Creating stronger bonds between players and NPCs through group-conflict

This article explores how we can use psychology to strengthen players’ emotional bonds with NPCs in order to give them a more fulfilling experience and keep them playing for longer.

This writeup discusses a study showing the unsurprising result that group dynamics make people care more about others, whether they are real or fictional - we want good things to happen to our allies and bad things to happen to our enemies. This is relevant to game design because caring more about a game’s characters is a recipe for improved engagement. But what I found particularly interesting about the study was that it implies that a good way to make players care even more about their allies is to have them suffer setbacks and losses together, and a good way to make players care even more about their enemies is to make their rivalries as evenly-matched as possible.