The three kinds of video games characters
A study of the three categories characters in video games fall in.
Hello everyone. After a long while without posting (been pretty busy lately, with the uni and my -still unsuccessful- research for an internship... and the release of Xcom and Dishonored too, I'll admit.), I'm coming back with a new article, pretty much a sequel of my precedent one about the general creation of characters for stories. This time, I will focus on the specificities of characters in video games.
For this analysis, I will divide the characters in three categories, and give details about which ropes to pull to have successful characters in each of these categories.
First category: the playable character
Before going further in this part, I would like to clarify one thing. By the playable character, I am talking about the one character the player is in control of. Of course, this is, much more often than not, the "main character", or the "hero" of the story, but this is not always the case. Here are some examples where the playable character is not the main character:
In Fire Emblem 6 (the first fire Emblem released outside of Japan, uder the title of "Fire Emblem"), whil the main characters of the story are Lyn, Eliwood and Hector, the player actually incarnates "Marc", the stategist ordering them around the battlefied. This Marc has a purely gameplay role, and is almost useless to the story.
In Baten Kaitos, a RPG released pretty late in the Gamecube's life cycle, the player incarnates the "guardian angel" of Kalas, the main character of the story. Other characters will often refer to him in dialogs, asking him his opinion on various situations etc.
In most RPG games, where you have a team, the "playable character" is the first one you start playing with. You know, that guy who fights with a sword, has better stats than anyone else, and is always, always in your team? Especially if your game has real time fighting, it's the one you'll always end up controlling, because the other ones are not as fun to play as...
So you forgot the pizzas? No problem, we actually needed a healer in our party!
So, now, what are the characteristics of these characters? Usually, they're not the most develloped character around... Well, most of the time, they don't speak at all. Just think about the most influencial characters in video games history. Most of them fall into the "silent protagonist" category, in which they either don't speak, or don't say anything really relevent. Mario, Link, Samus, Crono, Chell, Gordon Freeman, Doomguy, Oldschool Sonic, the hero in Bioshock... Most video games iconic characters are silent protagonists.
Silent does not always mean mute. In these games, dialogs are often implied, but not written. Add to this the fact that they usually don't have a very developped personnality.
In any other media, this paperthin main character would have been a major drawback. But in video games, I believe it is almost an obligation. This character is not really a character so as to speak, but more a window for the player to gaze through the story of the game. He is the character you're in control of, he does what you want him to do, he acts as you want him to act, he thinks what you want him to think.