Adam Jensen is shaking down a woman for her life’s work. I chose this option, but I didn’t want it. Upon setting out on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I had only a couple ideas on how I was going to play his character. One: each action would be ultimately decided by logic, and two: If the situation calls for either anger or empathy, it should be as detached as possible. But when screen-Jensen goes from almost allowing the woman to cry on his shoulder to appearing to want to break her spine over his knee, I can’t help but feel that my initial goals were going to die unrealized.
For as much as a role-playing game Human Revolution is, it’s difficult to truly play it as a role-playing game. Every bit of dialogue that grates with my ideal is jarring, and snaps me back out of the magical game-world where player and character are the same. I found myself dreading dialogue options: Would choosing this option make Jensen look like some faceless arm of a crime syndicate instead of a person who merely weighs options to find the most logical one? Should I find a bag of puppies for him to oppress?
The problem is that Jensen is not me. He can’t be the character I envision in my head, no matter how much I try. He is his own character, an entity wholly separate from me. I am just the invisible hand telling him which baddies to shoot and what to say in conversation.
Strong, relatable protagonists are the gold standard in writing. If you’re writing a book, a short story, whatever, you want a character that can exist in the world you’re writing and be both realistic and interesting. Stories can rise and fall based on the strength of their characters, and people will get pissed if characters don’t live up to their potential. But this advice is good if you’re writing a novel. It doesn’t have any place in narratives of video games, so you should toss it out. Forget it, it’s not important.
What is important is the idea of a player character and a player avatar. There’s only one fundamental difference between the two concepts: the character. The player character has enough character and history to stand on her own outside of your, the player’s, influence. This has parallels between the concepts of a traditional strong protagonist, which I’ll get into in a minute. The player avatar, on the other hand, has no meaning outside of what you put into it. It cannot exist in a vacuum, unlike the player character.
PLAYER AVATAR AS A CONSTRUCT
I’ve played an uncomfortable amount of Skyrim. My character, a Khajiit shadowmage, was my companion throughout the fifty-so hours of trekking through Skyrim’s frozen tundras. But without me, the character is meaningless. He’s only tangentially related to the plot, and that’s only because the player is the most important person in the game. He can’t exist outside of my influence, he has no personality, no skills besides what I’ve chosen. I am him and he is I. That’s as simple as it gets.
This is the idea of a player avatar.
The player avatar is nothing without the player. Without you, the avatar cannot exist. The avatar works in a narrative sense by allowing you to insert yourself in the story of the game without breaking the flow. The avatar allows you to shroud yourself in the trappings of the chosen hero and coexist with the game’s world, peacefully and without conflict. I hate the word “immersive” because it’s so wishy-washy, but it’s the only word that truly fits here. When the player can insert herself into the game proper, the player feels more included. This makes it easier on the writers of the game as well: they don’t have to write a discrete protagonist character. All they have to do is account for what the player can and will do.
Dungeons and Dragons is completely based off of the idea of players as avatars. In my mind, it’s the ideal of role-playing games. The game doesn’t need to account for the player because it’s built around the player, that’s the entire role of the Dungeon Master. It’s an extremely powerful system because the players can create their characters however they please. To a video game, a drow ranger is a drow ranger is a drow ranger. To the player of table-top games, that drow ranger isn’t just any drow ranger. He’s the ranger who acts too fast and angers too quickly; the one who is just as skilled with the bow as he is with his fists.
That’s not to say that role-playing of this magnitude is quite as deep in a video game, far from it. The role playing servers on most MMOs are a testament to that. But there are several limitations that are in place in most RPGs simply because it’s impossible to account for everything the player can toss out of his mind. The game cannot implement your invented backstories, because to the game they don’t exist. The game cannot account for every single one of your actions through speech and dialogue, and the game can’t account for the chaotic nature of people.
To combat this, most of the RPGs I’ve seen invent something relevant to the plot immediately before the plot happens to insert the protagonist in. MMOs have the tutorial grounds before the player is dumped onto the full world. The Elder Scrolls games have some version of prison boat/cart/cell/spacecar that the protagonist starts out on. In a rather daring version, Fallout 3 traces throughout the player’s life before it reaches that magical moment when tutorial ends and plot begins. But what these games have in common is that what happens before that pivotal moment doesn’t matter one bit for the actual plot. Everything you make up to lead up to that scene is useless, from the game’s perspective.
The one major stumbling I can find with using an avatar in games is when the game tries to incorporate you into the plot too much. Skyrim drops you up on one of its mountains and yells about how you can do anything! The game tries to pressure you into experiencing as much as possible on the first run-through that it’s terrified of having even the slightest moment where the player isn’t extremely involved in everything. Everything in Skyrim is about your avatar, but the avatar doesn’t exist. It’s just a construct of you.
PLAYER CHARACTER AS A ROLE
Screen-Jensen is talking again. The words that he’s saying and the words that are running through my imagination zig-zag past each other drunkenly; sometimes they meet in perfect harmony, sometimes they occupy different sections of the universe. This is unsurprising to me; this Jensen and my ideal Jensen are mutually incompatible. Jensen, then, is the player character.
The player character has no relation to you at all, and is just the character the player happens to be controlling at the time.
Now, I’m anticipating your complaints, friends. You’re wondering why someone would choose to put a character into a role-playing game when an avatar would give you more power. While it’s true that role-playing games that feature a character as the protagonist are significantly more restrictive than games like Dungeons of Dragons, you’re still playing a role in these role-playing games. It’s simply a role with a character attached to it.
This lack of player control over the character could be a gigantic detriment to you, but it also is a major boon to the legion of writers who slave over the game’s narrative. Narratives that focus on avatars generally can’t have any relation to a protagonist’s backstory besides extremely general information and events that happened in earlier games. Once you give a protagonist some depth, well dang, you now have the ability to work backwards in addition to working forwards.
Look at it this way. In Elder Scrolls V, every single character you will ever meet over the course of the game is a stranger. All of the NPCs are introduced over the course of the game, and they start out with no relationship to your character whatsoever. But when you take a game like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and give the protagonist some history, suddenly everything has more narrative significance. The generic quest-giver turns into the bereaved mother of Jensen’s girlfriend, the person you harass mid-quest becomes Jensen’s ex-partner.
It, quite simply, gives the plot a little bit more weight in ways video games only can. For as much as I loved Skyrim and its story, I couldn’t find it quite as relatable on a personal, character level. In Human Revolution, I’m infatuated with the story and its characters, simply because Jensen is an interesting character in an interesting setting. It’s not a terribly powerful way to structure a character gameplay-wise, as evidenced by my issues with its dialogue system, but it certainly works, and works well.
COLUMN A, MEET COLUMN B
I’m loath to say that these are the be-all, end-all way to structure an RPG protagonist. Like so, so many other things in life, the ideas I’ve put forth operate on a spectrum. Because of this, there exists protagonists that would fall somewhere in the middle between avatar and character.
The eminent Commander Shepard from the rabidly popular Mass Effect franchise tends to cool her feet solidly in the middle. She has a solid past, but it’s immaterial and usually not brought up within the narrative proper. Additionally, you can customize the name and face of Shepard in true avatar fashion. (Because of video game restrictions, of course, no one will ever comment on your name and face. I’ve seen some truly horrifying Shepards that the in-game people wouldn’t bat an eye at. Yikes.) While she has these avatar-ish qualities, she displays the level of emotion that would generally be attributed to a character. It’s also worth noting games like Bioware’s older games (Baldur’s Gate) and the more recent Dragon Age: Origins as exceptions to the ideas I’ve talked about in the avatar section above. Both games star the player as an avatar, but have heavy backstory elements attributed to them. They don’t run truly contrary to that idea of a true avatar (where the player is in complete control of the character), but they are characters without faces assigned by the game proper. If you imagine a line, Elder Scrolls and most MMOs would be solidly on the left side cooling their toes in the avatar camp. Dragon Age: Origins would sit comfortably in between the midpoint and the avatar side, with Mass Effect in the middle and Deus Ex: Human Revolution on the far right.
It’s not uncommon for a shift along the spectrum to happen within a game series as well. I’m bringing up Deus Ex again because man, I love Deus Ex. It’s also an extremely important game from a narrative perspective, but for the purposes of this post, I’m just looking at the characteristics JC Denton and Adam Jensen. For all of its high points, JC Denton wasn’t a terribly strong character. Instead, to me, he felt like more of a mould than a character, and because of it I didn’t have any of the problems with projecting myself onto him like I did with Jensen. His backstory was lightly detailed and his character was significantly more influenced by the player’s actions rather than the rigidity of a narrative.
When writing a gaming narrative, it’s important to ask several questions to yourself. The most important of these is: How much do you want to include the player in the game’s narrative? Is telling a story more important than giving control to the players? Do you want the game itself to tell the story, or do you want the characters to do it?
This is the first essay in a series of essays I’ll be writing that critically analyze the structure of role-playing game narratives. The second will come next Friday and will deal with the illusion of choice. Exciting stuff!
æthersnap 
Eich
12/02/2012
And this is why I loved Planescape: Torment. There is this rich backstory of dozens of lives. And there is me, free to play any role I want. My past can come back to haunt me or I can circuit possible bad outcomes by looking forward instead of exploring my past. I can try to tie up any loose ends my predecessors left me or I can create my own story.
You could say that the game uses the ages old theme of “lost memory” and dismiss it as uncreative. But then again you would miss out on one of the greatest games in pc history.
Jabberdau
12/02/2012
Another thing one could ponder about would be questions: How many ways can you answer the same question?
Well that depends on the type of question! There are yes/no ones and other more open ones.
“Do you want friies with that?”
Good: Yes, and I love fries more than anything on earth. Thank you 1000 times for asking.
Neutral: I detest fries…but I´ll have them anyway
Evil: I hate fries and I will now punch you in the mouth for asking it
Characters tends to become rather one dimensional from this aproach. One thing your article made me realise is, that if we where to improve upon this model, to make conversations more interesting, one would have to do 2 things:
1. Make the question beeing asked be dependent on the characteristics of the player. For instance if you are a 250 pound gorilla, would the shoe salesman ask the same question as if you where a Khajitt? Offcourse it wouldnt, because in the real world, people might want to ask people the same question, but they might ask it differently dependent upon who you are.
A situation could be that the player comes upon an event where a group of people have to move a heavy rock. Now assume that you are playing a 70 year old pensioner. So the group WILL ask you, but seeing who you are the question might just be “Could you keep on eye on that the board there dosnt get in the way? You just have to yell if it moves” Whereas if you where a muscle bound 25 year old the WILL ask you but then the question might be “Hey you look strong, think you could help us move this rock? Just push it with the rest of us”
In other words the asking part should take into consideration what the outside world knows about you such as your looks, visible stats such as age, maybe scars and such.
That would make it more interesting.
2. Make the answers availible for you to give, be dependent upon your inner mental state. What I mean by this is, that if you are 100% evil shouldn´t you have the choice off a more evil answer than if you where just 5% evil?
So suppose you meet this man who begs for forgiveness. You are 50% in the good range. The evil choice is still there (send him to jail -vs- forgive him), its just not as evil as if you where at the opposite range of the specter(kill him and then hunt down his children and kill them too just out of meaness).
Also one could spice it up further by having some NPCs asking questions only availible upon what you look like and the history known about you. But I don´t mean it in a general way. Only ask the question if it makes sense for that NPC to ask it! Dont have everyone comment on your physicque, only for those to whom it makes sense…like the fighters guild recruiter : “we could use a man like you” or “interesting scar, tell me about your battles”.
For someone less brawny these questions/comments might not even be there.
Remember this though: DO NOT have NPCs make actions based on only things YOU would know, such as your mental state.
Offcourse this would recuire 10x the amount of code, but perhaps you where thinking along those same lines?
Another thing that needs to be adressed would be how to make choices have meaning. If you choose to slay the shoesalesman the effect shouldnt just be weither a lightbulb turns green or red someway down the line.
I imagine a story as a big railnetwork formed like a tree. Everytime you do something some of the tracks down the line switch paths. Some leeds to the same areas. Others literally take you to a parallel universe where all the tracks are put together in a different way.
Think back to the future 2 where Doc explains to Marty,in the present, that because Biff aquired the almanak in 1955, the future they have gone to now, is down a different line. A line where things happened differently. These are the kind of lines I mean.
So you left the salesman in cold blood? A locomotive down a seperate line on the track further ahead just started and its name is “revenge of the brother”
Had you chosen to recruit him to your army of viscious salesmen that track would have stayed closed. Another one opened though, the one termed “salesman recruited – connections to his cousin – the king of shoes”.
Ergo, choices needs to have meaning. Real meaning. Every choice, not just the easy ones. Some might switch the same tracks back and forth for more interesting results.
Phew. Sorry for spamming your blog, you just started something in my mind : )
aethersnap
12/02/2012
Woah, how did you figure out what I was going to write about for next week? Are you psychic?
The way dialogue is done in games really needs some improvement. Human Revolution can do things like have other people comment on his appearance (though the blanket statements people make about his augs would work with a more loosely-defined character; things like his tendency to wear sunglasses all the time would need some extra work.)
I can’t think of any games that have systems similar to yours for a good reason: there are none. I can see why, of course. Something like that would have to be done extremely early in development, and would need at least two or three games worth of work to make viable. As for having every single choice have an impact? From the little I know about game development, that’s extremely, extremely difficult. I don’t say impossible because it isn’t, I just can’t see it working in a large scale RPG like the Elder Scrolls ones.
Now, if they had more of the choices like in Witcher 2, I’d like to see that. Of course, I’ll talk more about it cohesively on Friday.
Jabberdau
13/02/2012
Nah I don´t think I´m psychic : ). Just a fan of rpgs and simulations. Been thinking about how to make things more interesting for a while, well knowing its a dream. Pondering about it can be amusing though. I program a little myself so I´m well aware that any undertaking of that level of deepth would require a monstrous amount of time. Dwarf Fortress adventure mode might be there someday.
Here was another thought you might be able to use: Do away with the evil/good based scheme entirely and make the alignment and questions be based on human emotions instead. For instance, a question could give points in categories like “moral”, “confidence”, “compassion”, “Intellectualism”, “Thoughtfullness” etc. Throw in a bit about the current history of the player such as people killed/saved and so on for extra spicyness. Yeah I know I´m asking the impossible, but hey one can dream right?
Doug S.
21/02/2012
Having every single choice matter is possible, if you’re willing to make enough sacrifices elsewhere in order to do it. Games in the “visual novel” genre sometimes manage to achieve this; the choices had better matter, because the gameplay consists of nothing but one huge dialogue tree anyway.
See also.
Julia Mathias
12/02/2012
Really interesting post! I’m not a huge fan of games with a player avatar. Maybe people with more imagination can keep track of their imagined backstories and motivations, but I can’t. It’s the main reason why Bioware is my favorite rpg studio even though their games can be very lacking in other areas. Something that has also annoyed me a lot lately is the lack of choice in the dialogue trees. I can be a bit more forgiving when the main character is voiced, but with something like Skyrim, or the rpg I’m currently playing, Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning, I think it’s a huge missed opportunity. If my character is a blank at least let me give him/her some personality trough dialogue.
Felix
13/02/2012
I don’t think a player character has to be given a whole history to feel real on its own terms. It’s enough to be adressed regularly in a certain function, say based on your class, to be more deeply immersed in your role. Reactivity is central, whether you’re an avatar or a specific protagonist. This is where I think Dragon Age failed to deliver. They had this wonderful idea of origins, but the character passed through the world as silently as a ghost, a nexus that draws forth speech in others but is regarded almost indifferently as a person, a “Grey Warden” (an exalted status that only helps to elevate you more effectively from everyone else).
Julia Mathias
13/02/2012
I don’t think that is true, especially when it came to the companion quests, it felt personal to me.
zipdrive
22/02/2012
What? Dragon Age had many occurrences where NPCs would comment on the fact that my character was an Elf. It also made a (slight) difference in the elven alienage quests.
Felix
14/02/2012
Because of the sympathy with the companions, which is not contradictory, it is rather part of the point. The other characters may come alive, but the protagonist feels like a cipher. For a mere moment when someone adresses you personally you may feel like part of the story. But it didn’t feel anywhere near as alive as in Baldur’s Gate 2, for example. It didn’t matter what class, what background you were. This is also true for Hawke. It is just taken for granted, that he/she’s the guy who walks around and solves every problem.There is no connection to the personality, the background of the character. He serves no function besides as a device for getting the plot machinations into motion. Maybe you could feel immersed in the world, but the protagonist didn’t feel nearly as alive as any of the other characters.
It’s not that complicated, I should think. It’s also not a clearcut distinction, but a qualitative gradation. And the grade is fairly low, is my point.
Felix
14/02/2012
I’m also getting annoyed by everyone falling in love with the companions and not being able to argue reasonably about these games anymore because it wouldn’t be nice to their wonderful remembrance… As if there are no other stories and characters in the world.
Wai Yen Tang
16/02/2012
See: Klimmt, C., Dorothée, H., & Vorderer, P. (2009). The video game experience as ” true” identification: A theory of enjoyable alterations of players’ Self-Perception. Communication Theory , 19 (4), 351-373.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2009.01347.x
NaBUru38
23/02/2012
Tyler, Gamasutra siad this article of yours would describe the difference between an avatar and a character. But this got worse. I think about two axis, and I don’t get if this article describes one of them or if you are confusing these two axis.
One axis is “the player entity has / doesn’t have some story or characteristics”. The first type is a story-driven game, where each character has background, goals, personality. The second type is a game with flat characters.
The other axis is “the player’s actions change / don’t change the game”. The first type has an interactive gameplay, with a moral engine or that simply changes the story depending on the actions of the player. The second type ignores the player’s actions, and the story is linear.
Can you answer what of those two axis (or four game types) are you referring to?
aethersnap
23/02/2012
Gamasutra is right, but it’s a lot simpler than you’re making it out to be.
It’s a spectrum, (so that’s simply one axis), with the player avatar on the right, and the player character on the left. Or the other way around, if that what you’d prefer. I’m flexible. As you travel along the spectrum from avatar towards character, generally (but not always), the amount of involvement you have with the story decreases.
Of course, there are always exceptions to this, but usually with games that have player characters, the expectation is on the character to respond to the plot, not the player.