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...
Just followed your profile link on the ES post-mortem article, to this, absolutely fantastically well-written article! Really enjoyed it man, you make a very good point about Alyx acting as a kind of counter-point to Gordon/The Players own view, she allows the player to disagree, agree, or simply follow her orders, negating the whole aspect of confusion or disillusion present in other games without such a character. I'd never thought of that aspect before, and it was really interesting to learn your thoughts on it. Great article!
Good article, but it's interesting that you see the solution as the 'buddy' character.
You see, for me the buddy has its own failings: It often gets in the way of where you want to go, its actions seem clunky and can't always merge with player actions well, and sometimes it has some very strange reactions to what the player does.
** Half-Life 2 series SPOILERS **
Take Alyx in Episode 1, I found she was often getting in the way of my shots, or I'd set a barrel on fire (a user-generated gameplay mechanic) only to have her clear out the zombies before it exploded. I also hated the way she'd hover round you, I found it irritating. I wanted to take in the vistas, take the game at my own pace, but I had this annoying companion trotting round me in circles (the closest comparison being Donkey from Shrek!).
By Episode 2 Alyx seemed a bit more refined. She seemed to lay off a bit. She had a bit more character and you felt a bit more like she wasn't taking cues from you, but she was her own boss. She'd step forward in front of you and take the lead in sections. It was like she'd finally developed an Ego. There wasn't so much "Gordon whadda we do?!", it was more "Let's go this way!" or "Wow, look at that!".
I felt these breaks where she was allowed to stay on her own while you went off and did your thing made the game experience much more authentic. It also helped paint her as the survivor she is. Instead of you constantly protecting her in the first episode, in the next she would be holding the fort with a fellow companion. In Episode 1 Alyx felt far too dependant, far too helpless and damsel-in-distressy. Episode 2 was definitely an improvement in that sense.
But even in Episode 2 there were lingering issues, the sort of issues that show cracks in the woodwork and remind you that this isn't real, it's just cleverly scripted. Immersion-breakers, I'd call them.
For example, in the muscle car sections, try driving off at speed and Alyx will ask you to wait for her, but if you don't wait for her she just runs after the car at jogging speed without another word. It was here that the game missed out on iliciting another emotion from the player, one of guilt. How bad would you have felt if you had driven off, ignored her initial cries and then with her out of sight heard her dejected cries in the distance, with the pang in her voice telling of her disbelief that you would treat her that way.
Equally, if you do stop and then hit the turbo just as she gets to you, Alyx will hold on with brute determination and defy physics to daintily leap into the car while in motion, instead of letting go to save her fingers and launching into an angry tirade like most people would.
In either of these situations, when Alyx rejoins you there are no hard feelings. There's no "What the hell were you thinking? Did you not hear me calling out to you?" and the uncomfortable silence in the ride to the next section.
What commentary Alyx does provide is on the whole timely and believable, but there are odd moments where she says things out of turn that pull you out of 'the zone'. Like if you slam the muscle car into a tree and Alyx giggles to herself psychotically. For those fleeting moments before the real world caught up with me, that was a disturbing experience. Alyx went from believable to S&M kiddy crying "Again! Again!".
I suppose I'm being very harsh on Valve for not having included this, but for me it shows one of the weaknesses of the 'buddy' system. With a silent protagonist, there is no way for the player to resolve differences, and there are no arguments to be had. You exist in this artificial world where a friendship is flawless. Because otherwise the player would be forced into the uncomfortable situation you may have faced when abroad and someone's shouting at you in a language you can't respond in. You know they're angry at you for something, but you can't make things right.
I agree with highlighting the 'survival' storyline as key to the success of a silent protagonist. You see, without the war backdrop and the constant interruptions to fight Combine and the like, the artificial relationship between Alyx and Gordon would have nothing to hide behind. Without distractions it would be thrust into the limelight and the player would have no choice but to judge it on its bare mechanics.
What I would ask is does the 'survival' that motivates the player have to be their own? Or are there other options that might motivate a player? I think there is room for a player being motivated to save another, but the story has to be there, the game must have built up a connection that means you want this other to stay on the scene. And I think that's pretty hard to do.
Umm...
You may be interested in Jonathan Blow's latest lecture ( Braid-game.com ), if indeed you didn't write all that after listening to it. I heard it yesterday and it finally convinced me to give up working on anything on a 'big 3D' engine until I understand the design of games itself.
I don't know if I'm meant to respond to most of your text, since it wouldn't have affected me, but to your final question I say yes. You can certainly /try/ to involve the player in an NPC's survival, but it would be another leap of faith. Not such a big one as the "sophisticated motivations" I was thinking of when writing the piece, but a leap nevertheless.
On this subject, one idea I've been following up (as of about three hours ago) is NP'C's which are actually dumb AI shells that mimic the player's own actions. On paper it seems to me that these might be the silent protagonist of companions, right down to having a similar set of limitations. Not least visual representation.