Trends That Should End #1: The Silent Protagonist

Old Man (NPC): So your the chosen one, eh? Don't look like much.
Golden Knight (The Player): ...
OM: And you need me give you my crystal of light so you can save us all from eternal torment.
GK: ...
OM: Well, before I do that, you need to go in this cave and kill 10 fire drakes and bring me their scales.
GK: ...
OM: You don't say much, do you?
GK: ...
OM: No matter. Come back to me when you get the scales, okay?
GK: ...

A variation of the conversation above could have taken place in any number of games with very little alteration. Old games, new games, it doesn't matter; the basic structure is the same regardless. More importantly though, the above conversation illustrates one of the things about video games that irritates me to no end. It's one of those things that needs to go the way of text adventures… something you won't find in ANY other narrative driven art form... the completely silent protagonist.

First off, I'm not talking about the protagonist that simply doesn't have a voice actor yet converses though text. I'm referring to the main character who doesn't interact with the world save for with his sword. I remember playing some games of the past (JRPGs on the 8 & 16-bit systems mostly), walking up to the townspeople, pressing A, and reading the one or two lines that NPC was programmed to tell me. Usually it was something about the situation in town I needed to fix or general flavor text designed to fill out the world. I would wonder to myself, what prompted that townsperson to say that to me? Did I walk up to him, grunt, and then stand there to listen how monsters killed his wife or did I just stand there silently until he spilled the beans just so I’d go away? These tactics almost never works for me in real life. Usually when I walk up to people and grunt, they just look at me funny and hasten away.

Of course, I understand why this tradition came to be. To a large extent video games are a type of wish fulfillment... a way for you the player to leap into the shoes of whatever hapless protagonist said game is featuring and experience the world first hand. For this reason, the protagonist often remains silent so we can better project ourselves into their role. Video games are often presented from the perspective of the main character (who is your "avatar" for experiencing the game world) and therefore may be the only story driven art form where it's perfectly alright to use the second person narrative. As everyone knows, aside from Choose-Your-Own-Adventures (which are a type of game themselves), this form of narrative is almost NEVER found in fictional.

So what's the problem? In short, it's holding back the development of video games as a legitimate story telling art form. As video games have progressed from quarter-eating, high-score based arcade games of the past, where the protagonist was silent and made up of little more than a few pixels (and the most well spoken of them was Q-Bert and all he did was swear), into 15,000 polygon models with mo-cap actors controlling their movements which we watch from the comfort of our couch, the ability for video games to convey meaningful and emotional content has deepened greatly. In my opinion, video games are already the most atmospheric was of experiences a fictional world ever conceived. When the protagonist doesn't actually respond when NPC's talk to him, the resulting conversation feels stilted and unnatural…which is a huge distraction. As a thought experiment, imagine a movie where the main character doesn't talk, yet everyone responds to them as if they did. Imagine “The Godfather” if Michael just walked around through the movie standing in front of people and then they’d just run off their lines. Stupid, isn’t it?

So why is it that in some of the most story driven games out there, we still have silent protagonists so much of the time? 90% of the time the silent protagonist technique is used now-a-days it takes away from the story and most of that remaining 10% where it actually does work are in games made by Nintendo (Mario wouldn't be improved with full voice acting). I don't have a problem stepping into a character that already has a personality. If anything, it helps me empathize because the main character feels like a real person. One of the primary reasons I play video games is to experience a life I can never lead. I want to see my dreams projected onto the TV screen in full 3D glory and guess what… I can't recall the last dream I had about being a mute.

With that said, I hereby proclaim the silent protagonist a "Trend That Should End" except for very few, very special situations.

List of a few recent offending games:
Fallout 3
Ghostbusters: The Video Game
Metroid
Dead Space
Fable I & II
Metro 2033
Saints Row
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Most FPSs