How Fuzzy is Your Game Character?

I prefer creating video game protagonists that aren’t wholly defined, leaving room for the player to bring their own ideas to the character and having a sense of co-authorship. Of course it very much depends on the project — it’s a personal preference but doesn’t mean it’s the right answer for every game.

I’ve had questions about this over the years and wanted to put down my thinking on them — and use that as an excuse to do some more thinking.

I was struck by a comment a few months back from a writer relatively new to the industry, who said: “I hope the games industry has progressed enough over the years to not have to stick to blank slate characters, but to tell a proper story with a properly defined character.”

This, I think, is a fundamental misunderstanding of why some game characters are more loosely defined than others. To me, this isn’t about old-school vs. modern games writing (“these days we’re better at it!”). This is about what’s suitable for the game experience you’re trying to deliver for your specific game. And where you want to position the player, in relation to the character.

Whose story is it? The protagonist’s, or the player’s?

So let’s dive into it.

Caveat: I’m thinking here specifically about single-player games with a lead player-controlled protagonist, a story, and a world. These thoughts can absolutely be expanded to other genres, I’m sure.

Who is the player character?

I think a lot of narrative design pivots around answering the question: “Who is the player character and what is their role in the world?”

In answering that, how much input are going to let the player have?

And how do we get all this into the player’s head?

From clean slate to railroad

Let’s think about a line. At one end, the writers and designers don’t define the protagonist’s character at all — it’s entirely up to the player to fill in any blanks. At the other end, the character is completely defined and every beat of their behaviour is on rails because they’re so firmly determined that the player is given no freedom to dictate choices.

Examples:

• At the blank-slate end of the line are games like Minecraft and, not far away, Skyrim. Who is the protagonist, and what is their role in the world? Both are very much up to the player.
• Then, say, Fallout 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, where the character’s look, role in the world, name, and some basics are defined, but there’s plenty of scope for player definition as to what sort of character they are — both in skills and interactions. Mass Effect sits somewhere a bit further along.
• In The Witcher and Red Dead Redemption, the characters are much more firmly defined — down to their look and demeanour — but there’s still a lot of scope in how they treat people and the actions they take in the world.
• Then maybe Uncharted, or the later Tomb Raider games, or The Last of Us, where characters are very clearly defined and aren’t affected by the player’s choices. Yet the player still has some space to express themselves through their actions.
• Consider Dragon’s Lair. The player is simply watching interactive sequences with very little actual gameplay.

Setting your game’s approach

Say you have an idea for a game in mind with a central protagonist and their detailed background and history. Let’s look at some reasons you might have decided to solidly define aspects of this character:

1. The character’s definition supports the player fantasy.

You want players to feel they’re playing Indiana Jones, or D’Artagnan, or Sam Spade — or a character which feels very close to those templates. You want to take them away from their everyday life and make them feel empowered. So the space the character takes up in the game should reflect and support that fantasy, and their backstory should help create that character.

2. Story beats in the backstory support or dictate the shape of the game story.

If events in the character’s narrative past will affect your planned game story, you might need a character who has experienced certain things or holds particular opinions. So you want to communicate those to the player.

I’d be very wary of this — this is a classic case of “tell, don’t show.” Dictating to a player what their character experienced in the past and how they reacted risks them failing to connect with the emotions of the character.

For example: “You killed my father, prepare to die!” screams your character, but the player has never met the father or experienced the loss. It’s much better if the player can experience that moment through the character’s eyes, and could even fail to save their father — then they feel something when they finally meet their father’s killer.

The Last of Us does this brilliantly at the start, setting up Joel’s loss so that we understand him and, critically, feel alongside him for the rest of the game.

3. This is a story you personally want to tell about a particular character and their journey.

That’s fine, as long as you’re clear about why you’re doing it! But remember, this may distance the player from the character and limit their agency. Instead of embodying the character, the player might see themselves as an observer or companion. They may support the character and feel empathy or sympathy for them, but the emotions may not feel like they’re happening to the player directly. It’s someone else’s story.

Back to the bones

I find a useful exercise is to suppress your initial impulse to heavily define a protagonist’s character, and strip it back to the minimum with the following questions in mind:

• What features of this character directly support the player fantasy? How much definition is needed for the player to feel they are this type of character? The messy detective’s office and the 1930s decor, perhaps, but do they need to know they were once a longshoreman, owned a dog called Frederick, and their mother’s name was Martha? Do those details function as useful character-defining quirks, or are they distracting fluff or even worse do they act as limitations?
• What features of this character are required for the story to work? Are there key background facts that need to be true? Must they be an orphan? Must they be the last heir of the kingdom?
• What features of this character are required for the emotional beats to land? Must they have a best friend (who will either die or betray them later in your story)? Do they hate snakes?
• What elements of this character might disengage some of our audience and would be better left unspecified or flexible? Must you play them as a male character? Must they be a particular ethnicity? Must they talk with a terrible cockney accent, or can that be selected from a menu of terrible accents?
• What elements of this character have we added just because they seem fun or fit the picture in our heads? Are these actually helpful? Or are we being self-indulgent?

Once you’ve stripped it back, of course you can build it back up. I’m not saying the only way forward is a completely blank slate character! It’d be dull if we said nothing and had no quirks of decoration and texture.

However, I think it is important to understand the reasons for and implications of your choices, and to figure out how much the player needs to know to be able to enjoy the game. What do they need to know so that they understand the character they are playing enough to not be confused by the story? What do they need to know to make them feel like they are the protagonist, if that’s your aim?

What do you let the player contribute?

I don’t think explicitly asking for player choice is a necessity to help the player feel that the character is ‘them’. Sure, you can have character customisation, background choices, and pivotal story decisions. But I think you can get a lot by deliberately underspecifying, simply leaving gaps for the player to bring their own ideas or preconceptions. For me, leaving gaps allows players to feel a greater sense of ownership and can give the story more space to flex. (I’m a big fan of gaps.)

Suffering from the Great Exposition

If you have a strongly defined character that you want your player to grasp as they play so they know their own role in the world, how do you communicate it? How do you answer their questions – what type of person am I? How did I get here? What is my role? Do I have to read three pages of prologue before I start?

How do you communicate key character elements to the player? Say you’ve decided that they must have a best friend (who will later betray them and/or die). You could let them meet a character with a neat little “As you know, Dave, we’re best friends” tag. But isn’t it better for them to spend some time with that character doing best-friendy-type interactions, earning that tag? That way you’ll earn your emotional pay-offs. Let them learn who they are through play.

A good way to show the player who their character is through relationships and reactions. Do the other characters see them as a hero? A villain? A friend? A saviour? A nuisance? These reactions fill in the gaps without endless exposition and you can do them well through dialogue.

You can also always use environmental storytelling. What’s your character’s apartment like? Is it tidy? Or is it covered in pizza boxes and discarded clothes? Be intentional about this and make sure that the environment are team are briefed about the character features you want to communicate.

Remember that tropes and clichés can be useful shortcuts. The lone gunman in the Wild West. The gumshoe detective. The knight in shining armour. Broadly, players have a good handle on these archetypes so less detail is needed — you can then pivot from and adjust the archetypes. I wrote about this over here.

The distance to the character

How closely do you want the player to align with the character? (I wrote about this recently.)

• Is it the player’s story — they are the main character?
• Does the player take the reins sometimes, but let the character make the decisions?
• Is the player a close companion, like an adviser in a point-and-click game?
• Is the player just the audience, with no agency?

There is always give and take here between immersion and empathy.

Sometimes it’s easier to feel an emotion by seeing it on someone else’s face — your protagonist feels something, so you feel something. (Indy hates snakes!) Empathy is what fuels movies.

Equally if you are suitably immersed in a character to the point where you feel you are them — looking through their eyes, making all their decisions, experiencing the world as them — then it can be a very effective way to make you feel emotions directly. (cf. larp)

My preference is to align the player as closely as possible to the character, because if you can affect the player directly it feels like a stronger effect. And I find aligning player and character is easier if the player feels that they have some co-authorship of the character rather than it being a fully-fleshed-out character they are borrowing. But then I’m from an immersive/larp/ttrpg background, so YMMV.

The usual disclaimers

Thinking about these concepts early in design can save headaches later, as they affect so much of the game’s design and storytelling. Every game and every story is different, and what works well for one may not work for another.

As a creative or narrative lead, I think it’s always good to have an answer about how defined your player character is, why you’ve chosen that level of definition, and where it offers opportunities and challenges. And then, of course, communicating it to the rest of the team is critical. I’ve seen too many projects lurch forward without explicitly addressing these ideas.

You can always adjust the answer later if things don’t work out. Starting with something is always better than starting with nothing.

For what it’s worth, I haven’t always been happy with my own work in defining characters and finding the right boundary. It’s always a learning process!