The main sources of inspiration for the design of more engaging synthetic characters are existing psychological models of human cognition. Usually, these models, and the associated Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, are based on partial aspects of the real complex systems involved in the generation of human-like behavior. Emotions, planning, learning, user modeling, set shifting, and attention mechanisms are some remarkable examples of features typically considered in isolation within classical AI control models. Artificial cognitive architectures aim at integrating many of these aspects together into effective control systems. However, the design of this sort of architectures is not straightforward. In this paper, we argue that current research efforts in the young field of Machine Consciousness (MC) could contribute to tackle complexity and provide a useful framework for the design of more appealing synthetic characters. This hypothesis is illustrated with the application of a novel consciousness-based cognitive architecture to the development of a First Person Shooter video game character.