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Characterization through Social Media

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Immediately, Killing Time at Lightspeed leverages the familiarity the player likely has with social media to create empathy between them and the characters, even as their characterization is just starting to take hold. Because the player likely already has experience with social media, it is quite easy for the game to open with familiar interactions between the characters to reinforce the idea to the player that these are their friends, and the player should care about them. This is most clearly seen with the direct messages the player receives on the first day, shown on the right. Conversations like these are familiar to the player, and this familiarity goes a long way to grounding the story and emotionally investing the player, until later, where this is subverted to create emotional moments at the end of the game.

This emotional investment is slowly deepened over the course of the story by how each character's personality comes across through their posts. Killing Time at Lightspeed utilizes its format to great effect with its characterization of the people who post regularly. Information on characters in not only gleaned by what they talk about, but also how they do so, as well as how they interact with social media as a whole. This kind of layered approach to characters allows them to reveal traits in a way that feels organic and natural. The best example of this is shown by the character Alice throughout the game. Alice's first posts, shown left, immediately gives information about her from the fact that she chooses to use social media to lament the problems of modern technology, and from how she writes about it. She keeps her poetic voice through the entirety of the game, during which it is revealed that she is, fittingly, an artist. Finally, Alice gets characterization through her use of social media from a broader perspective. Specifically, as Alice's posts about technology grow more and more disillusioned, she eventually stops using social media at all, putting action behind the philosophy she talks about. While this kind of character building is exemplified by Alice, it is shown to some extent in most of the characters in the game. This goes a long way towards making them feel like actual people that the player should care about, and eventually leads to the emotional investment the game needs to create its eventual emotional impact.


Ashwin Datta

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