State of Play: Out of Characters
Game protagonists have hit a creative slump. It's time for someone new.

Right around the time Cole MacGrath, chief protagonist/antagonist of Infamous, got his umpteenth super power, I started wondering what he must've been like back when he was the only bike courier in the world with a voice like the Dark Knight. I imagined him pitching woo to his girlfriend Trish, finally winning her over with a deft combination of no-fun pathos and throaty grumblings. I pictured him on his delivery rounds, squinting menacingly at receptionists while telling them to "Sign here for your package, or I'll kill you" in his best Clint Eastwood.

Here's a guy who just couldn't be happy gaining amazing post-human abilities. You or I might think it was pretty cool if we could hurl cars twenty feet, but Cole seemed lost in the romance of his former minimum wage existence. Funny, because nothing about Cole makes much sense unless he is indeed a comic book superhero. Lucky it ended up working out for him.

If you game much, I bet those character traits sound familiar. Attitude problem? Check. Sounds like he's gargled toxic waste since age five? Check. Despite super-cool abilities and combat prowess, is never, ever happy? Check and double check. Cole MacGrath, you are a video game character, and there are hundreds more just like you. Exactly like you, in fact.

A while ago, I talked about the rising importance of storytelling in gaming , but stories need characters. And as it stands, gaming is severely over-populated by grim anti-heroes that have all been Xeroxed off each other a few times too many.
A good 90% of playable characters fall into the Heavily Armed Badass category. You can faction that down to four types: Space Marine, G.I. John Doe, Semi-God of Whoopass, and Foreigner with Overcompensation Sword. Kind of a small pool to draw from, isn't it? Hell, most JRPGs are still riffing off the character archetypes set down by Final Fantasy VII thirteen years ago. Tetsuya Nomura (who designed those archetypes) went on record calling Lightning, his lead character for Final Fantasy XIII, a female version of VII's Cloud Strife. In other words, an uber-morose and largely self-absorbed man-magnet with a hidden past. Been there.

These aren't different characters. They're the same character with a venue-appropriate palette swap. We can do better.

To be fair, this easy pigeonholing isn't solely applicable to gaming. Chop all the cop shows, lawyer shows, and doctor shows from network television, and you're left with a handful of sitcoms and lots of dead air. Those settings are popular because they provide for plenty of conflict, which is what a TV series needs to keep telling stories every week. Similarly, most games require a certain type of person in the lead. Shooters need somebody holding a gun. Fantasy calls for people holding swords, bows, spears, clubs, or freaky arcane might.

You might think that naturally limits the casting pool, but it's no reason to give everybody a personality that begins and ends with their trigger finger. Cop shows feature everyone from straight-arrow Joe Friday to crooked thug Vic Mackey. Doctors House and McDreamy sure don't share similar bedside manners. And while Patty Hewes and Perry Mason are both attorneys-at-law, Patty would eat Perry alive, and pick her teeth clean with Ally McBeal.

So there is some wiggle room. And yes, lot of games are taking baby steps to add depth, but most are doing it in the exact same way: upping the personal dramas by going dark.

Maybe it's a sign of the times, but few game characters are enjoying themselves anymore. Granted, a lot of them are deep in situations that don't provoke fist bumping and rainbows, but it's interesting to me that we're supposed to have a good time as them when they're plainly miserable. In recent years we've watched Ratchet and Clank's friendship start to fray. Army of Two: The 40th Day is practically one long loyalty test, with a pass/fail finale. The screw-ups from Battlefield: Bad Company are still screw-ups in Bad Company 2, but they aren't nearly as much goofy fun. As if characters in shooters weren't already interchangeable enough.

Of course, in some cases, that's actually the point.

There's a valid school of thought that says game avatars should be ciphers so you can infuse your own personality into the action. Role playing games stake their reputations on how far you can impose; some RPGs don't have main characters so much as meat puppets you fill with the motivation and morality of your choosing. Valve and Irrational Games have practically made silent, first-person protagonists into signature elements, letting you work in the details yourself... or not. The idea is that without an actual character to get in the way, the game becomes more immersive and is thus automatically better. Makes you wonder why so few developers (outside of Bethesda) combine the two for a super-immersive, first-person, meat puppetry RPG.

Even outside those extremes, a lot of playable characters are - often purposely - vaguely defined to make it easier for you get in their skin and inhabit them for a while. Problem is, sometimes they're so vague as to be practically nonexistent. Give them a tragic backstory, a few bits of pithy dialogue, and whammo, you have Marcus Fenix, Kratos, and Ryu Hayabusa all set to act out your aggressions.

It's great when it works, and feels empty when it doesn't. Games need a personality to give us something worth reacting to, and if it doesn't come from the lead, it's got to be in the environment. The revenge fantasies of God of War. The gung-ho professionalism of Modern Warfare. The oppressive doom of Half-Life, Dead Space, Heavy Rain, and many, many, many others. I'm all for a bit of pathos, but minus a few candy-colored Mario exceptions, "bleak" has become flavor of the decade. That's hardly a good substitution for depth.

The sameness is enough to make me miss big personalities like Duke Nukem and Serious Sam, two scholars from the Arnold Schwarzenegger school of political correctness. At least they knew they were cliches. Now those same Ramboized character types are totally missing the irony, and that's turned them into big, fat targets. Developers need to step away from the easy choices and actually think about who they're putting in their games.

There's a lot to be said for skipping past the obvious cop/soldier/ninja choice and going for the "wrong man in the wrong place" scenario. Alfred Hitchcock made a pretty good living doing that, and games like Heavy Rain and Alan Wake certainly follow his example. I also hope I Am Alive digs its way out of whatever development hell it's in, because the idea of playing a survival game as a normal person trapped in an increasingly desperate and isolated disaster zone sounds incredibly compelling. Said the guy who lives between two California fault lines.

Okay, maybe we shouldn't cast a shlub like Silent Hill's Harry Mason in the next Call of Duty, but it shouldn't be another faceless stormtrooper, either. Personally, I'd love to see more done with tough guys Captain Price and Soap MacTavish (assuming Activision doesn't scrub Modern Warfare's continuity since the gutting of Infinity Ward). And where some will jump right to the unintentional self-parody, it's always interesting to move in the opposite direction and puncture someone's machismo. Nathan Fillion (Firefly) practically made a career out of doing this, and did it well in Halo 3: ODST. Squad leader Buck is one of the sharpest weapons in Earth's arsenal, wiping out Covenant heavies single-handed, and he still nearly pees his armor when a new and scary alien sneaks up on him.

That's a real reaction, and I believed it. And that's all I'm asking for, really... characters I can believe in. I believed Sam Fisher when he grunted with effort climbing up the side of a building. I believed Nathan Drake's panic, waking up bleeding and suspended over a bottomless gorge. I believed GLaDOS when she promised me cake, though that turned out to be an error in judgment.

Those are smartly written, nuanced characters who defined their games. Those games wouldn't be as good without them. As an experiment, play Portal with the sound turned off to see just how much GLaDOS adds to the experience.

Hey, I don't need to get inside Pac Man's head, or delve into the deeper moral quandaries experienced by pilots in R-Type or ninjas in N+. I'm not saying you can't have a badass running around stomping the enemy without a twitch. But if you're going to have a story, and the majority of games at least pretend to, it's got to be populated, and there are no excuses left for making populations of flat, dull, mindless, forgettable, superficial un-people. Stop handing me cookie-cutter Cole MacGraths. Stop giving me heroes I like less than the sidekicks. Stop ignoring the one thing that every great story has: a great main character.

Not everyone has to be iconic right out of the box, but richer characters are fast becoming mandatory. They are, after all, the face of the franchise itself. And as games get more sophisticated, it's increasingly going to take more than just a pretty face to grab attention. It's going to take someone we like... and can believe in.  Rus McLaughlin