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RE: Balancing Characters: The Risk, Energy, and Reach Method
Thanks for this overview. It makes perfect sense that risk, energy and reach should exist and seek/achieve balance.
Coming from a business background as well as dabbling in fiction, I can see where risk, energy and reach fold into both. It seems like they would have application far beyond that.
Which is probably why they're so integral to game play. They manifest in the real world in some form or another, and they also manifest within each player. The human gamer brings elements of risk, energy and reach, too.
Very insightful and thought provoking. I think I'll have to take a more indepth look at what I'm doing with story and character development with regards to risk, energy and reach. :)
While I intended this mostly for game design, I think there's an element to be had of this in more traditional storytelling as well.
Most appealing characters strike a balance between these three or are notable for having some deficiency or excess in one area. Usually the deficiencies make better characters (like dystopian fiction protagonists who can't fix their world), but whenever you're too far out of balance characters feel unrealistic and wrong.
I'd consider a good example of this to be Superman on the high end, where he has a lot of plot arcs that really seem to be fraught with danger or excitement because he'll always win. On the low end, you run into characters like Werther in the Sorrows of Young Werther who lack appeal because they're so lame (ironic, since Goethe was writing semi-autobiographically, but not unintentional, since he wasn't necessarily proud of the events that transpired).
So there's something to be said for applying this to writing too.
I've always found it interesting that in anything I've seen with Superman, be it comic book, animated or live action, that they always figure out someway to prolong the conflict. Most of it makes no sense, some of it some sense, and every once in a while they come up with something good.
Battling other Kryptonians with experience and various skill sets would take longer than taking down your run of the mill super powered villain. Yet, somehow, those two generally get treated the same.
Obviously, it wouldn't be much of a tale if it ended in two seconds, like it probably should, but it does take away the argument of Superman being over powered, if he's either holding back, or concerned for human life and collateral damage, or doing things in a more proper, better way.
Knowing his own strength and holding back something has never really helped his cause.
I think we saw in the Injustice series of comic books just what he's physically capable of if he's unhinged from any kind of moral code.
One of the reasons why Superman saw a dramatic fall in popularity (and Batman fell victim to this too, in some ways) was that they started to drift too heavily into storytelling formulas. It's the whole "Saturday morning cartoon" monster-of-the-day schtick, only in a print format that was attracting readers who wanted more from their stories (and, for that matter, increasingly sophisticated audiences across the board for comic-book based media, like those Marvel has been capitalizing on).
The problem isn't even that the stories themselves were uninteresting (though they often were, since iffy writing tends to be a wide-spread problem caused by writers who aren't examining their practice at all), but that it was so formulaic that even relatively "complex" operations turned into, X challenges Superman, who uses Y (ditto for Batman, only with X being a little less powerful and Y being a gadget).
You could have told these stories with other characters, and your reader would recognize them as a Superman story. There was also very little "meaning" in this period, lessons about life replaced with a feel-good saccharine approach to the very real dangers in the world and the ways we struggle against them.