Five years ago today, Edouard Ramos died.
Those of you who knew Edouard will have to bear with me while I explain it to the few readers of this blog who don’t know who I’m talking about.
Edouard was a character I played in the online RPG Castle Marrach. Marrach is a text game, not like World of Warcraft with flashy visuals and an empahsis on slaying things, collecting treasure and leveling your character; it’s a very story-centric world with many intriguing characters and intertwining plots. Edouard was an NPC (non-player character, for those uninitiated in gaming parlance); as one of the original design team, I played a lot of NPCs in the early years of the game, but Edouard quickly wormed his way into my heart as a particular favorite, despite the fact that he was one of the least appealing to me at the outset — or, more likely, it was because he didn’t appeal to me that I came to love playing him so much.
You see, as any actor will tell you, to play a part really well, you have have an in-depth understanding of what the character is all about. This goes double for someone writing about a character, and roleplaying is, at its best, a happy combination of acting and writing. Oh, it’s true I could have played Edouard to his designated surface qualities (passionate, fiery tempered, amorous, fickle) and served his purpoes well-enough in the game, but that’s just not the kind of player that I am. To enjoy playing Edouard, I had to find a way to relate to him, and that meant I had to really dig into his psyche to figure out what made him tick.
Now I have to confess that this post is not really a paean to a lost, beloved character (it is that, but only a little). What I really wanted to do was say how much my writing was affected (and hopefully improved) by the experience of playing him. It was in learning to love Edouard that I first truly came to understand the complexity of any individual character, all the layers and textures and details that go into making the whole. If you google “character development” you’ll probably turn up a lot of questionnaires that ask you to supply details about your character like eye color, day job, favorite tv show, what they usually eat for breakfast, etc. You might also find some good advice about building character strengths and flaws, along with motivation and goals. Useful knowledge and tools, all, but I could never stand filling out those questionnaires; it wasn’t just the seeming irrelevance of some of the questions (like what kind of car he drives, when most of my characters had never heard of cars), but the static nature of the information they recorded.
Character is fluid, and it is this very fluidity that makes storytelling enjoyable. If we could count on people acting the same way all the time, there would be no point in telling a story about it. My excavation of Edouard led me to see that he was someone in the process of change — we all are, aren’t we? — and my job as a storyteller was to give him a story that allowed that change to take place. Because that’s the whole purpose of storytelling, to show how people change, to provide a model for ourselves in the changes we must face in our own lives. I may have read this somewhere prior to my time in Castle Marrach, but I didn’t truly understand it until I’d experieced it telling Edouard’s story, and was able to practice ways to show that fluidity and process of change through dramatic means.
I killed Edouard off largely because I was planning to leave the game in the near future, and I knew I never would so long as he was around. But also, with the end of his story arc, he’d changed in all the ways I thought he could; at the time, I didn’t know what direction he could go in afterwards, so it wasn’t TOO difficult to let him go. But the guy still fills a remarkable portion of my brain-pan sometimes. I’ve got at least two Works-in-Progress with characters directly inspired by him (not copies of him, of course, but definitely influenced by). My friend Sol, who played Edouard’s wife, and I still play the game of “what might have been” — to excess, sometimes.
I’m not sure I really expressed here everything I had in my head when I started (but really, if I use the word really one more time I’m really going to kill myself), but I’m at work and it’s nearly time to leave, and I don’t know if I’ll have time to do it later in the day so I have to post now. I really wanted to post an update to Promise, the site where I have archived some of the collected logs from Ed’s story, but every time I sit down to convert the files to HTML, I just end up reading and reading. Maybe, later tonight, I’ll find some time to squeeze it in. In the meantime, you’ll just have to make due with this digital portrait I did last year, when I was feeling particularly artistic. Draw yourself a flagon of ale, and enjoy!
