Summary of Archetype Exploration

This conclusion has been a long time coming, really.

The project itself was actually really fun and quite interesting to see how people percieved my characters. The idea, obviously, was to see how many could be fooled by simply looking at the appearances of these characters, and to identify whether archetypes are necessarily a good thing.

Just as a reminder, these were my characters. Some or all possessed characteristics which were deliberately unexpected for the character's physicalities, to challenge the idea of 'archetyping'. 

I provided participants with a number of statements that could apply to one or some of the characters. The participants were then required to decide who they thought each statement belonged to. 

It provided some interesting results, actually. I'm going to note only some of the more significant ones here.

Only 50% of particpants selected Aaron as a competent craftsman.

Absolutely none of them would have thought that he was an ex-assassin, due to his sheer bulk. This was an intentional design choice and yielded the expected results. Upon feedback, however, this was seen as a good thing given that he wasn't what people were expecting. The surprise led to curiosity - an important aspect of players engaging with characters, as research indicated.

53% recognised Isolde as a dancer, a surprisingly low percentage, personally speaking. I believe that some participants tried to outsmart the concept by choosing the least likely looking dancer since they were aware of what the experiment was looking for.

Not many people considered that more than one of the characters could be blueblood, so most people only thought that Daniel was of any noble background. While this is true, two of the other characters are also of a noble descent. Of course, the physical design of the characters affected this. Trystan looks less than regal, despite his actual background, and events in the character's life are responsible for this. Again, this twist struck a chord with people's curiosity and ultimately they wanted to know more about this character. 

Again, another relation to his size, 40% participants thought that Aaron would be claustrophobic, when in fact it was Amber. 

What I found interesting was some of the comments made about Caleb in particular. Several noted how they would have believed his fighting style to be, which was in fact almost spot on from a handful of them. He was seen as a graceful, fluid combatant. Although a very tall character, he is lean and not the lumbering kind of character, which was spotted by these several. The large majority of participants would have seen him as the leader of this group, however, which was incorrect. Those who did get this correct - Lilith - did so based on colour palette (although that did lead some to think of Aaron as the leader). 

The conclusion that could be drawn from this short exploration is that archetypes are a good foundation for creating recognisable characters, but there needs to be a balance between what the audience can work out and what they can't. If the whole character is transparent enough to work out without needing or wanting to learn anything about that character, then it lacks depth and is in danger of being a 2-dimensional stereotype. While characters shouldn't be too complex that it becomes too convoluted for the audience, the best outcome is to find that balance which engages the player through the unexpected but does not frighten them off. 

In short, the archetype is not gospel, but can indeed provide a good diving board for an intriguing design, as long as you use it to your advantage.

Though an interesting note: I must have designed something right about this particular group of characters, since a number of participants informed me that they definitely wanted to know more about these characters and would follow their story should I choose to develop it further.