PETAFL0P

I saw about a year ago that Gordon Freeman had been crowned, by an anonymous internet poll, the best videogame character of all time.  Let's take a moment to reflect on how ridiculous that is.  Now don't get me wrong, I love Half Life.  I have five hundred hours logged in HL2, and hundreds in both of the episodes.  When the recent ARG scare turned up, I squealed like a schoolgirl - but Gordon Freeman isn't the best character in gaming; not even close.  

 

Gordon Freeman has exactly one defining moment of personality in the entire Half Life series - in the first five minutes of Half Life 2, when he throws the can at the metrocop.  Aside from that, his personality consists entirely of stoic bludgeoning, drug abuse, and nailing people to walls with superheated pieces of rebar.  Half Life 2 may be a character study, but it isn't a character study of Gordon.  Or what about Isaac Clark of the Dead Space franchise?  Isaac is the wonderbread of people.  He doesn't even talk in the first game, and, when he starts in the second game, it isn't a big improvement.  Even Booker Dewitt from Bioshock Infinite, who is an antihero and by all accounts a terrible person, is a phenomenally boring one.  

 

Take another look at another series beloved for its rich characters.  Think about Mass Effect: Ashley, Garrus, Joker, and Mordin are all excellent.  If you named your favorite character from the series, it would probably be one of them.  It, notably, wouldn't be Shepard.  Shepard has a few cool lines, but aside from that, all of her personality can be summed up by the word 'hero' (or, if you play renegade, 'antihero.'  The backstory is even interchangable, and affects only a few lines throughout the entire trilogy.  Shepard has no past, no deep flaws, and no driving conflicts.  Shepard is barely a person, compared to the rest of the crew.  And, yet, in-universe, it is Shepard who is universally beloved and respected.  It is Shepard that the crew will follow into hell itself.  It is Shepard who billions of dollars are spent to resurrect when she gets spaced.  For one of the blandest characters in the game, it feels a bit out of place to have people bow down to worship Shepard when any of her crewmates are way more compelling.

 

Okay, so, why?  Why are all these protagonists, who fill such vital roles in the story, so damn boring? 

 

In order to answer that question, we need to rewind fourteen years, to the ancient era of 1999.  As the years comes to a close, Half Life and System Shock 2 hit the gaming scene, and suddenly everyone with a PC stops what they're doing and plays them until their fingers bleed.  When the bandages came off, a few things had become very clear to anyone who was paying attention.  Maybe the most important was that the nature of storytelling in games had fundamentally changed.  Before SS2 and HL, there was a canonical method of storytelling in games, and it wasn't very good: you played through mostly-unrelated gameplay in order to unlock movies or text dumps that advanced a story.  Half Life (and more so Half Life 2) brought a crucial innovation to the table: they blended up the story and gameplay into a chunky, immersive soup, and turn the player loose in it to consume at their own pace.  By using the same interface for talking to people, shooting monsters, and solving puzzles, a huge number of new storytelling conventions became possible, including the possibility of genuinely forgetting the distinction between one's self and the player character. 

 

This way of telling stories is now more or less the norm in gaming.  A number of games still rely heavily on cutscenes (sometimes to their detriment) -- but almost all of them now have major sections of the story conveyed during gameplay.  However, this mode of storytelling introduces some unique limitations.  One of the surprising ones was the degree of synchronicity required between the player and the main character.  

 

According to Ken Levine, the creative director of Bioshock Infinite, Booker Dewitt tested substantially better when all of his dialog that wasn't literally true was scrubbed.  When Booker expressed strong opinions that a player didn't share, it caused frisson between the player's identity and Dewitt's.  It was more difficult to pretend that the two are the same person.  In a more general sense, even for games that aren't explicitly trying to achieve that kind of tight psychological fusion, the player is still intended to think of the main character as being, in some sense, themselves.  It is frustrating when the game forces your character to do things that you don't want to.  It feels like you're being railroaded, and, in the world of modern game development, railroading players without making them feel it is an art in itself, and an area in which it doesn't pay to handicap yourself.

 

Every gamer remembers moments in which the invisible walls become claustrophobic.  Sometimes, you'll be playing a game, and you'll be offered a choice, and your response is... 'What?  No!  I don't want either of those things.  Why don't we do this other thing instead?'  - unfortunately, it's simply not practical to develop enough content for everyone's philosophy and approach to problem solving to be embodied as character choices.  The character can't actually be us, so the path of least resistance is for the character not to be anyone at all - if the main character expresses no opinions or strong emotions, then we can simply pretend that they're feeling and thinking what we're thinking, and get through the game.  It's not as good as if we had that thread of feedback of the character affirming our experiences, but it's not as bad as when we're stunned by a powerful emotional twist, and the main character starts laughing.  Bland or silent tabula-rasa main characters exist for a reason.  It's not ideal, but unless content creation gets a lot cheaper, it's the price we pay for better storytelling.    

 

There are a few approaches that have developed to address this problem.  The earlier one was the development of more interesting villains.  The nature of these games, with combat and story so tightly integrated, lends itself to powerful, personal, antagonistic relationships.  From Shodan to GLaDOS to Dr. Breen to Andrew Ryan, the malicious, interesting, strangely persuasive voice that talks to you on the radio is clearly a powerful way to convey a character to a player, and to inspire strong emotions.  Another development that seems to work well had been the addition of a 'second protagonist' - an NPC companion, hard or impossible to kill, who follows the player and provides an emotional lead to ground.  This trend started, in many ways, with Alyx in HL2:Episode 1.  By adding a character that is much more richly developed than any of their peers, and who accompanies the main character, it is possible to allow the game to focus on someone interesting and compelling, and to allow the player to really believe in one character who, in turn, validates the fiction of the game's world by participating in it.  In many ways, Alyx is the protgonist of the episodes: she is the one we care the most about, she is the interesting character that we focus on, and it's her emotional journey that makes up the backbone of the story: Gordon is there in a support role, to solve puzzles and shoot things -- but he isn't the core of the experience.  The same goes for Elizabeth, Ellie, and Clementine.  The Walking Dead adventure games aren't a story about a man taking care of a little girl -- it's a story about a little girl being taken care of by a man. 

 

Maybe one day, machine-generated content will be good enough to allow us to really imbed ourselves in games on our own terms, with the game reacting appropriately - but until then, we can at least enjoy the storytelling mechanics that have developed around the current technology.