Character personality in first person games
polycounter lvl 7
Hello polycounters!,
I have opened this
thread in order to talk about how the animation and the UI in a video game
affects the way we perceive the personality of the character we are playing
with. I couldn't find any other threats about this, so here is one.
I'll be uploading
my progress in the study so I encourage you to join the discussion.
Replies
Wonder how the UI could affect the way we perceive the personality of a character in any game, not just FPS.
Animation of the hands doesn't tell me anything about the personality either.
Probably I didn't get the whole point
In some games character personality are conveyed in the playable time. Mostly it's based on characters comments on events, taunts etc. And then theres games like hl2-doom4 that convey characters personality based on surroundings commentary in playable time. I especially like that one.
imo we still have a lot of way to go in order to make main and periphery characters(as well as NPCs) act more lifelike and less sequence based.
If I had to break preexisting games into three categories for whatever reason, is is probably how I'd do it.
The Preexisting Story, games with set characters, with personalities that we can't affect
IE: Team fortress 2, Overwatch, Borderlands, Halo, Left 4Dead, Duke Nukem, Titanfall 2, Call of Duty Black Ops
Blank Slate that we can infer our own idea of what the character is like, or the character IS us
IE: Fallout series, Half-Life Series, Metroid Prime Series, Portal Series
Mindless Pawn, your character is a yes man, no real barring on the story, NPCs talk at you, not to you.
IE: Basically any multiplayer game mode in any video game, Most Call of Duties
And obviously forming a game around a first person narrative can be a clear and obvious decision for games like the Stanley Parable, where it's important to show that YOU are the one the narrator is talking to and that its YOU making the decisions. Where the game play is the narrative and not the fun shooting mechanics.
Would be interesting to see this in a multiplayer game, but I can imagine that keeping readability the same would be a higher priority.
Sure, in theory you could fantasize about Gordon secretly being a psycho or a coward who just got caught in the events (a la Rincewind) but every ingame cutscene treats you like a heroic dutiful character and there's no way to change other character's perception of you or affect the events.
Gordon, too, is a yes man and has no real barring on the story. NPCs talk at you, not to you.
Which is not unlike majority of older FPS games.
Now Fallouts, being role playing games, provide players with all kinds of ways to display personality by giving them choices which affect other characters and their perception of you. It's having these choices that lets people feel like protagonist's personality isn't predefined.
Joanna Dark was James Bond with boobs fighting aliens. Literally.
i'm struggling to think of any modern FPS where the main character is given any real, meaningful characterization. Far-Cry 3 came close but it was incredibly masterful in it's design to not go too far. It was designed to make you first feel sympathy for the character, and then BECOME the character. Maybe Deus Ex?
Gordon has a name. He has no characterization outside of that. The characters don't talk at you at all, their narrative is for you, the player character, to make YOU feel heroic, not to make Gordon feel heroic. You the player don't give a shit whether Gordon is a hero or a coward. You care that YOU are a hero. That is the entire point of the fps genre. It's even the point of first person perspective books. They're designed specifically to make you feel just enough for this faceless character that you could relate to them, and then be a blank enough slate that you can become them.
Freeman's state is kind of different than other dummy yes man characters. The entire storyline around him is tailored for hinting his own characteristics. Most complete yes man games don't even go into this. There's also an intentional mystification on Freeman's characterization, although some of his traits most likely came from tech limitations eg. he's muted in HL2 as well as HL1. This intentionally puts a kind of blank state not to overly divert the characters itself before the player. Similar for doom guy and it's well crafted starting from the very first second of the game as well as in Portal2 where character has no personality at all but backstory is conveyed via environments and commentary masterfully and left a lot of dots for player to match. I think this style is particular for Valve.
In terms of games Deus Ex: HR probably is the best counter-example. Interestingly, Frictional Games have written about this exact topic on their blog in terms of their horror games (SOMA, Amnesia, Penumbra) — They talked about how in Penumbra, their earlier title, they had text appear on screen with characterised statements like "Those spiders give me the creeps; I've always hated arachnids". In their later games they moved away from this approach as they recognised the potential for someone who happens to like arachnids to be jarred away from the experience of feeling themselves as the protagonist, which is essential to the horror experience of feeling scared and genuinely in danger.
(Ah, found the blog post, lots of good points about feeling connection to your character in it).
In terms of UI; they also tend towards no UI to maximise immersion. SOMA is also a good example of first person animations (and sounds... the sound design was amazing in SOMA) to convey the characters fear, hesitance, shock... more so than games that are gameplay driven rather than story driven anyway.
I think it did a pretty well job with combining the first person perspective with a character and it even did so without putting it down your throat and more by slightly shifting your perspective about the main character over the course of the game.If you think about it, it was very clever structured, even on a meta-level.
You start as a seemingly random guy on a plane, the only thing you know about him is that you see his wallet with a picture of random people in it and a present with a note, to "Jack" (to him), on it. Then the plane crashes and we get to the lighthouse and then to Rapture. At this point most people might've even forgotten about the stuff on the plane for it was just shown so short and seemed to just be a minimal setup for the game. The only thing you probably notice and wonder about are his chain-tattoos on his arms, but that doesn't seem to be significant Just a small unimportant detail the programmers added, you might think. So you're a guy ("Jack", if you even red that on the note and got that it was meaning the main character) with tattoos and guns, who crashed with a plane and went to an underwater town full of creepy weirdos, where he learned magic (Plasmids), not much of a developed character.
And it stays like this, for a very long time. You follow the linear story, do everything that guy Atlas tells you to (just because this is a game and your playing a nobody who has no better idea, you might think) and have the occasional flashback of photos and other things, but you can't make sense of them, so you quickly forget them again.
And finally when you meet Andrew Ryan (or even before if you're smart) the game unwraps. You are not just any random guy, you are Jack Ryan, the son of Andrew and you are not here by chance, but by the control of Atlas, who controlled all your actions over his "would you kindly" trigger, who you now have to find and kill, to finally be free.
So with Atlas, the antagonist, fooling Jack into believing he is just a random guy, the game fools the player into thinking they play an important, undeveloped character. I think this is just such a great twist, it even explains the games linear story. Atlas didn't only control Jack, he even controlled you, the player.
Spec OPs: The Line has pretty decent character development for a first person protagonist. However, you have to play through it a while before it starts to show up, before that it seems like your standard fps shooter.
I agree with Bioshock though. So many things in that game were perfectly balanced to bring me in.