In real life:
1. When would you tell your "backstory"?
2. Who is the devil's advocate?
3. Who lets you know the options and goals?
4. Who asks you for your opinions?

Ok, this I can answer. In real life, or a novel-format, I would place all of these in the interior monologue/narration. Things I am saying to myself. But for a game, I want to give the player the opportunity to say these things to the game. A game world has the potential to be more satisfying than the real universe because the universe doesn't have the ability to understand or care about an individual person, but the game does. I want to create this NPC to be the personification of the game, and emphasize the close relationship between player and game by the fact that the NPC is a reflection of the player. I want this special NPC to feel like "self", not "other" like a normal NPC.

For me, when I do this type of exercise, I understand that I am designing, but at the same time I also feel that I am discovering the interesting truth as I explore the possibilities. I feel this way because my brain could detect what is interesting before I could explain it. As I explore the possibilities, I am trying to discover and keep the features the excite me. The decision to keep what excites is the same as the decision in design.[/quote]
Ah, that's a nice and easy to understand way to think about it, I like that.

Why can't the PC seem like the center of the universe? I didn't understand this point.[/quote]
I've seen that too often in stories and I don't find it life-like. I understand that this is not a universal judgement, but when i see this feature I tend to dislike the story.
[/quote]
Oh ok, that's reasonable. I like the Dramatica approach myself: spend 1/4 of the time considering the main character as if they were the center of the universe, spend 1/4 of the time considering a different character as if they were the center of the universe, spend 1/4 of the time looking at the relationship between the main character and a different character (treating them as equally important) and spend 1/4 of the time looking at all characters including the main character like pieces on a chessboard.

Re:

Those four questions were directed toward creating an NPC. I guess I didn't quite understand what you were trying to do.
Now with the update, you could still ask the question:

In real life:
5. Who is like a reflection of yourself?

Some ideas:
o A buddy since childhood
o Your child
o Your student
o A sentient being you created based on your own thoughts
o A subordinate



* * *

The approach I started in this thread was about putting a relation as the root of the design, then design the characters accordingly to fulfill that relation. One relationship that I always have in my mind is one where two characters know each other very well, have worked together for a long time toward a shared goal, however, due to some event, they realized that they cannot both succeed so each of them tries to secretly outsmart the other one so the other one could succeed.

For me, if I read a description like this, I am already interested in the story. I don't even need to know what the characters are, or what world they are in, because the relation itself is interesting enough, for me.

When the above relation is turned into a game, the PC is neither of those character, but a third character knows both of them who is trying to figure out how to resolve the situation. While it looked easy at first, very soon the PC finds that she quickly faces a similar question but with a twist.

o Would you be willing to sacrifice so that they could both succeed?
o The twist: Did they trick you to sacrifice yourself?

The overall emotion I want to create in the player is one where you have reasons to believe you are on the good side, but you can't prove it, you can't be known, and you can't have true friends other than the closest ones you worked with your whole life who might be just setting you up to sacrifice for them. You want to believe that you are the hero, but where do you get the strength to keep going?

Depending on how the player plays the PC, the relationship between those two NPC would reflect that between them and the PC. So if the player can solve the struggle inside the PC, the player will be able to solve the struggle between the two NPC. Because the three characters are in a tight group (they are the only three who knew their true identities), the thoughts and emotions of each character bounces off and reflects among one another. To give the player a foreshadow what the problem is, I only need to let the PC listen to what the NPCs say.

Since I didn't start the design by thinking about a single character, I wasn't considering from the same direction as you are. I didn't try to figure out "what NPC can I use so that the thoughts of the player can be reflected," because I started with a relationship, how the PC / player would interact comes as by-product that doesn't need to be specifically designed. The rest of the design is to "discover" how this situation exist.


* * *

"I want to create this NPC to be the personification of the game, and emphasize the close relationship between player and game by the fact that the NPC is a reflection of the player. I want this special NPC to feel like "self", not "other" like a normal NPC."

When I read this again it sounds like you want to create an NPC that is the PC of the PC.

In my story above there is a similar situation, where NPC A can't move very well so she trained the PC to do what she couldn't. So in some sense the PC of the player is also the PC of A. While the Player decides what skills the PC should have, the player is temporarily playing NPC A, so NPC A reflects the Player's decision.

As mentioned before the concept of NPC vs PC is not flexible enough to describe what you can actually do with characters. So I suppose perhaps we could just stop using those terms and just refer to them as characters.