Identifying with a Blank Face

I finished the fight last night (after losing 2 hours of progress by not saving).  My friend Reed made a comment about the way I was speaking whilst playing Halo 3.  You see, all of the commentary I was making about the game was in the first person.  I was saving humanity, not Master Chief.  In a sense, I was master chief.  This is a technique video games can employ to create a strong narrative in ways that film and literature never can. 

When you watch a movie or read a book (other than a choose-your-own adventure, which I’m not counting), you’re being told a story about someone else.  This doesn’t mean it can’t be a great story, but it’s still a story about someone else.  Even so, if you look at many of your favorite books and films, you will find that you probably identify rather strongly with at least some of the major characters.  You may not realize you do, but on some level, those characters you like you probably unconciously see as a kind of alter-ego of yourself, based on character traits of that persona.  The more strongly you identify with a character, the stronger your emotional connection will be to the work. 

Unlike in film and literature, protagonists in games can be very vaguely defined.  Creating a vague definition of a protagonist is a tricky thing.  If done well, the player will project their own thoughts and feelings into the void of your protagonists character.  If done poorly, the player will fail to identify with your hero at all, and as a result feel no emotional attachment to the situation the character is in, and therefore the narrative of your game. 

There are two major ways in which video games can create vague character definitions.  The first is to not show the player what the character looks like.  Master Chief has a helmet on, at no point do you ever see his face.  Jack from Bioshock is not obscured in any way, but because the game is always shot from the perspective of jack, and all the mirrors in Rapture are conveniently broken, you never see what he looks like.  This goes a long way to helping the player identify with the protagonist (because if you could see his face, he would look like you!).

The second method is to limit or completely curtail the protagonist’s dialog.  There is a long history of silent protagonists in video games with rich plots for this reason.  Examples include Link from The Legend of Zelda, Gordon Freeman in Half-Life, Jack in Bioshock, Chrono in Chronotrigger, Ness from Earthbound, and Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII.  The technique is not as simple as abstaining from dialogue, as identification requires traits to create an emotional connection.  The trick to this technique is to use the other supporting characters to suggest a variety of traits the hero may possess (without spamming the entire continuum of character traits).  If done well, the player will latch on to those which suit his fancy and ignore the rest.

Creating a vague character is not the only way to get players to identify with your protagonist, but it is a way that works for a broad spectrum of people.  Idenification with the protagonist does not ensure the game will be loved either, but it does help to bring about a strong emotional reaction.  If the character you identify with suddenly starts acting in a way inconsistent with your views, or if the work as a whole doesn’t meet your standards, you will probably hate it - but at least you have strong opinions one way or another.  On the other hand, it’s difficult to love the narritive in a game if you don’t identify with the main character.

Top 10 Game Optimization Myths

Gamasutra has a good article on the top ten game development myths.  Very programmer-centric, but a good read nonetheless.

 Update:  I found this while cruising around, an older article by Daniel Cook on Game Design Myths.

Design Concepts

A few days ago, Gamasutra put out the eight edition of the annual classic, Bad Designer, No Twinkie.

There is much that is good in that article, and a quick perusal will have you nodding your head at half the games you’ve played.  I particularly like the segment on Failure to provide short-term goals.  This particular problem is one which has caused much frustration in and about my person, and has been the single cause of my inability to complete several games.  Part of a game is guiding the player through an experience - Not spoon feeding it to her - but some direction is expected.  There are games (mostly orbiting the celestial entity that is Will Wright) which set out specifically to allow the player as much freedom and to deny specific goals at all.  This is a somewhat different matter, as the gripes entailed by the above refer specifically to scenarios under which a specific goal exists, but the goal is not adequately presented to the player.  Nevertheless, it’s a dangerous game to play (although one Will plays very well), because there is a difference between allowing the player to define their own goals, and providing no direction on goals whatsoever.   This is something I’ve wondered about with Spore (Remember Spore?).  I’ve just watched the video from the 2007 Leipzig Game Conference, and the game certainly looks more visually polished than it did a year ago, but there’s no new magical reveals on content or gameplay.  Spore is an interesting beast because it’s less a game and more a toy.  The difference between the two really are that toys are something you play with, to explore the possibility space of your imagination.  Even so, this possibility space is limited by the structure of the software, and if no hints or direction are given as to the ways in which you can explore that space, one can get frustrated easily (not that I anticipate that will happen in this case).

I’m not sure I entirely agree with the argument for Amnesia though.  This can, if done properly and occasionally be a powerful technique (a film example would be in Memento, a game example would be Bioforge), but it needs to be the focus of the work, and it’s difficult to pull off.  This is at odds with the number of games which employ the technique.

Eight years of Twinkie Denial can be found at Ernest Adams’ No Twinkie Database.

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