The goal of this project is to determine whether it is possible to establish a personality model for movie characters that can be used in interactive storytelling. Psychologists have a good personality model for humans called the Five-Factor Model, or OCEAN model, and it works very well for humans. The problem is that the characters in movies aren’t real humans; they do things that no normal person would do.
Seriously, would YOU have taken the red pill?
So we can’t use the psychologists’ model. We need our own model. We’ve developed one that we think works, but we think we might be able to do better. That’s what this project is about.
The technique we’ll be using is… well… complicated. It uses some truly high-falutin’ mathematics. If you really want to learn all the dirty details, the procedure is explained here. But we don’t need anything like that from you. All we need from you is your estimates of how similar different movie characters are.
We’ll need you to select some characters to evaluate, but first we need to know what movies (or TV series) you’re familiar with. Here’s a list of titles. Please just check any of these that you’re familiar with—familiar enough to compare characters from one show to characters from another show.
🔲 The Game of Thrones
🔲 The Lord of the Rings
🔲 The Matrix
🔲 Harry Potter
🔲 Star Wars
🔲 Vikings
🔲 Stranger Things
{It might be better to use rectangular buttons that alternate between dull (unselected) and bright (selected). That’s Ivan’s call.}
Now it’s time to select the characters you wish to compare with each other. We suggest that you select ten characters from this list. You can select as many as you wish, but the more characters you select, the more comparisons you’ll need to complete.
The Game of Thrones
The Lord of the Rings
The Matrix
Harry Potter
Star Wars
Stranger Things
Entering Your Data
Now that you have picked your characters, it’s time to enter the data for them. You do this by manipulating a simple graph. Here’s an example of what you see at the outset:
Let’s suppose that these are the ten characters that you chose to compare with each other. They are initially placed furthest away from Spock. All you have to do is drag their images around; characters that are similar to Spock should be closer to him; characters that are very different from Spock should stay far from him. For example, here’s how I repositioned these characters:
I decided that Arwen and Arya are very far away from Spock, but Agent Smith is quite close to him. I pushed Jon Snow and Tyrion a bit closer because they are, after all, fairly logical guys. Having moved them around to positions you like, click on the “Next” button, and you’ll see something like this:
Now Tyrion is at the center, so now you reposition the characters based on their similarities to Tyrion. Continue this process until you have entered the data for all of the characters. When you’ve finished the last one, you’re all done.