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Analysis: I Have No Mouth and I Must Save the World
by Jeffrey Matulef [PC, Console/PC]
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September 6, 2010
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[In this analysis, Gamasutra writer Jeffrey Matulef examines the silent protagonist through video game history, looking to games including Half-Life 2, Okami, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Deadly Premonition for prominent examples or surprising deviations.]
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt." -Abraham Lincoln.
Dialogue for a video game protagonist is a double-edged sword. Develop them into a three dimensional character and you'll risk alienating your audience who may not like them. A common workaround is to leave the protagonist silent so the player can impart their own identity unto their avatar.
The problem here is often one-sided conversations feel awkward. Just look at Gordon Freeman, silent hero of the Half-Life series for example. Gordon never speaks, but other characters talk to him and it feels disingenuous when he doesn't respond. The idea is that by making him silent the character is supposed to be the player.
So when cute, spunky, ass-kicking scientist pal, Alyx Vance flirts with the silent hero it feels pandering and false because, let's face it, she says that to all the guys. However, there is hope for this approach. I'd like to take a look at some of the best examples of silent protagonists that manage to make us care about them and their relationships with others without seeming at odds with the fiction.
The example that comes to mind first for me is Amaterasu, heroine of Clover's 2006 cult-hit, Okami. Ametarasu (Ammy for short) is a wolf. Actually, she's a wolf goddess of the sun. The player can see her celestial blood-stained tattoo-like marks and otherworldly weapons adorning her back, but to everyone else she just looks like a regular wolf. Everyone that is save one bite-sized "wandering artist" named Issun, represented by a bouncy green ball hopping on her nose. It makes sense that Ammy can't talk, what with being a wolf and all, so her interactions with villagers seem far less awkward than those of her spiritual predecessor, Link from the Zelda series.
With Link there's no excuse. He's human (or elf) and others of his kind talk to him -- he even has what seems to be a girlfriend in Ocarina of Time -- yet he can only respond in pantomime. Ammy's reactions make sense given her species, but that doesn't explain why others talk to her as they do.
That responsibility lies with Issun who does all the talking. He's kind of annoying at first, but grows into a more lovable character as the game draws on. More importantly, he's allowed a distinct personality because he's still technically an NPC. Just one that happens to be parasitic.
Together, the two of them form a symbiotic relationship creating a silent noble goddess and a street smart (well wannabe street-smart anyway) wayfarer. Accompanying them on their quest creates a stronger bond than either of them would have been capable of on their own.
 Similar to Ammy and Issun, a recent game that takes this symbiosis to its extreme is Deadly Premonition. Protagonist, FBI Agent Francis York Morgan does talk. Quite a lot and often to himself. Or does he? See, York (it's what everyone calls him) has a split personality. He can often be found conversing with his alter ego, Zach. Watch closely, however, and you'll see that Zach is meant to be the player.
Thus you control York's movement, but aren't actually playing as him. You're playing as Zach just as in Okami you played as Ammy, and York fills the same roll as Issun- the half of the party the game world can see. Nobody addresses Zach except York and it doesn't feel unbelievable when Zach doesn't respond as York is presumably talking to himself.
The result is that York feels at least one degree away from the player's control, so we're meant to remain a bemused detachment to York's more ridiculous antics (such as when he tells a story of his previous case over dinner and how the culprit both peed and drank from his victim's skulls. Incredibly, York is quick to point out, he used the same skulls).
On the other end of the spectrum there's Bioshock 2. I'll get this out of the way right now; I liked Bioshock, but the silent protagonist thing bugged me. If you're playing as a regular Joe who happens to discover a ruined underwater city and some guy starts yapping to you over a two-way radio, wouldn't ya know, want to ask him questions about what the hell's going on?
 Bioshock 2 fixes that. This time around you play as Subject Delta, a Big Daddy (a brainwashed Frankenstein's monster like beast in scuba gear). Big Daddy's can't talk so this explains the silent protagonist thing well. Characters even respond to your silent treatment.
The first time you encounter a non-hostile NPC she thinks you're there to murder her. You can, but I chose not to (much to her surprise). Big Daddies are assigned to protect mutated little girls called Little Sisters and your Little Sister, Eleanor is in danger and needs rescuing. Since you're already a monster of sorts you have little to live for, saving Eleanor is your sole goal. It's hard not to empathize with such a determined powerful beast and that's all we need to know about him.
Simply by integrating a characters silence into the fiction isn't a sure-fire success. In Deadly Creatures you play as a tarantula and scorpion, but unlike their cartoon counterparts these ones don't talk. They have no motive beyond killing and eating creatures, so there's really no reason for them to be going along the game's prescribed path.
There is a story about a couple unsavory prospectors that is overheard by the playable arachnids, but they have no reason to be involved since it's not like they'd be able to understand what people are saying. While the deadly creatures of the title are tied to this story thematically in their harsh, dog-eat-dog struggle for survival, they play a passive role and it's hard to care about them. Simply coming up with an excuse for a characters silence isn't enough if there's no motivation to go along with it.
What all of these successful silent protagonists have in common is that they're a). Explained in the fiction why they can't talk back to others. And b). All have clear, sympathetic motivations. Ammy is a wolf goddess more aware of what's at stake than she can let on to others. Zach is trying to aide York in solving a murder. And Subject Delta only exists to protect, so his fatherly instincts take over.
Silent protagonists can work wonders when the barrier between them and the game world is properly explained. Not being able to communicate is a scary, Kafka-esque nightmare but it only takes a keen understanding of the systems at work to turn said nightmare into a lucid dream.
[Jeffrey Matulef is a freelance writer for G4TV.com, blogs about games at JumpingMoustache.com and is a regular on the Big Red Potion podcast. You can contact him at jmatulef at gmail dot com.]
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Why? Because up to this point, everything you know about him is cultivated in your mind. Through all you've/he's been through, his facial expression at that moment in time, the scars he's endured, the years of stress - all play a key role in what he looks like.
Remember that Valve is extremely detailed about what their characters look like emotionally. Making a cookie-cutter Gordon only to be reflected would cheapen this ideology.
We make Gordon in our own image, so by looking into a mirror without a reflection we decide what we must see, no matter what's there physically.
This may be why the third person shooter has started to get more popular.
Personally, I didn't mind seeing Chell, though the less human robots in Portal 2's co-op look more suited for players to embody. Since they look like none of us, we can all identify equally.
And the silent thing bothered me less in Portal as GLaDOS' taunts didn't seem to warrant a response the way the supposedly 2-way conversation in Half-Life should have. I realize this may be splitting hairs for some, but that's how it struck me.
Nearly all videogame protagonists are silent when it’s not a cutscene. The actions you are able to take in game aren’t “say hello”, “kiss”, or “laugh”. It’s “grapple”, “shoot”, “punch”.
As expertly used the silent protagonists in this article are, the problem of expression might be that in 99% of games out there, your tools of interaction are limited to maiming (or in the BioShock2 example, choosing NOT to maim). I don’t think a silent protagonist makes that reality easier to swallow.
Talk about characterization through action: Gordon Freeman isn’t whatever that particular player does, because every player only has one method of communication: violence. If character is defined as habitual action, then Gordon Freeman is a sociopath no matter who plays him. The only problem is that he’s not supposed to be a sociopath, he’s supposed to be a messiah. That’s why Gordon Freeman as a silent protagonist fails, it characterizes him incorrectly.
I am the player, the protagonist, it is my agency in the game working with/against the game rules that causes the system make it's response to my actions.
But the moment there is a 'cut-scene', the moment that 'I' make a decision that is not my own, to follow some narrative point, it conflicts with my agency. It is not my decision.
That is not to say that narrative play is not possible, dialogue trees represent a good trade-off. But in games, such as Half-Life, in which your choices in the game have no influence on the narrative outcome at all, any speech you make would be meaningless, as it does not change the outcome of the game.
Freeman's silence represents the designers acknowledgment of the meaninglessness his voice.
:)
In addition, something worth noting is Portal 2's multiplayer - "go here" function. This is an interesting idea, as with other games you could extend this ideology to other verbs that could communicate to NPC's or real players. This is challenging though, because it would also need to be more than just an RTS. Your character could point, gesture etc. to get their point across.
A lack of voice isn't always a bad thing. In all situations, I think it's better to let the actions speak louder than the words.
That may be true for you, but it's certainly not true for me, as I already explained above. I don't know how games affect other people since I'm not them, but I know how they affect me, and for me a "silent protaganist" breaks immersion.
This works very well, but it does fall down slightly where there are other characters around, especially when they tell you what they think of you or tell you what your motivations are. This is why the first Half-Life is the best. When I played that game, I was *there*. The illusion was maintained by the fact that there were very few characters and they didn't claim to know you well. In Half-Life 2 there is a lot of sitting aroundn waiting for characters to finish their speeches about how awesome you are. Those bits were boring. In addition, I was being told about my motivations which I only half agreed with. In the original game my motivation was to escape and stay alive. No one needed to tell me that. The gameplay fused with the story much better.
In conclusion, for Half-Life in particular the solution to the "not talking back" problem is not for Gordon to talk but for less people to talk to him. And perhaps, set things up well once at the start of the game so that little talk is required later. The plot isn't important. It's the world.
I suspect the situation is similar for Link. It works better when he doesn't talk but with all the extraneous character interaction you are forced to go through with modern Zeldas, it seems absurd that he doesn't. The solution is to reduce the number of characters and cutscenes and get things back to Zelda basics. It is a series in decline and it should leave its current path and return to doing what made it popular in the first place. Check out Sean Malstrom's articles on Zelda for some interesting insight.
As for Okami, Issun talks too much. His dialogue could and should have been cut to 30% of what it was with zero loss to the game. Half the time I was skipping text before reading it so I could go on to explore the beautiful game world.
He have injected into gaming the need for (badly implement) realism, we have all of these realistic physic stuff and emotional expressions, vehicle collisions and weapons firing, that when something that's unrealistic (like a mute character in the presence of another human being, both of which are inside a life threatning event), that our minds just shut down while screaming "WTF".
For example GTA4, I cant point the game as fun because its always trying to be too damn realistic and then you leave a path of corpses behind you and no one comes after you just because you painted your car blue...
Non speaking characters are just another small tip of the fake realism iceberg... our minds just dont accept it very well...
Also, what the author seems to understand, but some commentators are missing, is that if characters were always better off silent then nobody would have showered Max Payne and Psychonauts with so much praise. There's great delight to be had playing out somebody else's story.
Now, about the article itself, for what I can understand the author says that characters should only be mute if he is actually unable to speak in the game mithos. I think that is unnecessarily literal... If the hero speaks with gestures and the other characters respond to those gestures like he had spoken, I can completelly fill the gap with my imagination. Without the gestures though, I would agree that the game designer is trying to stretch our imagination too far.
We don't need everything spelled out for us. Like with invisible walls: sometimes you just don't care what's behing them (well, not all of them, but that is another story).
Nice article by the way, it sparks some thought on the subject.
Sadly, I doubt we'll see a change in production or design quality or the death of silent characters for the sole fact that it's a comfortable point for any designer to be. Any player can pick up the game and just have fun with what it challenges him to do.
I believe that talking characters, with opinions and all, are a great way of actually making the player think. Hide the true character motivation and keep the game moving through sole player motivation and you could have a player who's only playing to try and understand the character, get to know him. Trying to crack the reason or the motivation why he's doing something.
Relatively open-world RPGs, for which exploration of both places and characters are a key feature, frequently seem to include a dialogue system through which the protagonist can express his or her nature. BioWare games are good examples of this; Deus Ex is another.
Immersive games on rails, however -- Valve games like Half-Life and Portal, and games like F.E.A.R. and Dead Space -- seem much more likely to go with a silent protagonist.
If you accept that linear games are about the developer creating a specific experience for the player to enjoy (like a book or a movie), while open-world RPGs are about letting the player create his own experience, then maybe going with a silent protagonist in linear games and dialogue systems in open-world RPGs makes sense.
At least either of those would be a conscious design choice to support and reinforce the core structural features of the game.