A game object is a funny thing. They exist and inhabit the worlds we imagine, provide either useless window dressing, form part of environmental storytelling, or perform some sort of function for (or against!) the player.
But do we ever think of them as anything else? And why should we? There’s a danger to class this as simply anthropomorphism when the reality is that we’re building real narrative weight into every object we create when worldbuilding.
Objects in this distinction should be treated as story-bearing artefacts, not quasi-people.
First off, I want to split hairs over the definitions I use here. A game asset is a technical or digital resource and implementation of an object in the development of a game. A game object is the thing itself within the game world, after it’s been implemented. I’m using the latter here because it’s more relevant in narrative design and game writing than the technical makeup for this discussion.
In narrative and game design, however, knowing more about the implementation and function of the game asset helps define the experience that the player will have when using it, but that’s not the focus for this piece.
When we create a game character or NPC, we go to great lengths to describe them – their bodies, their attitudes, the way they walk, talk, interact, their backstories and childhood traumas. It gives the character depth, a reason for existing in the world we’ve built; the world makes more sense with them in it.
In Brett Warren’s post – How to Create Video Game Characters – he talks at length about this.
However, when we create something like a fork, it’s just a bloody fork. Sure, you could pick out an existing asset off the shelf, or create one using some of the techniques described in Brett’s article, but it’s still a fork.
This poor excuse for an object just sits here, more than likely either as something the player can’t interact with, or the player goes on a thieving rampage and steals everything in the room until they’re overburdened, and then the fork is unceremoniously ejected from inventory and left behind.
But what if that fork had a history?
Sounds stupid when you read that sentence.
Let’s use another example to illustrate.
In the movie ‘John Wick’, a big deal is made out of how he killed someone with just a fucking pencil. That fucking pencil now has significance, even though we’ve never seen it; it is more than a simple object in the myth and lore that has been built around John Wick. That fucking pencil is as legendary as he is.
The idea of the pencil could have gone further.
We could have learned about how it was made and the craftsperson who made it. John could have kept it as a trophy and continued to use it to dispatch other assassins; the wood grain of the tip of the pencil now stained with the blood of many victims. The pencil suddenly takes on an emotional weight for John as he carries it with him everywhere he goes.
This fucking pencil has become a character in its own right.
Back to the fork, and now the fork might have been used to serve up someone’s last meal that they ever ate at their favourite tavern. That character lies slumped with their throat cut after leaving the tavern, jumped by thugs for the handful of gold coins they owned.
Or it was made by one of the characters you’ve painstakingly spent weeks writing, defining and getting signed off on, but the fork itself was a throwaway asset, an object you placed in the game to make a scene feel busy.
A fork is just a fork until it’s not.
Let’s use another example.
In Star Wars, a lightsaber is more than just an object. This really is something that takes on a life of its own in the lore of the galaxy far, far away. There is real narrative and emotional weight, history and significance to every single lightsaber that exists because of why it exists, how it exists, and who wields it.
If you look at all the various elements that make up a character, it ticks every box – physical attributes, history or backstory, gameplay interaction, range of motion, an archetype – technically, you could argue that the archetype is tied to the character, but then it could also be argued that the colour of the lightsaber itself is the archetype more so than it’s a physical attribute.
The lightsaber is, to me, the perfect example of an object in worldbuilding that is more than just that. This isn’t anthropomorphism – I don’t see objects like a fork or lightsaber gaining emotions, agency or intent; it has no desires or needs, but its accrued significance – as a result of it being more defined – places it more as a character than an object. The character, in the case of the Jedi Survivor/ Fallen Order games, is Cal Kestis, and he still drives the plot, but the lightsaber brings more to the table that defines the stakes for Cal.
There is another example I can put forward, too.
So far, I’ve talked about objects that we as narratives want to push the boundaries of, but what about the players themselves? How do they see and treat the objects we create in our worlds?
If we take games like Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, we’re given complex objects to interact with – the spaceships and other vessels. But over time, players pick out their favourites to use over and over again, remember the scrapes they got out of in them, and they build character around the objects we’ve placed for them – in essence, they’re doing the narrative work for us in the context of the world they’re building for themselves in the game. You could classify this as anthropomorphism in the same way sailors would designate their ships as ‘she’, but I see it more as creating evidence of a character out of an object.
For players of space games, or even other games like Sea of Thieves, the ship is a biographer. It’s not a character in the way that the player thinks it’s alive; it’s a character because it is the only other object that records the player’s history in a way.
We’ve provided a framework for them already, of course: every ship has its own manufacturer backstory and lore, where they were built, and the imagined technical specs, but the player has assigned so much more significance to the game object than we did creating it – whether by design or just human nature.
Of course, what I’m not arguing for is that across your game you define every single individual object, but it does make you think more about the interconnectedness of the world you’re building and the world you want the player to inhabit and experience.
This ultimately helps with environmental storytelling, too, to think of them this way.
The objects-as-characters distinction is what separates a world that feels designed from one that feels alive. If every object is treated as a character with its own provenance, then the environment becomes a storytelling web of intersecting biographies. A room filled with objects is really a populated space with characters, each with a story to tell.
And it all connects back to the narrative, which is what we want as designers at the end of the day.
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