How I Create Characters With the Enneagram
Updated: Mar 5
I originally wrote this essay for The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope from Inkle, now available for purchase!
People love to sort themselves into personality types, using systems such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Enneagram, or even astrology. And while a complete human being can’t be perfectly sorted into a box, you know who can? A character!
The Enneagram, originally developed by philosopher Oscar Ichazo in the mid 20th century, is uniquely suited to building a character’s personality, backstory, and even interesting dialogue choices. Unlike MBTI and other personality types, the Enneagram concerns itself less with innate traits a person was born with, instead focusing on how a person’s formative experiences shaped their needs and fears.
At its core, the Enneagram is a set of nine personality types, each with a basic desire, basic fear, and a greatest strength and weakness. Every element informs the others; a person’s basic fear is a lack of their basic desire, their greatest strength is also their greatest weakness.
To walk you through my thought process when using the Enneagram, I’ll create an example character for a medieval fantasy action-adventure game: Amira, a no-nonsense monster hunter, traveling from village to village with a singular purpose.
Amira is an Enneagram type 3, also known as the Achiever. A type 3’s greatest strength is their drive to succeed and their greatest weakness is attaching their self-worth to their success. If they don’t achieve success in the eyes of others, they feel worthless. I love using the desire/fear duo as the foundation for my characters; throughout the story, they run toward their desire and away from their fear, both of which are shaped by their past experiences.
For Amira’s backstory, let’s say she grew up an orphan and a street kid, tough as nails but looked down upon by the people of her town. When she publicly kills a monster that was plaguing the townspeople, she is suddenly celebrated. Now, Amira constantly seeks out monsters to defeat, chasing the high of feeling valuable, and running from a time when she felt worthless.
The basic desire and fear also point us towards an opportunity for character growth. How can our character change by the end of the story so they’re not dominated by their basic fear? How can Amira learn that she’s still valuable and worthy of love even when she’s not saving the day?
Another useful aspect of the Enneagram personality types are the lines of integration of disintegration, which outline the way a certain type might behave when emotionally healthy or unhealthy. (If you look at the Enneagram diagram above, the lines criss-crossing the circle are lines of integration and disintegration.) The idea is that each type takes on characteristics of other types in times of significant stress or peace.
For instance, unhealthy type 3s take on the worst traits of type 9, the Peacemaker, and healthy 3s take on the best traits of type 6, the Loyalist. So let’s explore what that means for Amira.
Type 9’s worst traits are extreme conflict-avoidance and inaction, so when Amira is at her most stressed, she retreats from the world, burnt out by the enormity of the task she’s set herself. An emotionally unhealthy Amira engages in a lot of all-or-nothing thinking; she feels like it’s impossible to reach the standard she’s set for herself, so there’s no point in even trying.
Type 6’s are productive members of a group and secure in their community. When Amira is the most mentally healthy, she seeks out others, instead of taking on the monsters of the world alone.
With the scale between Healthy Amira and Unhealthy Amira in mind, we can build dialogue choices for Amira that represent different points along that spectrum.
For example: Amira travels to a new village that she’s heard has a monster problem. When gathering information around town, a haughty young priest proudly declares that Amira isn’t capable of defeating their local monsters.
An unhealthy Amira is worried about her ability to face these new monsters, but tries to save face, resulting in the dialogue choice: “That’s awfully rich, coming from a man who looks like he’s never held a sword in his life.”
An average Amira won’t even entertain failure as an option. “You needn’t worry. I’ve faced far worse.”
A healthy Amira puts her ego aside, wondering if the priest made this declaration because he knows something about the monsters she doesn’t. “Why? Are they truly that formidable?”
Through the majority of the game, Amira is somewhere in the middle of the healthy-unhealthy spectrum, and dialogue choices like those above allow the player to subconsciously decide whether she’s tending towards stress or peace in that moment. And the same framework can apply to large narrative branches as well.
This is only scratching the surface of what the Enneagram can do; other features such as wings, instinctual subtypes, and triads can provide a deeper dive on your characters. All together, it creates a touchpoint that you as a writer can return to again and again to truly understand your character and maintain consistency throughout a game.