Role-playing games and the fundamental problem of sympathetic characters
I recently picked up Fallout 3 in the Steam Christmas sale after ignoring it for over three years. I don’t have any particular aversion to complicated role playing games, but to be sure they take a considerably larger effort than a 10-hour narrative.
They require a different headspace altogether. That doesn’t bother me, but I have tried to avoid them in the past – because despite all the talk regarding how these games provide us with a rich tapestry of character, I find them to be the most bleak and disconnected narrative experiences a game can provide.
Consider the beginning of Fallout 3. After being shown a picture of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, you actually experience birth. A small light slowly grows to encapsulate the screen, and suddenly, you’ve arrived.
The scene is quite startling. You look up at your father, voiced by Liam Neeson, who coos and praises how good looking you are. It’s a nice moment, watching the new father become wrapped up in the miracle of life. Just as a real infant is in its first moments of life, you’re completely helpless.
That is, until you’re prompted to choose your gender, and how you’re going to look when “you’re all grown up”. This isn’t such a big deal, every RPG does this. But something about Fallout 3 strikes me as wanting to be different from the pack.
I could have chosen any RPG here. Demon’s Souls, Dragon Age, Skyrim, anything that uses a face and character creator. But clearly, Fallout 3 creates a specific attempt to connect you to your character more than any other game of its type by actually having you experience your birth, childhood and adolescence.
By all accounts you should connect to this character the most, after having experienced literally everything they have as well. But you don’t. Walking through Fallout 3’s wasteland, I’m more struck by the sense of loneliness and despair than I am any type of grief when I’m killed by a fellow raider.
Why? What is it that whenever my character is killed or damaged, I have absolutely no concern for his wellbeing?
It’s because the character building aspects of role-playing games are fundamentally broken and prevent sympathy from the player.
Consider what I’ve done with the character so far. I’ve created a façade for him, which is nothing more than an appearance. The fundamental nature of the role playing game is that you create a personality through your reactions to other NPCs, but even then, sympathy is hard to come by.
The character here is nothing but an avatar. When I respond to the Megaton sheriff asking me whether I can diffuse the bomb in the middle of tomb, I’m not responding whether my character can do it. No, instead, I’m wondering whether I, Patrick Stafford, can do it.
I explored this in my piece for Hyper Magazine last September about whether the decisions we make in games reflect something about our personality. Research I cited in that story suggests the decisions we make in RPGs are in fact a reflection of what we might do in that sort of situation, or are at least representative of how we feel about the decision at hand.
(There’s also a piece on the Psychology of Games blog here that explores this in a little further detail. I’d post my Hyper piece, but unfortunately, it’s in print!)
Part of the problem here is that I never see my character’s face. Whereas in games such as Mass Effect each conversation plays out by having a fully-voiced protagonist interact with NPCs based on dialogue decisions you’ve picked out, here, there is no audio.
You click a response based on what you want to say. Sure, you might argue that it’s your character who is making the response, and that you’re completing a “good” run or a “bad” run, but there is absolutely nothing about the character that dictates this. It’s purely the player’s decision to follow a certain path.
Perhaps we don’t play RPGs for rich characterisation. That’s fine. It’s been that way for years. But it can be done. Notwithstanding Mass Effect’s shortcomings, it places the player inside the middle of the action but without the abandonment Fallout 3 uses to create immersion.
Instead, we see your own face, reflect on the tone in your voice and become more of a puppet master than an avatar for your decisions. You’re here controlling the action in every conversation, but you’re not necessarily a part of it.
Or consider Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its own conversation battles. From the first person perspective, Jensen talks down criminals and head honchos using a variety of narrative options, fully voiced, making you feel more of a part of the action.
Both of these games provided me with fewer choices than Fallout 3 and yet I felt more attached to these characters than my own little vault dweller.
The lack of audio responses in games such as Fallout 3, Dragon Age and older RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate may be part of the avatar experience, but they also are a critical roadblock in the attempt to make characters more sympathetic.
Could it be the use of first-person perspective? Perhaps. But as I just pointed out, Deus Ex uses the same perspective for its conversation battles and yet you still feel a part of the action. It’s more likely to do with the fact that in Fallout 3, you never see your own face.
Yes, of course, there are moments where you catch a glimpse while in third-person. But for the majority of the action, the default-view is having you look through the characters’ eyes.
Even Dragon Age showed your character creepily standing by silently during text-driven conversations. Here, you’re not so much a part of the action as you are the direct conduit, and as a result, the use of facial-design features are pretty much nothing more than a distraction.
Is that a problem? Probably not. But we ought to acknowledge the limits of the genre and work around them in other ways.
The other end of the spectrum would suggest present characters in an Uncharted-like scripted format, but it’s not even necessary to change at all. When I say the use of these character building tools are fundamentally broken, they are, but only in the sense that they are broken when wasted. Maybe the only thing we need to add a little bit of sympathy is a face in a mirror.
For all the talk we do about how these games provide us with the opportunity to create any type of character we want, we ought to acknowledge more often how this system falls short of its potential, creates some of the least interesting characters and as a result, presents a fundamental barrier to inhabiting a digital body.
Note: This blog post was prompted by Critical Distance’s “Blogs of the Round Table” project on the subject of “being other”. You should go here and read the rest of the entries, they’re all great.
Second note: After being posted on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, this post has received a fair bit of attention. I’ve written a reply here.
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Categorised as: Action | Adventure | Console Gaming | FPS | Opinion | RPG | Single Player | Third-Person
I think your real problem with identifying characters comes not from being unable to see a face, but being unable to hear a voice. It seemed like you were more peeved at the mute characters, and I think there’s something to that. At least with other silent protagonists you’re given a name and some semblance of a character, but in Fallout 3 it seems like you are just the Vault Dweller and a totally blank slate. It’s hard to connect with an avatar when the only method of characterizing them is through unvoiced conversations. The game wants you to care, but that illusion is too thin and the player can see right through it. We don’t relate to the Vault Dweller as a person or as a character because we perceive them as just a replacement for ourselves playing a game. In those other games we have an actual character with a voice and a face to care about.
Great point. However, it’s funny that even in games with mute protagonists we still identify with them as characters. For instance, the Half Life series. Gamers feel a connection to Gordon Freeman even though we’re never shown his face in the game (if I recall correctly) and never hear his voice. However, in that game in particular, your persona is thrust upon you by the other characters. They all call you Gordon, Mr Freeman, etc.
[...] RPGs and the problem of sympathetic characters. On Fallout 3′s character creation process: “By all accounts you should connect to this character the most, after having experienced literally everything they have as well. But you don’t. Walking through Fallout 3’s wasteland, I’m more struck by the sense of loneliness and despair than I am any type of grief when I’m killed by a fellow raider. Why? What is it that whenever my character is killed or damaged, I have absolutely no concern for his wellbeing? It’s because the character building aspects of role-playing games are fundamentally broken and prevent sympathy from the player.” [...]
Personally I think that the traditional concept of RPG clashes with the concept of story-telling: while the former emphazises choice and conseguences, the latter is more hierarchical and it excepts a narrator to choose some kind of story, which is player-indipendent to some degree.
If we take into consideration RPGs (in the modern sense), we can see 2 types of characters: the blank state character (like the Courier of Fallout: New Vegas), which is simply an extention of the player, some sort of “link” between the player and the enviroment (he exist merely to provide a virtual projection of the player) and the full character, like Shepard (Mass Effect), Jensen (Human Revolution) or Hawke (Dragon Age 2). This characters do have a personality on their own, and they do have a place in the narrative which is player-indipendent: yes, we can decide to play Shepard like a total douche, but in the end the plot still expects him to be the hero of the Galaxy, in this case, the story takes over the RPG and limits the choice possibilities of the player. Fallout 3′s Lone Wanderer stands in between this types, providing some sort of stiff narrative (the main quest is character-defined, not player-defined), while giving an open-world with enviroment-affecting moral choices.
At the end of the day, it comes down to personal taste: do you want to play an RPG or a more story-driven open world game ? In the first case you choose to disregard story as much as possible, while living YOUR adventure, in the second case you want a story with enough choices to seam “original”
Your main point here is “Separating a player from their avatar makes them empathise more with that avatar.” That’s a bold point, and I’d be interested in hearing someone argue it. Instead, though, you take it as an obvious intrinsic truth and spend the article going through examples of games that don’t agree. It’s a waste.
“The lack of audio responses in games such as Fallout 3, Dragon Age and older RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate may be part of the avatar experience, but they also are a critical roadblock in the attempt to make characters more sympathetic.”
You cant be serious, going there, can you ? Good storytelling, from your words, equals to voice acting. Huh. I’m guessing you dont own any books, are you ?
Although your intentions are pretty much good ones, your “arguments” are not arguments for all of us. Some of us actually prefer the lack of voice of our “avatars” and even the lack of third-person cameras. Although the ME games are good ones and DXHR is damn superb, I would prefer not to be Adam Jensen or -whatever-Shepard. I would like the game to cut as much as possible from the distance between me and my avatar and that includes the need for voiced characters or showing him from a third-person perspective. Yes, in-game mirrors would be nice, so I can see “myself”, but I don’t want to be Shepard or anyone else. I want to know as much as possible that NPCs talk to me – straight to my point of view in the game – and don’t go on and on about how Shepard or whoever saved this and that. For me, that actually creates a big distance between myself and my avatar, actually transforming him into another character.
Honestly, I am a bit bored with the fact that so many people consider that the lack of voice actually detracts from RPG immersion, when some of us don’t want to babysit or hear Shepard or Hawke etc.
Interesting post. I hadn’t thought about it to this extent, but as you chose Deus Ex: HR as an example I realized that it’s one of the few games where I’ve actually “cared” about the characters in the game. Same goes for Mass Effect and Dragon Age (But with DA not as much as the other two)
But as far as role-playing goes, I’ve been role-playing a lot more in Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Oblivion, etc. than I was in Deus Ex: HR or Mass Effect. Sure, I enjoyed the characters and the story more in ME and DXHR, but not because of role-playing, but because of the characters written into the game.
With that, I think Fallout 3 is a lot more of a role-playing game, because the gamer actually needs to play the role and it’s not spoon-fed to you like it is in say, DA, ME or DXHR.
Or to put it other way, in other games you take a role of a character and the character truly is what you make it to be. Then if you don’t “feel it” for the character you are and you created, maybe it’s your “fault”.
In the end all this doesn’t matter for most gamers, as the “role-playing” is just making the correct choices to get in bed with Liara or to see that mushroom cloud over Megaton, or whatever the result is to “win”
I really dont see the problem here. When I play an rpg, to me my character is really nothing more than a representation of me in the game. That is what games are all about imo.
In books and films you’re detached from the action and merely spectating. In games on the other hand you’re participating, and to me my character is basically nothing more than a suit that I put on to be able to participate. I dont feel any need to connect to the character I’m playing as any more than I feel a need to connect with myself, because when I play a game I think of the playable character as an extension of myself rather than a seperate entity. The place where charactarisation is important is with the supporting cast, like your crew in ME. TES games have got it right. They simply supply you with an empty shell that you can experience the world through, because that is basically all you need in my oppinion.
I wish you’d expanded on this topic, because it’s an interesting one and a salient criticism. You defend your thesis by bringing up the inherent flaws of a character creation system, but never build on that criticism. I think there’s a lot to be said of stat-heavy RPGs that lean too much on custom characters, and whether or not such a system gets in the way of immersion and sympathy, and how the nature of “sympathizing” with a video game character may be different from sympathizing with a character in a non-interactive medium such as film or literature.
You went on a tangent about the absence of voiced characters and the strength of Deus Ex HR’s protagonist, which are points well-taken but distracting from your main thesis. There are lots of games without a voiced protagonist that elicit a strong sense of sympathy, as you noted in your followup comment. Planescape Torment comes to mind as well. There are lots of games in which you never see your character’s face, all of which require a strong sense of sympathy. I don’t think, for example, Amnesia would work as a horror game if you didn’t powerfully connect with your avatar on some emotional level, even if that emotion is horror and desperation.
There’s also the greater question of the value of sympathizing with your character. Different games may require different degrees of sympathy. Mass Effect is a very character driven game. I need to “connect” more closely with my Shepard in order to fully experience the story. But this connection is not so necessary in games like Fallout 3 or Skyrim, which are games that are less about the character and more about the world.
Fallout 3 is a bleak world, and that sense of “loneliness and despair” you feel may be the intended narrative of the game-world, one which overrides a more abstract, nebulous desire to feel like your character.
I think you raise some very strong points, but I don’t think it’s enough to just question whether or not certain design elements of an RPG get in the way of immersion/sympathy (partly because sympathy is so subjective a concept). Different RPGs require different levels of protagonist sympathy, and there are many ways to immerse oneself in a game, not always through the protagonist.
I don’t know. I’m not sure that you don’t feel concern for the wellbeing of the character because of that character being an avatar. I think you don’t feel concern for the wellbeing of the character because it’s a video game with action sequences in it, and being able to just try again is part of that. Do you feel concern for the wellbeing of Mario? I mean, I don’t, so much, but I didn’t create him or use him as a sockpuppet for my viewpoints. In Skyrim, I might go “oo, poor kitty” if my character’s death was particularly gruesome and involved a lot of bouncing, but since it happens all the time I’m mostly annoyed at having to reload from my last save.
Whether or not I try to roleplay in a CRPG depends a lot on the character creator, it’s true. My Commander Shepard has a personality that I think is distinct to her, not just a sockpuppet for me. Part of that may have to do with her lines being voiced. I think part of it also has to do with getting to choose not just my character’s appearance, but elements of her back story, which you can do in Mass Effect and also Dragon Age. It made me a bit more attached to the character-as-character and separate from myself to be able to choose those elements.
But I don’t think that whether or not I care about dying or losing a mission should be tied to that. I only care about the choices that “stick,” and dying isn’t one of them.
First of all, I want to thank everyone for these comments. I really appreciate your thoughts.
Because I can’t reply to everyone individually, I was thinking about writing a follow-up piece that would address the criticisms some have pointed out. I’d be able to go into a little more depth.
Before I do that, however, I just want to point out that this post was not written as an in-depth analysis. It was written to take part on Critical Distance’s “blogs of the round table” feature. Had I known it was going to be linked to on RPS, perhaps I would have spent a little more time tailoring it to that particular audience.
However, I think a second, more expansive post may provide some more insight.
I would suggest that it’s a mistake to connect Dragon Age and the various Bethesda-style RPG’s. Despite the lack of protagonist voice-acting, I always felt like there was a character I was role-playing as in Dragon Age, largely because of the extensive dialogue options and ability to develop relationships with the supporting cast. The trouble with Fallout 3 et al is that there are no conversations; the only responses tend to be “yes I will help you” and “no I will not help you.” There’s no sense of being a person with a personality – angry, melancholy, cheerful, or anything. And sure, voice acting can provide this (as it does in Mass Effect), but the fundamental question is whether the game provides the character with the ability to express themselves.
*The point about face editing is, I think, mostly a distraction – cf. Mass Effect.
[...] RPG and the fundamental problem of sympathetic characters games rpg [...]
Hearing the player’s voice may be a requirement for some, but for some others like myself it may be a distraction. I like leaving that to my imagination as I build the character, and my mind gives the character its voice. I have always associated more sympathy towards the followers/companion characters than with my own character and I find this true to real life – most people tend to care less about themselves when it comes to getting a task done. We don’t drink cups and more cups of coffee and stay up all nights to finish reports even with full knowledge of the deleterious effects on us, I see the same trait when I see my character where I chose to get what I set out to do done even if it means I take some damage. I would of course try to do it in a way which is least harmful to my character but the job at hand would get priority. My companions – should they be wanted by me and not thrust upon me will get my care and sympathy too as in real life. I think not having to hear my players voice saves me from the trouble of being potentially disappointed with my character’s voice. Not to mention most people I know in the real world hate listening to their own recorded voices, why should my video game character have to suffer the torment of hearing his own voice.
Others have already made comments similar to this, but here’s my two cents anyway. Empathy with a character, whether in a novel, traditional rpg, or fps, requires imaginative work on the part of the reader/player. Part of your problem seems to be that player character responses in rpgs like Fallout are “scripted,” but they are as well in novels, and readers have been able to connect with characters in novels from time immemorial. In fact, rpgs are more interactive in that regard: you may be able to choose from a menu of responses, rather than the one a character gives in a novel. You just need to work with “limitations of the genre” more carefully; you need to get in the game, just like you need to get into any game for it to work. That you are not able to with the likes of Fallout or Skyrim may be more your problem than the game’s problem. And, by the way, anyone who has played the Bethesda games (Fallout, Oblivion, Skyrim, etc.) to any extent knows that you can play the ENTIRE GAME in third person if you want to; yes, first-person is the default, but you can simply press the “F” key and you are in third person for as long as you want to be, and you can spatially maneuver your distance from the player character, see close-ups of its/your face, etc. But again, this requires a certain effort on your part: the game doesn’t automatically do it for you.
I think we’re all overthinking this.
Why do you care when you see other characters in games get hurt, die, etc.? Because you almost always see the followup. You see the other characters’ reactions, you actually feel and sense the loss of a character.
Now, when YOU die, you simply hit F9 and all is well again. There is no sense of loss when your character dies because you CANNOT die. You dying impacts the narrative so severely that the narrative can’t continue.
Hey everyone. Thanks for all your comments. I’ve written a longer response here: http://problemwithstory.com/2012/02/sympathetic-characters-a-response/
Hopefully this addresses some of the criticism.
[...] Role-playing games and the fundamental problem of sympathetic characters [...]