Lets talk about shortcuts for a moment, shall we?  Emotional shortcuts, character arc shortcuts.  We want to hate them.  It’s pretty much universally understood that they are the lazy way to do things, and yet AND YET we persist in using them.  When you *really* think about them, they often take the form of stereotypes, and those can be an ugly thing in inconsiderate hands.

We know, as game creators, as designers and writers, that this is a cheap hack.  We drop in a set of conditions (bad*ss language, scar on the left cheek, military haircut, post-military drug addiction, murdered parents) with the purpose of triggering understanding on the part of the reader.  We are tapping in, for better or worse, to the decades of storytelling that has gone before so that we can sketch a character in a single paragraph, rather than taking the entire chapter.

Creating a fully rounded character takes time, it can take the course of an entire AAA videogame, or an entire novel to take that cutout and make it flesh.  But audiences, and critics, are impatient.  They all want to consume faster, they all want a fully rounded character presented up front and in a single paragraph so they can get on with things.  It often feels like what we are being pushed to create is simply a new version of the cardboard cutout, rather than being allowed to flesh out a character as they should be, over time.

to be continued…