It's The Final (Countdown) Draft

Developing your character is

much like creating a sculpture from stone.

It's already all there. You just have to get to it.

Character Development is one of the most important things within any form of fiction or storytelling. Without it, your character would stay the same throughout the entire medium, never growing as a person or learning. Your audience should grow along with your character, whether it be a book, a movie, or a game. Development is something we all go through and fictional characters are no different.

This Literature Review will cover why Character Development is such a necessity within media.

Imagine your favourite movie. Why did you like it so much? Was it the story? The action? Or was it the characters that made it come alive.

William B Russel III and Stewart Waters(2010) talk about how many different aspects of the creators views and opinions go into creating a character. Morals, values, beliefs. All these things and more are often taken into consideration when creating a character you want to take part in your choice of media. Every game you've ever played and every movie you've ever watched has had parts of the creator be featured within the characters you are seeing. Granted most people would call this projecting but the point is still there. Character Development comes from your views and how you want them to change.

The history of Character Development within fiction and stories has been around since before Biblical times. Plato's Story Of The Cave featured character development, with the character realising there was an outside world and that it was simply shadows being cast from the Sun. Henry Jenkins(2005) states that you need to make meaningful comparisons to real life growth and development in order to truly reach your audience.

However one thing Jenkins states within his piece is that, not all games tells stories and have development. Some are just simply that, games. Games to enjoy. Games to play. Development of a character is crucial within a piece of media, but if your media has no character, then you need not worry. Tetris (Pajitnov, 1989) has no characters, and it is the most widely known and played game as of now and more than likely forevermore.

With Judy Robinson and Judith Good(2005) they say that with the children that took part in the workshop of creating a game, the most popular part of said workshop as discussed with the participants in an interview was 'creating the characters'. Character Creation is always the most important part of any form of medium. Especially if you look at an RPG or something like DnD. The creation of a character will inevitably lead to the development of it, regardless of whether or not it was intentional. At the start your character could be a complete jerk and plan to rob or maim everyone you meet. But, as you go through the game and meet other characters, you will start to develop along with your character, and come to make choices you would not have in the beginning.

Lankoski, Petri & Björk, Staffan. (2007) say that computer games research literature use very little information when it comes to character and design. In fact, so little is noted of character development that the entire paper is based on how to properly create a character driven game design method. In order to create a game you need to create the characters within it, even if that character is yourself and every action is of your own choosing. It states there are three important aspects of character design, those being the physiology, psychology and sociology. Physiology would be the most immediately noticeable change within the development of a character, changing their shape to show how they have aged or gotten stronger, giving them scars based on injuries you have acquired, and so on.
The development of a characters psychology would depend entirely on their experiences since the game starts as the character might be required to make a questionable decision against their actual morals, which can shift and change due to that decision. The sociology of a characters development is the least like to change unless they gain more enemies and lose their family. Which, given the usual backstory of most characters is surprisingly likely.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the development of a character is absolutely necessary and can be found in quite literally any form of media that tells a story or simply shows a character going through a journey. The development a character takes is completely up to its creator, though sometimes you might find your character developing in ways you yourself never even intended. And sometimes, those are the best developments of all.

Citation

1. Reel Character Education: A Cinematic Approach to Character Development
   By William B. Russell III, Ph.D., Stewart Waters.(2010)
   Reel Character Education
2. Story Creation In Virtual Game Worlds
   By Judy Robinson and Judith Good (2005)
   https://sites.google.com/site/judyrobertson1/ACMArticleRobertsonGood.pdf
3. Game Design As Narrative Architecture
   Henry Jenkins(2005)http://blogs.bgsu.edu/honors1120/files/2013/08/Jenkins_Narrative_Architecture.pdf
4. Character-Driven Game Design: Characters, Conflicts and Gameplay
   Lankoski, Petri & Björk, Staffan. (2007).
   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236680480_Character-Driven_Game_Design_Characters_Conflicts_and_Gameplay