concepts in order to negotiate between the demands of their culture and their personal existential need for self-direction and a sense of uniqeness.

PC's, by way of comparison, are usually archetypal exemplars of the culture into which we immagine them, or villains who reflect that culture in negative immage. Even "rogueish" or "quirky" charachters most often derive their uniqueness from a certain subculture or counter culture (the local theives guild) or from a depressingly simpleminded "childhood trauma" such as "I am a mutant and grew up as the only albino Martian all my green-skinned schoolmates made fun of me" or " i was dropped as a child, I am afraid of heights". As such, Quirky PC's still the simple products of their culture in an unexamined way. The most we can usually hope for is that if we say a charachter was born into an equestrian warrior culture, the character will realise his "life goal" of being the "greatest horseman/warrior EVER".

PC's rarely show any interest in security. They usually preffer to spend five consecutive years hiking, camping, forgeting to bathe, and nearly dieing at least three times a day. PC's are usually uninterested in sex fer chrissake! While sexual subplots often arise, PC's in the 18-35 age group rarely show interest in finding life-mates or putting themselves in a position to esztablish a household, while in the case of humans these are the primary concerns during this period of life. At most, charachters may engage in casual sex from time to time, but only in the total absence of cost or risk.*

So my question is who are these creatures we call charachters, what relationship to they bear to our own species, and what drives us to create them?

*Exception: All of us who gamed as teenagers most likely remember at least one session where a charachter was granted experiance points for having sex, usually followed by the party burning through 15 min of play time, 3 months of game time, and several levels by "Rolling to bang prostitute". In most cases this was the last game played for a while....

[Marco]

In fact, in a Freudian sense, PCs are almost all ego (the conscious), but almost totally devoid of id (base emotion) and superego (guilt or conscience) unless players work (through logical processes of the ego) to put it there.

I think there's (often) a lot of truth to this--but I've done psychodrama and in that you "play other characters" (including people you don't know) and it's very psychologically intense.

I don't usually get that real during RPG's--but I have--and I've seen it done by others.

And that's not just the surface ego.

-Marco

[M. J. Young]

Maybe it's because I was already out of college and married before I'd ever heard of a role playing game, but what you say about characters doesn't entirely fit my experience.

I would say that most player characters are risk-seeking. If you had a high level of risk-avoidance in your characters, you wouldn't have the sort of adventure stories the traditional game tries to create. But I still have trouble with your analysis.

I've played characters who were doing what they were doing because they were good at it and hoped that it would provide for them the future financial security they needed to settle down for a long life. I remember, in fact, that the OAD&D DMG recommended to DMs that we take steps to strip player characters of their wealth--taxes, expenses of high living, and other money-sucking techniques--so that they would have to go get more. Part of the assumption of the game seemed to be that these were people who built their lives around the hope of getting rich quick by doing something so dangerous no one else could do it, but who then didn't have the good sense to be able to hold on to their money once they had it. It's a bit like casino winners who throw away their winnings on celebrating so fast that they're right back in there trying to win again--only we're gambling our lives.

On the other hand, I never played a character who couldn't handle his money. (Odd, that, as I'm not particularly good with money myself.) The character I played who faced the most serious dangers went on his first venture (he did not call them "adventures", as they were very much a business proposition for him) because he needed a job and this was offerred. He went on his second venture because he had almost incidentally rescued a princess far from her home, and felt a personal obligation to see her returned safely to her family. He was looking forward to additional ventures that included finding a childhood friend who was rumored to have moved to the mountains some distance from where he was, solving a riddle handed down from his ancestors, and blazing a trade route from which he would receive commissions for the rest of his life. There is little in that which is not normal human psychology, as far as I can tell. It just happens that he was good at a very risky and potentially lucrative occupation. He also reminisced on his deceased fiance, and wondered whether anyone would ever truly replace her in his life.

I played a character who was a student in a military academy for starship crews. He had a terrible crush on another student who was studying to be an engineer, and he had friendships with several students of other races.

Most of my games are PG, since my eldest has been playing in them since he was seven. Before that, it never occurred to us that sex had to be part of the game. We were all adults playing characters from a fantasy story. There wasn't anything like that in the pages of Lord of the Rings that I recall. I did create a vile and evil place in which sadism was part of the religious rituals, although that was all off camera with only evidence of it for the characters to find.

None of my characters engaged in casual sex, and it didn't happen in my D&D games. One character in my D&D game got married to an NPC, as did several of my Multiverser player characters. A couple of Multiverser player characters have been somewhat promiscuous, but the game has consequences for such conduct. (I note that Paul Cardwell's game (Mythworld?) has rules for venereal disease and magic items related to its avoidance and treatment, so it has been done.)

So maybe my experience is just extremely atypical; but our player characters tend to seem rather realisitic for some reason.

--M. J. Young

[zephyr_cirrus]

I think that PCs are really just a reflection of human beings.  I would equate them to a beam of colored light in a rainbow - the white light represents a human being as a whole, but because nobody can truly ever comprehend another person entirely (or at least in a reasonable amount of time), our logic acts as a prism to split this person into different wavelengths.  We then pick and choose which characteristics suit our partial vision of this person, and ignore the rest.  Of course, we do so without realizing it, because we do not actually know that the other characteristics are there because we don't see those features as being a part of this person.  So, put quite simply, a PC is a sentient being (very much human or human-like) that is viewed through the monocle of our judgement.  As for what drives us to create them, I think that it is impossible for somebody to be completely satisfied with their life, and there are some things that we would like to do and simply never do because of lack of courage, time, resources, etc.  And so, we create these fictional people to live out such fantasies, whether we realize it or not (which justifies your point about sex in games involving teenage players - it is simply a teenage fantasy, and adult players can usually fulfill these needs, so they simply are not played out in game...usually).

[HereticalFaction]

OK, I admit it: That second post was a bit tongue-in-cheek, and I indulged in some serious playing to stereotype....

My agenda for doing so and for the innitial post was to find or spark some discussion of PC psychology as such. It does not seem to me that "creating and playing charachters who resemble human beings in detail" is either a neccessary or likely a desirable goal of RPG design. However, understanding the charachters that players in the field create with the game systems that are on the market, what those PC's are and are not, might bring us a long way towards understanding "Gaming, the thing itself". Most games that I have seen follow the model of a) Identifying explicitly those things about PC's which are unlike normal humans. b) Creating through their design a system which encourages implicitly a certain style of playing at the Meta-game level. And c) Leaving it pretty much up to the participants to negotiate the two in creating consistent play of both the charachters and their setting.

I immagine that better things might be done in this arena given a solid model of "the PC" as a class of artifacts in their own right.

So far I have recieved just the sort of feedback I had hoped for.

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This is where I feel it might be best to be forthcoming about my own agenda in reading and posting on this forum:

I come from a gaming family (many of my older cousins, aunts, uncles and even my father were caught up in the innitial RPG fad of the late 70's), gamed for a long time as a child and adolescent, and more recently participated in Darkon for a couple of years. I do not currently play nor do I intend to as it doesn't really make sense within my current lifestyle.

I have always been far more interested in world creation, rules adaptation and orrigional design of games than in their actual play (I derive as much pleasure from observing a game in progress as from playing it). I am pursuing an academic career in Psychology/Cognitive Science, and would like to steer myself towards the study of Fiction and Fantasy, Gaming, how reality and human behaviour are modeled in each, and the interaction that each have with the human psyche.

Having said this, I would like to assure all who read this that Iam not on here every day reading your articles and archived threads in order to "study" you as some exotic gamer subculture. Rather, I wish to learn from what clearly is a community of sophisticated, intellectually rigorous group of enthusiasts with a broad experiance base in the subject and a commitment to their craft.