Interactive storytelling: Behavior-psychology congruence

We wish to introduce the notion of a fictional-character's behavior being congruent, or not, with their psychology. This will help us to, in subsequent posts, look at how, in interactive storytelling, the player having control affects the storytelling.

We use 'psychology' to mean two things: the character's makeup and circumstances.

A character's makeup, is their nature, their personality, their character, and how they think about situations. Such details are a result of their nature, and nurture. How their character is shaped by their life experiences. It includes how their personality might be changed by brain damage or a brain tumor. Or how medications they are taking affect their personality.

By a character's circumstances, we mean what has been going on in their life. Perhaps they have had a stressful few weeks at work. Maybe a loved one died a few months ago, and they are going through grief. Or maybe they started a new relationship and they are happy as a result.

I don't think there's a hard-and-fast distinction between a character's makeup and their circumstances. These are just rough categories.   

In real life, a person's behavior is always congruent with their psychology (their makeup and circumstances). In fictional works, we almost always strive to make a character's behavior congruent with their makeup and circumstances, though we may fail to achieve this. So there can be a lack of congruence.

Behavior-psychology congruence doesn't just apply to "realistic" characters. It applies to all characters, even wacky and "out there" cartoon characters. Wile E. Coyote from the Warner Brothers cartoons wants to catch the Roadrunner, and sets up traps for this purpose. Despite many failures, he's never one to give up trying. The Roadrunner, in turn, likes running fast along roads, and seems to take joy in making the Wile E.'s traps backfire on him. These characters are not realistic, they're not at all like real coyotes and roadrunners. But Wile E.'s psychology is to want to capture the Roadrunner, and to setup traps to do so, and so Wylie's behavior is congruent with that.

If a character has a cartoony makeup then their behavior should be cartoony as well, and good writers will make sure their behavior is congruent with their makeup and circumstances.

If there were scenes where Wile E. was sincerely explaining to other characters that he has been vegan since he became an adult, because he believes no animals should be harmed, then this would not be congruent with his established psychology.

 

In fiction, a character's behavior may be incongruent with their psychology, because of poor writing, poor acting, or poor directing. We can imagine that a very inexperienced writer setting out to write a novel. Earlier in their draft they gave the main character a gentle personality, whereas later on in the draft they gave them an aggressive personality, where the author didn't realise this change had happened. Which leads to inconsistencies in how that character is portrayed, with no explanation in the novel of why the character is different.

We may have a philosophical objection to this talk of incongruence between a character's psychology and their behavior. If all we as viewers or readers see is the character's behavior, and we infer their personality from that, then it would seem to be impossible for there to be such incongruence. Any apparent incongruence would just seem to be incongruence because we didn't yet know enough about the character's psychology. The philosophical objection is that we can only know behavior, so behavior is what defines our picture of the character's psychology, thus /by definition/ there can never be incongruence between them. Any /apparent/ incongruence is simply because we have formed an incorrect picture of their pscyhology, by jumping to incorrect conclusions about it based on the prior behavior of theirs that we've observed.

If a real person's behavior seems incongruous with their psychology, then it is our understanding of their psychology that is wrong (or incomplete). But here we are not talking about real people, but characters in fiction, fiction that may be written by a beginner, or an untalented, author.

In fiction (novels especially), the author may explicitly describe aspects of a character's personality. This way, that character's behavior can be incongruous with the stated aspects of the character's personality, if the writer is inexperienced or otherwise not very good.

But even when the character's personality is only inferrable from behavior, it is still possible for the two to be incongruous. It can be possible to infer psychological traits from behavior, and so we may have two sets of behavior B1 and B1, which reflect psychological traits P1 and P2 -- and P1 and P2 may conflict. A character may be terrified by speaking in front of their class, one point, and yet later inexplicably be supremely confident speaking in front of a large group. We're not saying it's impossible for there to be such a transformation; we're talking about the case of a story that has not included any details explaining such a transformation. At least one of those two behaviors is therefore incongruous with part of the person's psychology.

 

We usually expect that if the character seems to be acting incongruently with their established psychology, that the story will provide an explanation of why. But it may not, and the incongruence may be a result of poor writing (or acting or directing).

 

In subsequent posts, we'll look at how interactivity, in interactive storytelling, can lead to incongruence between a character's behavior and their psychology. The basic idea is that if the player can control a character's actions, then those actions will tend to reflect the player's psychology, not the character's. Using the terminology of those future posts, we'll explain why behavior-psychology congruence is necessary for strong storytelling and fictional realism.