Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

When it comes to the realm of character development, we gamers are left high and dry. Undoubtedly we have our memorable characters throughout our short-but-turbulent history, but there hasn’t been a lot of innovation on that forefront, compared to other entertainment mediums. Whenever I inquire to other PC gamers about the depth and development of game characters, I typically receive several pre-canned responses. The most common one I seem to get is the age old, “If you want a deep story and characters, read a book or rent a movie!”, usually followed by some other snark comments as well as a jab at my mother.

On the flip side, you have the desperate defender of gaming characters and stories – the ones who act like the plot in BioShock is the greatest fictional epic since Ulysses and that wish Lara Croft was their girlfriend. Still, is this the best our medium has to offer? Is the reason we’ve been relatively absent in the area of character development and complex stories is simply because most gamers don’t want that? Does it all boil down to a case of “Excuse me waiter, but there’s some character development in my games?”

Wing Commander III’s character development was a good start.

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. In recent years, developers have been attempting to make some headway into the realm of character development and story. I’ll admit that the atmosphere found in BioShock was excellent, even if the characters were as stale as last weeks’ plasmids. Half-Life 2 has perhaps created some of the most interesting and lifelike characters of recent memory, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. The typical problem most games face when it comes to character development is the dynamic nature that every games face – it’s not a camera sitting there watching a story roll out, but rather you, the gamer, controlling it.

We all know that one guy who mashes buttons whenever a cutscene pops onto the screen. He’ll play through the entire game, sometimes more than once, but if you ask him what the character names or the general plot of the game was and he’ll stare at you like you’re asking him to recite King Lear backwards. I think this is the core problem of getting rich, deep and complex characters and stories into games – gamers are really split right down the middle on the subject. Some gamers are playing simply for the fun factor. They just want to be entertained, to see some explosions and cool effects. On the other end of the spectrum, there are gamers who desire more fulfillment from games – who are playing games as opposed to reading a book or watching a movie. To them, an interesting story and setting are just as important, if not more so, than how cool the action or how fun the gameplay. I personally fall between these two extremes, with a slight tilt towards the latter. While I’ve had days where all I wanted to do was sit down and watch gibs of people flying everywhere in Team Fortress 2, I’ve had even more days where I’ve craved an interesting multi-faceted story and involving characters.

BioShock’s character development was a bad continuation.

The Witcher was a fantastic RPG. Role-playing games are typically associated with having the best stories and characters out of any genre, and indeed The Witcher succeeded in the realm of story. However, I felt almost no attachment to the characters – especially the characters which the protagonist can potentially “get his shag on” with if you play your cards right. The whole sexual notion presented in The Witcher felt like a total prepubescent joke, like some sort of peculiar minigame where after you screw that greatful barmaid she hands you a miniature portrait of herself that looks like it belongs on a centerfold in Playboy. Instead of using sex as a means to deepen the story and enhance character development, the game used sex as a gimmick. What is the point of sex in games if it has no substance to deepen or progress the story or characters in any conceivable manner? Without that, you’re left with two 3d models smacking themselves together in a virtual world – which is uninteresting (and not to mention slightly awkward) to watch.

Interesting and fleshed out characters should be the norm for single-player games, not the exception. I’m not asking for characters which redefine storytelling, but simply ones that are believable and interesting to the player. I would feel much more motivated fighting to save a character’s life if I had grown attached to them throughout the game than if I had to save them “just because” that is how the game goes. Not to mention you feel so much more accomplished and a much greater sense of fulfillment out of finishing a game in which you were emotionally invested into the characters, or at least I sure as hell do.

My dream for the future is simple – we will have characters and stories in games that are as interesting as those found in other mediums. Many gamers feel that because of the fact that a player is in control, games will never have completely fluid and engaging stories. But a gamer can dream, can’t they?