 Do me a favour real quick. Close your eyes and think of the first name that pops into your head when I say NPC. If you're feeling particularly helpful, go ahead and share that in the comments, I'd love to know who you thought of. Did you think of Sans, the cheeky skeleton and secret boss from Undertale? Did you think of Cass, the accordion playing Parrot from Breath of the Wild and, hopefully, Tears of the Kingdom? Or maybe you thought of Monika. Just Monika. Or did you think of someone smaller, a bit player who has still made an impact on gaming culture? Someone who likes shorts or who is, apparently, an error? Non-player characters, which is to say a game character that the player doesn't control for the bulk of the game, are the lifeblood of many a title. Not all games have or need NPCs, but even games with bare bones non-player characters use them for a significant amount of world-building and exposition. Many of these characters get overlooked, but they are vital to the gaming experience. And when a game really nails its NPCs, they stay with you long after the game is over. A good NPC feels like a true friend or true enemy. And it's easy to suspend your disbelief and see them not as a collection of art assets, but as a living, breathing person, with emotions, wants, needs and desires. Recently, I have been obsessing over this question. What actually makes a great NPC? Over the past year, in what little free time I have, I've been making a game just for fun. It's a very basic premise you wander around a town and you talk to the people that you meet. With such a simple premise, I'm aware that the NPCs need to be interesting and enjoyable enough to hold the player's interest. So, how do I do that? Well, I asked the experts, all of you. I asked who your favourite NPCs are and why you love them. Your answers were, of course, quite eclectic. To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy NPC relationships are happy in their own way. That said, there were certain patterns and trends that emerged in your answers, from which I've come up with a list of things that can help make an NPC memorable, engaging and, indeed, lovable. But first, the true answer to the question, what makes a great NPC? The player does. None of this is possible without the suspension of disbelief. Creativity is a collaborative process. Whoever you thought of when I first said NPC, that says as much about you as it does about the developers behind that game. You were willing to use your imagination to see a fictional character as alive, even if only briefly while playing the game. One of the human brain's great skills is seeing humanity in other people, animals and objects. This serves an important evolutionary advantage. It's easier to spot danger if your brain fills in the blanks and assumes that a shadow or movement around you is a person. It also helps us to grow together as a community. The ability to see humanity in others, people around us, animals, even our infrastructure, helps encourage compassion, cooperation and trust. Humans are designed to love others, even if that other is a sword with human eyes for some reason. Our instinctive anthropomorphism can only reach so far without prompting. People donate a lot more money, for example, to charities that look after animals that look more like humans than, say, insect charities. Even though we all really need bees not to go extinct. Sometimes our innate desire to see a familiar human spark in the world around us needs a little push. From your comments, it's clear that the easiest push to make an NPC engaging and interesting is humour. This makes sense. Leaving aside the world of video games, scientific studies have shown that humour is the number one most important factor in human attractiveness. If two people share a sense of humour, they are far more likely to fall in love. So we have characters like Sans from Undertale, who endears himself to the player instantly by telling some of the worst jokes imaginable. Sans puns are the perfect introduction to this character. They hook you in quickly and establish that this guy is a bundle of fun, the kind of character that doesn't take things too seriously and is just a light-hearted goof. And then the rest of the game happens. Sans's humour is important not just for establishing his role in this part of the story, but also for setting the tone of the Snowdin chapter of the game. Sans arrives at a time when the game has been getting a little more serious, and his arrival punctures some of the dramatic tension and emotional weight that has been building up. Any good NPC will communicate as much about the world as they do about themselves. That might mean explicitly telling you what each button on your controller does, or establishing some kind of lore or backstory to the place you're exploring. An interaction with an NPC, whether a major player in the story, or simply a random townsperson with a single line of dialogue, should teach you something meaningful. If a game features too many conversations that are just empty-patter, before long players will learn that there's no point in actually engaging with the NPCs along the way. A good NPC conversation should feel like an essential part of understanding the game, should provide some new vital piece of knowledge. Some games will try to get around this by having NPCs yell out exposition unprompted as the player walks past, but while this can be an effective way of delivering information, if the player doesn't actually want to talk to the NPC, we're unlikely to remember the interaction for very long. For an NPC to be memorable, they need to be the kind of character that the player enjoys talking to. We should want to seek them out at the start of each new phase of the game to see what new dialogue they have to offer. Take the guard from Fire Emblem 3 Houses as an example. His unbridled optimism and friendly nature make him a pleasure to interact with, even if just for a moment as we're busy scurrying around engaging with the game's more noteworthy characters. This was another trend in your responses to my initial question. What makes you want to talk to an NPC rather than skip them entirely? It helps if they're likeable and, this word came up repeatedly, charming. Now, of course, charm comes in many forms. This doesn't mean that a character should be sycophantic or overly sweet to the player. One of my personal favorite NPCs is the dastardly lineback from the Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass, who's a bit more of a cat, a kind of cowardly Han Solo, only in it for the money and with a history of ruining the lives of people around him. All of this is what makes him so much fun, even as he's strangling my avatar or making life more difficult for me. Plus, he's got an absolute banger of a theme tune. Now, if being inherently charming and enjoyable to talk to was an easy skill, we'd all be doing it all the time in real life. As someone who is a bit of a charisma vacuum myself, I can attest to how difficult it is to be witty and fun and generally just nice to talk to. Crafting interesting NPCs takes work. Depending on the game and its genre, getting dialogue interactions just right takes a significant number of revisions. Portal 2 is one of the most heavily playtested games in the history of the medium. The team at Valve came up with an interesting idea called F-Stop, built a game around it, playtested it extensively, discovered that people were disappointed that the game didn't actually have portals, then scrapped the entire F-Stop game and started from scratch. Every level of the finished Portal 2 was fine-tuned to perfection to ensure that every single puzzle was perfect. The perfect difficulty, the perfect number of moving parts and signposting, they even polished the motion of the game to a level where they could make sure it gave the players the least possible amount of motion sickness. And they playtested NPC dialogue. Not only did playtesting inform the puzzles of the game, but the character arcs that the NPCs go through. I normally don't like to do spoilers in these videos, but it's Portal 2, it's okay to spoil Portal 2 at this point, right? Said writer Jay Pinkerton, When we playtested we found a very stark difference between this imperious, all-powerful GLaDOS talking to you and this powerless GLaDOS talking to you on your gun. And what we discovered was point-blank, no one wants to hear this woman telling you you're an awful person, dumb and fat while she's sitting on your gun. People were asking, why am I carting this person along? By a matter of necessity, GLaDOS needed to have a character shift. She's going to be your sidekick, she can't be needling you for a half hour. So the narrative arc for GLaDOS, and by extension the whole narrative message of the game, came about because of extensive playtesting. Now, it's not particularly inspiring to hear the story of a very well-funded game project that had extensive playtests thrown at it until it was polished to perfection. But while most games just won't have that level of resources, it's worth bearing in mind that characters can benefit from player feedback just as much as any other aspect of a game. After all, the point of an NPC is ultimately to simulate in some form an interaction between two living things. Depending on the game, as with Portal, that relationship between the player and the character they meet may change and develop over time. Another of the common themes in your comments on your favorite NPCs was the fun of seeing characters go through their own story arc which isn't necessarily connected to that of the player. These can be big plot points for a game, a rival in a Pokemon game learning a lesson, for example, or developing a closer relationship with Sohiro in Persona 5 and learning more about his family and backstory. Or these can be little things. Background characters who have different dialogue at different stages in the game giving you a reason to check back on them regularly to see how their lives are progressing. In a video game, you as the player are often the center of all the action. The world often revolves around you. Literally, if you're playing Katamari Demasi. NPCs with their own character arcs help to give the sense that they're off on their own separate adventures. It helps to create the illusion that the game's setting is larger than the one story you were experiencing yourself. This is ultimately the point of NPCs in general to make a world feel lived in a little less barren. With this also we get the sense that a character is relatable. We can see a little bit of ourselves in their struggles or at least empathize with the challenges they face. Empathy is gold dust for characters in any work of fiction, especially in video games. Take a character like Groose from The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword. Good old Groose? Someone who at first feels like little more than a one-dimensional archetype. He's Gaston, right? From Beauty and the Beast? There's not much more going on there. But as the story progresses and the player spends more time with Groose we learn about his wants and needs and we see him struggle with challenges. Before long that empathy kicks in and we start to see this character in a new light. What would otherwise feel like nothing more than a caricature is given greater depth all because the player is forced to spend some time with Groose to see a little more of what's going on inside his heart. The nice thing about this process is that as mentioned we as players are eager to fill in the gaps ourselves to do some of the emotional and creative legwork in finding humanity and characters that of necessity are limited in how much they can display believable intelligence and adaptability. It helps that gaming is inherently a medium that encourages this kind of emotional investment. Anyone playing a game is projecting themselves into a story willfully putting themselves into the shoes of a character that exists outside of themselves. Now this could easily be a video in its own right but when we're doing all of this to identify with a player character it's not that much more effort to develop empathy for other characters within the game as well. So, what makes a great NPC? You do, as the player. You make a collection of pixels into an imaginary friend. Great NPCs come from an open, honest, trusting creative collaboration between game designers and game players. It helps when a character is inherently charming, fun or makes the player feel good about themselves. It helps when the NPC goes through their own character development and are shown to learn and grow just like the player. Ultimately though, all of this can only go so far. It's only when the player then engages with a character and chooses to overlook a game's limitations to see the character as alive that an NPC truly becomes great. So, the moral of the story? If you're wondering why you're obsessed with Cass from Breath of the Wild you've got nobody to blame but yourself.