How To Write a Video Game With a Silent Protagonist
What are the pros and cons of silent protagonists and how do you write one?
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Video games and silent protagonists go hand-in-hand. While the earliest video game protagonists were silent due mostly to technological limitations, many games today still feature silent protagonists despite the advancements in technology and the accolades showered onto games that feature compelling and relatable voiced protagonists. So why do games still feature silent protagonists, and how exactly do you tell a story with a character who doesn’t speak or (sometimes) even emote?
What Is a Silent Protagonist?
A silent protagonist is a player character who doesn’t speak at all throughout the entire game. Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule and sometimes they’ll make the odd brief comment—usually more of a sound like Crash Bandicoot going “Woah!” after he gets hit with a big stick.
Why Silent Protagonists Are Bad for Stories
As both a writer and a gamer, silent protagonists can be infuriating. Here are a few of the key reasons why.
1) They Lack Depth
There are many very good reasons not to feature a silent protagonist in your game. For starters, they generally lack personalities, or at the very most, whatever personality they have is very one-note and archetypal. As a result, they lack a character arc (they do not grow and change as a person) because they lack character to begin with. Silent protagonists effectively wander through life as exciting and emotional things happen to them and they solve one problem after the next until they’re done.
2) They Bend Realism
Silent protagonists can also make scenes with other characters feel awkward and unnatural. How many times have you walked up to someone in real life—especially someone with really important information or someone experiencing a lot of emotions—and just stood there quietly staring at them? Probably never, and if you did, that person probably didn’t casually exposit a whole one-sided monolog detailing the emotional temperature of the current situation and what you need to do next to remedy it completely unprompted. That’s not how people work, yet in a game with a silent protagonist, it’s usually how every interaction goes.
3) They Break Immersion
In the worst cases, silent video game protagonists can actively hurt a story by failing to offer players a rationale for their actions. In a scenario where the silent protagonist is faced with two choices, even if the player has a say in what they do, the player doesn’t quite know what the protagonist is thinking and thus both choices risk clashing with the player’s existing presumptions of the protagonist’s motives.
Even in games where the protagonist is a blank slate meant to represent the player, there will inevitably be times when the limited choices available force the player to disconnect from their avatar. Think back to any moment you were presented with a handful of dialogue options in The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, or similar games and you thought to yourself “None of these are what I want to respond with.” Considering video games are a medium of immersion, the last thing you want to do is yank the player out of the experience at any time.
Why Silent Protagonists Are Great for Games
While silent protagonists are bad for stories, they’re actually great for games—even story-heavy games.
1) They Enhance Immersion
As I said, video games are a medium of immersion. Immersion happens when you feel like the events of the art you’re consuming are happening to you instead of to a character. While you can experience a great story and even get immersed in it through books, movies, theater, art, and everything else, video games combine all forms of art and allow you some level of freedom and control within them.
Simply put, it’s much easier for players to feel like they and the main character are one and the same when the player character doesn’t contradict them. Of course, dialog isn’t the only ingredient in immersion — there are a dozen reasons that Crash Bandicoot still feels like a character while Gordon Freeman of Half-Life feels like a vessel for the player — but it is a particularly potent ingredient nonetheless.
2) They Help Put the Gameplay Front and Center
While silent protagonists can help to immerse players in the story and world of the game, they can also help players ignore the story entirely and become immersed in the game itself. As a writer, I’ll never stop preaching how much stories can make even a relatively mundane game exciting, but I’m not blind to the fact that video games are, first and foremost, games.
Whether you’re uncertain of your storytelling abilities, working on an extremely limited budget, or just not interested in turning your protagonist into an interesting and meaningful character, creating a silent protagonist is a tried and true strategy to keep the focus of the game on the gameplay itself. After all, once your game is a hit you can always add a story and characters to the sequels like we did with the Cook Serve series.
3) They Allow You To Focus on More Interesting Stories
As a writer, one of my favorite things about both writing and playing as silent protagonists is that they don’t get in the way of the much more interesting parts of the story. You see, because protagonists are confined to certain expectations (such as being the center of the story and finding a way to get through it) and most writers learn how to write from the same formulaic resources, protagonists are often the least interesting characters in their own story.
Side characters, however, are not held to any expectations. They don’t need to be important to the story, they don’t need to have a character arc, and they don’t even need to make sense (though they should always be meaningful). When you write a story with a silent protagonist, the time you would have spent trying to make the protagonist interesting and memorable can instead be spent exploring more unconventional, unpredictable, and naturally more memorable stories and characters.
How To Write a Silent Protagonist
Whether or not your game should feature a silent character protagonist is ultimately up to your preferences, your goals, and your limitations. Those factors can also determine how you write your silent protagonist, but here are some general tips to consider during silent character development:
1) Lean On Supporting Characters
As I said above, one of the benefits of games with silent protagonists is that they allow supporting characters and their stories to shine. Since your protagonist likely doesn’t have much personality or a character arc, bring the personalities and character arcs of the supporting cast of characters into the spotlight. Use those characters to enhance the tone and themes of the game and try things that wouldn’t work with the protagonist.
2) Utilize Visual Storytelling
If you want to feature a silent protagonist but still give them some personality, do so through visual means such as facial expressions, body language, clothing, and their environment. If you don’t want them to have a personality, use visual storytelling techniques such as environmental storytelling to pull players’ attention into the world and lore instead so they forget there’s a protagonist entirely.
3) Embrace Ambiguity
When applying characteristics to a silent character, try not to overcompensate for their lack of a voice by spelling out everything about them through other means. Turn their silence into one of their greatest strengths. Allow room for different interpretations so that each player has a unique and personal experience with the character, and they become more relatable as a result.
What do you think? Did I miss anything great or terrible about silent protagonists? Leave a comment below!