Let’s face it, Master Chief has all the emotional range of a tin of paint. Whether hanging out on the bridge of a UNSC frigate or being sucked into the anus of an alien spaceship, he can be relied upon to deliver gruff, eye-rolling one-liners. Witnessing the slaughter of fellow soldiers, he breaks down and... briefly shakes his head, in the way one does about the lateness of buses, or teenagers who throw litter.
Main characters in first-person shooters are mostly cardboard cut-outs, generally given a lick of personality to move the story from A to B and get you bang-banging through the field of play as smoothly as possible. And Microsoft’s mighty Spartan is far from the only offender.
Take B.J. Blazkowicz. Unusually in the burgeoning FPS scene of the early 1990s, we saw his face all the time during Wolfenstein 3D, a neat graphic that demonstrated his physical state. Personality wise, he had twitchy, arching eyebrows that suggested a curiously wry nonchalance about metallic melting Hitlers. By 2009, the character had been fully fleshed out into a walking square-headed frown. BJ gives the impression of one puzzled and disturbed by the apparent phenomena of other living beings.
And Duke Nukem? The less said about him the better, a feeble 1990s piece of irony about 1980s action heroes, resurrected needlessly for a 21st century audience.
Look, the best shooters, like Halo, rely on NPCs such as Cortana to add a sense of drama to the stories. You could argue that the main characters exist merely to act as the gamer’s proxy, a spectator of events as they unfold, setting up the shooting action to follow.
This is especially evident because, in first-person, you are ostensibly more the character, rather than the one controlling the character. The less of them there is, the more of you is allowed to inhabit the shell of emptiness. It’s no accident that Master Chief is a face unseen, one who is both iconic and anonymous.
No-one represents this best than Gordon Freeman, the much-loved first-person player-character from Half-Life who is barely ever seen and never heard, and yet who seems to have a personality reflected back on him both by his situation and by other characters in the game world.
The non-accidental nature of these characters’ lack of substance is also seen through Call of Duty’s Soap MacTavish. Voiced by the excellent Scottish actor Kevin McKidd, he is nonetheless merely a means-to-an-end, generally given lines that suggest some action or urgency on the player’s part. Interviewed at the premiere of Modern Warfare 2, McKidd said one of the big challenges of voicing the character is that he is generally given the lines without any attending context of what is actually going on in the game. Hardly the stuff of Hamlet.
But as game-makers strive to find ways to create more believable worlds, all that is changing. Shooters like Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3 are turning to deeper characters to tell their stories. And fully-realized main characters are beginning to come into vogue.
Take Far Cry 3’s Jason Brody. He evolves not merely in terms of killing-power but also as someone who goes from being a regular guy to one who becomes a survivalist and finally who skirts with insanity, grappling with issues of identity and trust. His struggles are reflected in other characters in the game, most notably the insane villain Vaas and the exotic Citra.
Dan Hay, Far Cry 3’s producer, says bringing character to first-person shooters allows these games to become more fully realised stories, rather than aim-and-fire arcade galleries.
So how difficult is it to incorporate character development in games that are, essentially, all about killing people?
“It's tough," Hay says. "The subtlety of the performance, the believability of the performance, you have to do your homework. You have to make sure that this character isn't a clown or isn't a fake. If a character is off by a certain percentage, that percentage translates to the experience that you have.
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We want the player to have a great time playing it, but also, when they leave, the experience should haunt them.
"The goal is to bridge emotion in the player," he continues. "If you're just taking people out and you want to feel powerful, you can do that. But just like a piece of music, they can't all be notes. There's a value to the rest, and making sure that you can have a moment where you can appreciate what you just did while sharing it with a character in the game.”
Game development originated in a culture of science and technology, but today, artistic storytelling is becoming ever-more important. Hay says, “The teams that we have now include people who worked in the movie industry, marketing, script-writing, commercials. You end up with this pool of talent where it's just incumbent upon you to give them the tools necessary to be able to write that script and exact the characters that you want and capture that performance and get it on screen. It’s one measure to create something that is very interesting to play, and another measure for something to be very interesting to live. It's a fine line to make sure that you get that mixture right.”
Hay says that character-creation in games is still very much a work in progress and that there is a lot of “bumping around in the dark”. He adds, “It comes down to being in a room and asking yourself a question. ‘Does this work?’ ‘Does it feel a little cold?’ ‘How do we inject warmth into it, more humanity and emotion?’
“We want the player to have a great time playing it, but also, when they leave, the experience should haunt them. They're thinking about it, and it affects the world that they live in.”
Of course, the reason why character development has not been seen as a priority in shooters is that players have usually been happy without them. The original Quake, for example, has no main character in the sense of one with a personality, back-story, motive. It didn’t need one because the world and the action was enough.
But today, gaming addresses a broader audience than it did in the 1990s, and story is one way to give a game difference and appeal. Hay says, “Finding characters that are going to resonate and are going to draw people in is important, but so is finding characters that are not going to dilute the shooter experience. We want to make sure that we have a great story but at the same time offer a situation where if you just want to pull the trigger you can do that too.”
Borderlands 2, meanwhile, offers the player four different character classes to play. Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says drawing characters is one of the most fun aspects of making a game, one in which developers allow themselves to portray the world they live in through fantasy worlds like Borderlands' Pandora.
He explains, “It's a fun process. In some cases, we put ourselves and each other in the games. Maybe there is some stupid trait or some interesting quirky thing that this guy does. I'm going to steal that and put that in there.
“Whether we're talking about the physical design or the behavioral design or the attitude and personality of the character, when you have something real in your mind that you're drawing from, you can say, ‘What would this person do?’ And if I believe that then it'll feel natural and right.
“With Borderlands' characters, we kind of exaggerated. Contrast it with the characters we created for the Brothers in Arms series, which are super-believable, super-plausible kinds of people. The characters in Borderlands, they're believable, but they're not entirely plausible, because they're exaggerated. It's more like a sitcom kind of approach to character development. You take the personality trait that we've all known or seen in other people before, and then you exaggerate that, amplify that, and let that run away. It's a lot of fun.”
The ability to create shooting games in which players are mowing their way through enemies, while at the same time inhabiting a believable character, is not easy. But games like Far Cry 3 and Borderlands 2 are appealing to shooting fans who want more than merely target practice.
Colin Campbell is a British-born, Santa-Cruz based games journalist, working for IGN. You can contact him via Twitter or IGN.
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