HeyJaredCharacter Sleuth
A game design toolkit for making players care about game characters.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 20, 2026
Latest issues
Don’t kill your evil darlings! (opens the original)
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Subscribe nowCreating a villain your players care about is a challenging task, even if we ignore writing and just focus on the systemic level. Your game design incentives pull in three different directions, of which you can only pick two, cleanly: Your villain is intimidating, they appear regularly, and your players can win every encounter. This article explores which corners of the triangle XCOM 2: War of the Chosen prioritizes, what consequences this creates, and how other games approach this
A class on narrative frames (and advanced murder) (opens the original)
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Subscribe nowWho your player is in relation to the characters on their team can have a large impact on the emotional connections they develop. Fire Emblem: Three Houses makes the player’s role as teacher explicit both in narrative and gameplay, aligning its incentives with nurturing their students. This article compares the impact of narrative player-involvement in games like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, XCOM 2, and Darkest Dungeon with RimWorld, using research into parasocial relationships as und
Who am I in your game?! (opens the original)
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Subscribe nowby Jonas Pastoors & Lars LöbbickeGames place players in all kinds of different relationships with their world. Sometimes players step into the shoes of a fictional character or just play as themselves. Likewise, some games provide players with a body to inhabit, while others don’t. We think of narrative prescription and embodiment as two axes applicable to any game out there. However, it’s also important that these categories allow for overlap to accomm
Stop making well-rounded characters! (opens the original)
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Subscribe nowCharacters with pronounced strengths and weaknesses can polarize players into strongly liking or disliking them. Games with procedural characters can use this to their advantage. It doesn’t matter if individual characters are disliked by the players as no design resources were invested into any individual. This article builds its findings on interview data collected via a pen-and-paper prototype and discusses, as an example, how RimWorld uses traits and trade-offs to individualize i
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