next »

[Inanimate]

(We have had these threads before, but it seems fitting there is one for this section, and this one is more about the impact on a story it will have.)

What is your favored way to deal with a protagonist?

Does the player have direct influence over the character, crafting everything about them, with the protagonist merely being a visualization of their influence?

Is the protagonist a unique character, one who has his own past and look, but the main character hops into his shoes and controls him for the duration of the story?

Or is the main character entirely independent story-wise, able to have his own personality and make his own decisions, with you only taking over for game-play?

[snowyowl]

There's also the Ageless Faceless Gender-Netural Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person, as used by Zork. The protagonist has little-to-no characterisation, the plot just happens around him.

[Alec S.]

I'm often fond of the silent/non-personality protagonist in games.  The personality of the character forms through the interactions between the player and the game. 

I don't think this is a hard-and-fast rule, however.  With Captain McCallery, I gave him a backstory, and he has some dialogue, as well as the journal entries, which give him some personality.  But hopefully it's a soft enough force that the each player feels a different personality, which is a cross between the pre-written personality and their own projection.  I guess, ideally, they are playing a role of this character, but putting themselves into that character.  They are playing themselves if they were someone else.

[Xion]

for games (that I [want to] make), I like to have the protagonists be hollow shells onto which I can project my own actions and personality, but not so hollow that they are devoid entirely of existing relationships and connections to the story. A vague history is what I like most, nothing specific like "when he and she were twelve they promised to marry each other and he gave her a locket and she gave him a ring and..." but more like "they were friends as kids", Then leave it up to the player to decide what kind of friends they were.

as Alec S said though, silent and easily-projectable-uponable characters don't necessarily have to be devoid of personality and character, just that the nature might need to be more generalized and not specific enough to lend them to a specific "type" of individual. Like there are certain situations in which most anyone would be, say, scared, so it would be silly to avoid making the character look scared just to give the player an opportunity to project their own thoughts onto the character, when their thoughts would likely be fear anyway. Or also you can use the actions of the protagonist to incite certain feelings in the player, so like if your character on-screen seems scared, it might make the player feel more fearful as well, thus making them feel even closer to the protagonist anyway.

[Captain_404]

In pure terms of story, there is no such thing as a silent protagonist. Even if you make the protagonist as blank of a slate as possible that is still a character trait. Giving someone no preset characteristic is itself a characteristic and has an effect on the plot. By writing a vague, blank-slate protagonist the story surrounding the protagonist must be equally vague.

If you want to write vague stories, that's fine I guess, but the greatest stories told through human history have all been very specific, focused stories. Do we feel dissociated from Hamlet because he is royalty and we will never be? No! Of course not! We relate to him because we see him going through very real emotions, something all of us experience, triggered by very specific scenarios.

I don't buy that making the protagonist silent and faceless is the only way to let the player enter the game. It does, however, have the effect of making your story vague and limpid.

All this falls apart when the player does something a specific protagonist would never have done, and I guess I don't have any real answer for that yet. However, I think normally when the player is acting up and being stupid the actions are equally ridiculous coming from a specific protagonist as they would be from a blank-slate protagonist.


I do wonder though if the traditional idea of the protagonist is really the best fit for stories in games. If a game restricts itself to only being playable through a single character's eyes, you'll lose a lot of scenes and other view points which can make a really great story. The question arises if it would be better to have a sort of multi-protagonist approach to avoid this stifling of player perspective, but I imagine such an approach would lend itself to an emphasis on forced linearity.

[gimymblert]

Dreaming and visualizing a formless intuition

Findind his story function (guide, protagonist, counselor, etc...)

Defining:
Motivation
mean of evaluation
Methodology of action
Purpose

Then fill a predefine character profile to cover all aspect.


I had once create a character profile template that seem to have spread into the renai scene:
http://www.mangatutorials.com/tut/profiling.php

[mirosurabu]

What Captain 404 said.

I think that "silent protagonist" in terms of just being silent and whose actions are not fully narrated can work quite well as long as his personality is not absent. Silent protagonist in Digital a Love Story can be interpreted like that.

So, yeah, I prefer full blown characters. (:

[Alec S.]

In pure terms of story, there is no such thing as a silent protagonist. Even if you make the protagonist as blank of a slate as possible that is still a character trait. Giving someone no preset characteristic is itself a characteristic and has an effect on the plot. By writing a vague, blank-slate protagonist the story surrounding the protagonist must be equally vague.

If you want to write vague stories, that's fine I guess, but the greatest stories told through human history have all been very specific, focused stories. Do we feel dissociated from Hamlet because he is royalty and we will never be? No! Of course not! We relate to him because we see him going through very real emotions, something all of us experience, triggered by very specific scenarios.

I don't buy that making the protagonist silent and faceless is the only way to let the player enter the game. It does, however, have the effect of making your story vague and limpid.

All this falls apart when the player does something a specific protagonist would never have done, and I guess I don't have any real answer for that yet. However, I think normally when the player is acting up and being stupid the actions are equally ridiculous coming from a specific protagonist as they would be from a blank-slate protagonist.


I do wonder though if the traditional idea of the protagonist is really the best fit for stories in games. If a game restricts itself to only being playable through a single character's eyes, you'll lose a lot of scenes and other view points which can make a really great story. The question arises if it would be better to have a sort of multi-protagonist approach to avoid this stifling of player perspective, but I imagine such an approach would lend itself to an emphasis on forced linearity.

I think a silent protagonist works in a game sense without weakening the story, as long as you think of story in game-like terms.  Look at the Mass Effect games, for example.  Although he's not a silent protagonist, Shepard is a pretty blank slate, allowing him to be a stand-in for the player.  He's simultaneously the main character and a non-character.  His personality is a projection of the player's personality into a general nondescript bad-ass type character.  His personality doesn't really effect the plot in the way, say, Hamlet's personality effects the plot.  The real characters are the supporting cast, who do effect the plot and whose personalities you experience through the interactions experienced from the point of view of the player stand-in Shepard.

[dongle]

All this falls apart when the player does something a specific protagonist would never have done, and I guess I don't have any real answer for that yet. However, I think normally when the player is acting up and being stupid the actions are equally ridiculous coming from a specific protagonist as they would be from a blank-slate protagonist.

That's the key - extra effort has to be made to ensure that the player's motivations (at least to the degree of the mechanics of the game if not further) match the in-game character under her control, lest the illusion fail. Half-Life 2 is fantastic at this. So are some JRPGs (the Mother series comes to mind).

[Musenik]

This thread should be retitled to, 'How to write a player supporting protagonist.'

My first two games had strongly developed main characters. The player was given choices external to their character(s)' personality. This allowed the characters to act consistently, and maintain the continuity of the story.

My upcoming game let's the player decide a character's personality. In all of the games, a strong framework wraps the story. In the first two, the player explores a rich story and its potential paths. In the new one, players create a story within the framework. Each age of civilization is defined by the events it presents during gameplay.

How the main character (the family head of each generation) acts and reacts is decided by the player. This allows players to try out different personalities in the same game. Unfortunately, the player doesn't have to choose consistently for the same main character. This can break the continuity of the game, but I would rather allow the player to choose freely, instead of arbitrarily constraining him or her to consistent choices.

So my approach is to have a strong story framework that allows the player to explore personality options for 'their' character. The Bioware games have been doing this forever. My new game is entirely unlike those, but the concept still works.

[Inanimate]

This thread should be retitled to, 'How to write a player supporting protagonist.'

It's not necessarily about that, since I did intend to cover topics like "how do you write a protagonist as a separate character", but a good point nonetheless!

[mirosurabu]

The blank slate protagonist is nothing exclusive to games, though.

They were used decades ago in CYOA's as they pretty much only work with second-person narration and branching storylines.

And I'm generally not fond of that type of storytelling. I can see how it's exciting for programmers and gamers, though.

[bento_smile]

I think... I prefer to write a situation than a protagonist. I'm mostly thinking about visual novels though. So it's easier to write a bunch of options for the player, and grow the protagonist around that. :3 At least with a visual novel, you can try offer a range of options without any chance of the player doing uncharacteristic actions (like walking into a wall for half an hour XD )

[Evan Balster]

Throwing in with 404, I like characters with character.  There are ways to do 'blank slate man' right too, though.  Mass Effect, from what I hear, did a pretty good job.


The game project I've done the most storyline thinking on, my beloved vaporware "Lapratan", has a protagonist with a distinct personality and a backstory which is revealed slowly over the course of the game, so as to depict meaningful events after the player's gotten immersed in the (environment-heavy) game to some extent.  With hope, they would grow somewhat attached to her.

The player's meaningful choices would mostly be within the possible courses the character could take--generally between recklessness and caution, or wrathfulness and conservation.  She starts the story in a very emotionally unstable state (though the player doesn't learn until later) but finds something new to live for in her travels during the game.  What sorts of choices would exist and what effects they would have weren't really worked out.  In addition, we considered giving the player enough freedom to derail the story, if they responded to a warning the game would show--"Did that really just happen?"


I think the problems that usually arise with strongly predefined characters involve a lack of attachment on the player's part, which is hard to deal with.  My whole scheme is derived from games where I've managed to become attached to the character enough to act in context.  (Whether it works, I won't know until I try it.)

Lack of attachment can also plague side-characters.  It's hard, and a little annoying, to feel attachment to an NPC from the get-go just because that NPC is your "wife" or some such.  It works much better with things like animals (Agro from SOTC?) or a baby on your character's back because they don't talk.  It also works better if the character has been around for a while before the expected attachment occurs, or if the game breeds the attachment without ever demanding it of the player.  (Cave Story pulled the last case off wonderfully with Toroko and Curly.)


I think it's important to have at least *some* characters present throughout a game with personality.  Good games with silent protagonists make someone else (likeable) do the talking.  Good games without them give players a role they can fill without an acting degree or a great commitment to role-playing.

(I hate to say it, but whoever came up with the "quiet fellow with a talking squirrel on his shoulder" trope seems to have given this matter a fair amount of thought.  It's not a perfect solution, but it addresses the matter at hand.)

-


@GILBERT Timmy  I'm not sure exactly what you said there, but I'll agree that dreams and visualizing in that place between awake and asleep are the best places to snatch excellent writing ideas.  Sounds like you might do more of that than I do!

@bento_smile I love your work, so you're doing something right. 

[Captain_404]

Lack of attachment can also plague side-characters.  It's hard, and a little annoying, to feel attachment to an NPC from the get-go just because that NPC is your "wife" or some such.

In some part, I think this is mostly bad writing. It's using a vague cultural symbol and substituting it for real character development. I mean, in other narrative forms when the author just slaps in some random character and calls it 'wife,' it's just as bad.

It works much better with things like animals (Agro from SOTC?) or a baby on your character's back because they don't talk.  It also works better if the character has been around for a while before the expected attachment occurs, or if the game breeds the attachment without ever demanding it of the player.  (Cave Story pulled the last case off wonderfully with Toroko and Curly.)

Definitely this! The characters are no longer blatant symbolism, and a specific relationship is cultivated. The phrasing should never go, "This is your character's wife, that's why you love her," but instead, "You love her, that's why she's your character's wife."

Maybe the issue of a protagonist could be approached in a similar manner. Saying that certain character acts in a certain way and so you, player, must act in that way as well can feel cheap and forceful. I feel that a well realized protagonist should almost always have the player doing exactly what that protagonist would do because it's what the player would actually do if they were in this character's place. It then becomes more of a question of how to immerse the player so much inside this character's mindset that they begin to act as the character without realizing it.

[Peevish]

There's also the adventure game model, where you have a fleshed-out protagonist with a unique personality, and much of the draw of the game is that character's personality, independent of the player. There's this great Tim Schafer interview where he describes the logic behind it:

TS: ...I like to think of it more like the player is the intuition of the character. The character is a fully-formed person, but they're hearing this voice in their head that's saying "walk to the right." And they're like, "okay, I think I want to walk to the right." And the character always exhibits this cognitive dissonance. They act like they wanted to. "Yeah, I think I want to go over here. I think I want to open this door." But it's really you, you're kind of like this voice in their head, this Tourette's-syndrome compulsion - "Open the door. Open it!" And they're like, yeah, uh, I want to open the door.

CP: That's kind of a nice way to think about it—that you're the intuition of the character.

TS: Because you're not the actual thought of the character, you're sort of the hunch: "Go there. Something good will happen." It's like in real life, we're getting these weird impulses that we don't really understand sometimes, like "I think I should go to this party, I don't know why."

I'm following this model (or something like it) in my big game project. It's easier for me the way I'm doing it because you have control of 4 characters. So you feel less need to "become" the characters because you're more like this omniscient personality floating around above them, assume control now and again. It's a tightrope act keeping that design from getting frustrating.

That's the theory, anyway, I'm still in pre-production!

[Peevish]

Oh yes. And the "blank protagonist" thing never really works for me. I mean, if people go whole hog with it like in Myst or most text adventures, where you're just playing yourself, it can work. And I suppose it's common enough in old RPGs that I can generally accept it without trouble (I don't think I needed Crono to talk in Chrono Trigger).

But I think Yahtzee explained it best when dissecting Half-Life 2:

All in all, the NPCs in Half-Life 2 have become so advanced that it makes it all the more silly that Gordon Freeman never says anything.

The story appears to be becoming extremely character-based, and no matter how much humanity is injected into the others, the central figure remains this sort of black hole of a character with literally zero personality. Gordon Freeman must have once possessed the ability to speak, surely, or he'd never have gotten employed at a top secret research centre. So for him to never say anything throughout the entire Half-Life series just makes him seem stubborn. I know you can argue that the player is supposed to project themselves onto Freeman, but if that's the case, why give him a name? A backstory? An iconic appearance? All the other characters have known him for years, we can't really project ourselves because Freeman has a known history and reputation. Hell, he's the fucking messiah figure for the oppressed masses.

[bento_smile]

I'm not too keen on the blank protagonist thing usually - it took me a long time to get used to when I first encountered it. But sometimes it really works. I'm thinking of games like Persona 4, which has a lot of socialising/doing stuff for npcs. It works because it feels like I am being nice to the npcs because I want to be, rather than because the main character is some obnoxious do-gooder hero type. :3

(Although maybe games like that are semi-blank... The character doesn't have any dialogue aside from the occasional bit that you can choose, and they're not that frequent, especially within the main storyline.)

@bento_smile I love your work, so you're doing something right. 

Thanks! <3

[s0]

If your protagonist has "fears and personal issues", don't make them whine about it constantly. That is all.

[Evan Balster]

On that note, I like how psychonauts made "hydrophobia" into "fucking hands come out of water and drown you".

Maybe a good place to draw the "blank slate / full character" line is a defined personality or the lack thereof.  Gordon Freeman has a backstory and relationships, but some players might color him as a badass where others might see him as a desperate hero.  The same applies to Shepard from Mass Effect.  On the other hand, Jade from Beyond Good and Evil also has a backstory and relationships, but is more well-defined, with a compassionate and subversive attitude that's shown in her words and actions throughout the story.

...Jade Guevara...