It can be challenging to give your player character a personality, other than blank slate Hero. Superman may be a superhero, but he is boring. A character needs to be more fully realized to be interesting. There are multiple ways to bring your playable character to life.
One of ways this can be done is through dialogue snippets. These shouldn’t interrupt the flow of gameplay but should inform a bit about who is speaking. A great example of this is Dota: each hero will occasionally say a short phrase after being given an order from the player. What and how they say things fleshes out their characters quite a bit. For example, most of Queen of Pain’s lines are double entendres, which makes sense for a succubus. Lifestealer frequently cackles maniacally and refers to his unseen master who compels him to kill, in order to demonstrate his mental instability (if not outright insanity). The list goes on and on. Garrett from Thief is another example of this technique. His chosen career path juxtaposed with his judgemental one-liners show a very cynical man.
Garret from Thief (2014) above, Link from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker below
Another method is to use the character’s visual design for this end. What gender are they? How old? Are they human? What clothing are they wearing? Why those clothes? This may sound somewhat obvious, but it is extremely effective. You’d never mistake Garrett and Link for each other; they look wildly different and are wildly different people. Other hints can be dropped in the animation as well. How do they move? Is it a prideful stride or an unobtrusive shuffle? What do they do when the player isn’t giving them input? Are they looking at the player impatiently tapping their feet, like Sonic or Spyro? Are they humming a tune?
Other things contribute to characterization, too. What are they carrying on their persons? Are they armed with a laser pistol or a knife (the Courier in New Vegas) or sheer spunk (Spyro or Mario)? Are they given meaningful personal quests? Are they finding a lead for their sister’s murder, or collecting useful items for survival (Fallout 1’s Water Chip).
All these techniques can build a recognizable character with motivation, needs, and flaws. It’s a necessary step, when you are going to accompany someone on a lengthy quest.
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Personally, I don’t think it is necessary for every game to give the main character a distinct personality. Sometimes a game developer can actually enhance the gameplay by not giving the main character a specific personality. For example, Minecraft doesn’t use any dialogue at all, and everybody starts the game with the same plain character skin. This gives the player the freedom to give the main character a custom personality of their own choosing. The player can even make up dialogue and a backstory for the main character while playing the game.
Additionally, the visual design of the main character sometimes doesn’t even affect gameplay all that much. For example, you can customize the visual appearance of your multiplayer character in recent Call of Duty games. However, the multiplayer mode is played entirely in first person. As a result, you never see your character during multiplayer matches except during killcams. So one must ask: does the main character’s appearance really enhance the player’s experience while playing this type of game?
However, both games I mentioned above (Minecraft and multiplayer Call of Duty) share one thing in common: those games don’t have any story built into the game. This fact brings up an interesting question: do game developers even need to worry about giving the main character a distinct personality and appearance in games that lack strong stories? I don’t believe so from my experience, but I’m interested in hearing opinions from other people about this topic. Let me know what you think.
After reading this post I realized that characterizing player characters is one of the most important things in game design but for some reason I have never thought about this topic. Now characters such as Desmond Miles from Assassin’s Creed, Vito Scaletta from Mafia 2, Commander Shepard from Mass Effect 3 and many others come to my mind and I realize that giving those characters personalities is what make those games extremely unique.
Also I would want to point out that characterization of player characters is not always enough. A game designer has to reveal a “true character” as J.Patrick Williams suggests in his book “The Player’s Realm: Studies on the Culture of Video Games and Gaming”. The more a game designer expresses his player characters, the more immersing experience players will have. This may be achieved by designing more compound architectures where a player character could easily represent itself. However, it is possible for singleplayer games only. In multiplayer game worlds a character’s story is created through this character’s individual journey while “living, creating, and developing within the world”.
Characterization is a very interesting concept in game design. It has great potential to skyrocket the publicity of a series when done well. Gamers around the world recognize characters and can tie them back to their respective games with ease such as Mario from Nintendo or Ghost from the Call of Duty series. The player’s character is a key part of the front-end in single player games, but with many games becoming increasingly multiplayer oriented, giving characters the proper aesthetics and making them feel like complete characters can be tricky.
Some games such as Dota and even League of Legends do a decent job at harnessing a vision for each character through unique dialogs and wardrobes. As a league player, I know that there is also a separate lore for each character that gives them a unique backstory for players to get a better understanding of what each character is meant to feel like. To some people, these things are small and insignificant as they can still play the game without this extra information, but over time the different abilities of the characters and artwork can still give the player a sense of a character’s story.
I agree with your post, sir. Characterizing and creating an icon out of your player is important. This can help make a good game great. There are many titles that come to mind when looking at great characters and icons in the video game world, such as Kratos from God of War, Mario from Mario, and Nathan Drake from Uncharted. They have the uncanny ability to transform a story and make the player potentially make the player empathize with them and/or their cause. The cut scenes with a fully voiced characters are also much better, since it feels more natural and the like. Lastly, I agree that the items or clothing the character has on also make an impact. These items can define a character and impact the tone of the game by significant amounts.
I do have to say, though, that this is not always necessary. If you go on the other side of the spectrum, you get a sort of blank slate. This slate is one where the character does not speak, and is a chance for the player to feel like he or she is actually in the game. A lot of RPGs do this. From the beginning, the player gets to choose what the in game character looks like, what clothes he or she has on, and the accessories that he or she carries. I think that this is also a viable strategy in games, as the player then has a chance to feel as if he or she is growing along with the in game character. It really just depends on the type of game and what the developers are going for in terms of feeling.