Varsity

1 comment by Varsity on Jul 6th, 2008 digg this super bookmark

Here’s the thing about silent protagonists: they don’t have a personality. Their blank slate eases a player into their role by removing any possible disagreements with their decisions or dislikes of their characterisation – by removing the middle man.

But as I have recently discovered, this great strength is also a great weakness. You can’t reliably motivate a silent protagonist with anything other than survival. Anything else is a stab in the dark, a blind prayer that the person playing your game has a personal interest in what you are presenting to them.

This problem of sophisticated motivation isn’t an easy one to solve. Half-Life 2 was criticised in some quarters for the relative weakness of Gordon Freeman’s motivations, which swung away from the struggle for survival at Black Mesa to a presumed desire to fight a rebellion with sheer brute force. Similar criticisms were levied against the second half of Bioshock, even with it giving its silent protagonist some back-story at the point of transition to prop things up.

The immediate solution of a strong story (if you can create one in the first place!) can only go so far. Parts of your audience will always become involved and fall in line with your requirements, but even with the best story in the world there will be another portion of your audience, probably quite larger, which remains disconnected and doesn’t ‘get’ why they’re meant to be doing something, or, god forbid, what they’re meant to be doing. Perhaps because they aren’t paying attention, perhaps because they can only play for half an hour a week, perhaps because things simply don’t click with them; the reason is immaterial. With only a silent protagonist to work with, these players aren't able to invest in the world or its characters.

Solving the problem

Yet a silent protagonist combined with a first-person perspective is a remarkably powerful tool, and it would be a shame to abandon it when moving away from a survival dynamic. I see the problem as one of signal loss between the player and the game world – we only have mice, keyboards and gamepads to work with, remember – and a solution I’m going to be looking into is creating a companion character who acts as a semi-autonomous bridge between the two.

If it works, a companion will provide an identifiable character in the world who can express feelings and opinions without taking away from the player’s agency. A companion can say “let’s go in here”, and take the lead. A companion can have verbal, emotional conversations with other characters, potentially at the same time as the player is navigating restrictive dialogue trees. The player can disagree with a companion in a way that they cannot with a protagonist.

I work with Source, and here it pays off immensely. With Alyx in Episode One onwards Valve have already created a best-in-class player companion, the source code for which is included in the SDK. Shifting Alyx’s behaviours from combat to character interaction will be a drop in the ocean compared to the challenges of creating her in the first place.

But while I can use the Alyx’s code, I can’t use her content. It isn’t possible to add new skeletal animations to existing models in Source without the use of a third-party decompiling tool, which can’t handle the complexity the fully-articulated Alyx model without crashing. Voice is another issue, since text alone doesn't cut it and I, unfortunately, do not have Merle Dandridge’s agent on the line. And above all else, Alyx is such a well-defined character that I wouldn't want to fight against her image with my own what-if scenarios.

So I’m faced with the mod-killer, content. And not just any old content, but a walking, talking, 3D character of my own! Perhaps a robot would be achievable...