Do I Get a Say?

When a video game company makes their new Action or RPG game, they must at some point make a vital decision: Who will the main character be and will they be a character of the designers construction or the players?


The decision needs to be based on how much emotional investment you want from the player. Video games as a form of art is becoming more and more popular and for that to happen, you need to silicate emotions from your players.

I remember playing Dead Space (Xbox 360) a while back and while the game was fun enough, it never drew me in. The reason for this was very obvious (but two fold): The main character never uttered a single line. The only time he made a sound was when he was choking (the voice acting on that was very well done). There were other characters in the game which spoke to you but you never responded to them. You even had a girlfriend aboard this space station of horror and never spoke any fond words to her (Ripley when back for her damn cat, in Alien...and you don't even have one kind word to say to your girlfriend...damn that's cold).

This for me was a killer. While the gameplay was fun, I could not at all get invested in my character and because I was never invested, it was hard to get the emotional response which the game was trying to looking, in this case fear. My character had zero personality and (the other prong of the two fold problem) did not reaction in any way to his environment (other than breathing heavy during the outdoor space scenes and low oxygen moments). But giant monsters leap down at him and…he reacts not at all.

When your character has no reactions and no voice, it is downright near impossible for me, as a player, to invest any emotion into them. Dead Space was pretty, fun and had some cheap scares. And that’s it.

But then we come to the conflict: Dragon Age vs. Heavy Rain (the former of which I’ve finished, the later of which I’m only ½ through).

Dragon Age does not feature a full voice actor for your main character but it does feature a character creation system. Heavy Rain has 1 main character and 3 other (almost equally important) characters that you play.

Near the end of Dragon Age, though, I couldn’t help but feel a little distanced from my character. Here I was, in an otherwise intense scene with the ‘main’ bad guy and the dickwad who killed my parents and while my text options can imply that I can be emotional here, my character does not actually deliver these (or any) lines in the game. There is no emotional outpouring from my character, yet the characters around me have the emotion and the voice acting to go along with it. This scene really frustrated me because when the camera was on my character, she was stoic and blank faced (pretty much like she had been throughout the game). My enemies could sneer, scoff and yell at me, but I could not react, except with harsh text options.

Now playing through Heavy Rain, with pre-set characters, it would take a very hardened player not to become emotionally invested with the main character. He is well voice acted but also as importantly, the characters ‘acts’. When he goes through pain, whether physical or emotional, he really reacts to it. I feel very sorry for him and the awful situations he is put through. Half way through the game and he’s been put through physical hell and I can really feel it. The actor gets the emotion across.

So, in my books, Heavy Rain succeeds at drawing me in, far more than Dead Space and somewhat more than Dragon Age.

The reason I’m torn is because Dragon Age did create a level of emotional investment, but it wasn’t as strong as it has been during Heavy Rain. In Dragon Age, all the emotion needs to come from two places: The NPC’s (who are free to emote and are voice acted) and the player’s own mind. Without a actor/voice actor for your character, you the player are supposed to ‘edit’ in your own emotional content and your text selection is provided as an outlet, to display that in game.

There was some emotional investment that I felt near the end of the game. There are some great scenes with your companions give you a stiff upper lip scene about how you’re probably all going to die but maybe you’ll survive this. That scene was very touching as was the end scene that I choose. However all this emotion was again, portrayed exclusively by the NPC’s. The character I played in that game was wooden and for that, I could pretty much care less about her. The NPC’s lives meant more to me at the end than my ‘main’ character.

After playing Heavy Rain, there is something immensely different about playing a stoic, voiceless character choosing a text option and a playing a person actually crying over trying to find his son.

Also, Heavy Rain has been one of the first games that actually rattled me, the player, during a scene. The scene was one where an ally was in danger and I had a gun in my hand. First, they do a fantastic job of realizing when the character is nervous and as such, all your options become jittery and hard to quickly process and read. So clearly in this situation all my options were very jittery. Second, the scene does not pause at all. The bad guy here was yelling and freaking out and my ally was asking me for help. So, I as the player, being drawn into this well acted scene, was just as nerve wracked as my character was. With all the jittery text floating around his head, I saw only one thing that didn’t fit: R1 (the others were literally text like Negotiate or Calm, or something). But I focused on the simplest text I could see: R1. Hmmm, what does that do…

BLAM!!! Holy fuck, did I just shoot that NPC in the head?!? Yes…yes I did. R1 must have meant: to shoot. All the other options were to try to talk him down, but the scene was frantic and I, as the player, was drawn entirely into the scene and oh my god, I just shot the guy.

And that’s when I knew that Heavy Rain was art. People will critic the gameplay (which is really just a series of quicktime events, which I happen to love and other’s happen to hate) and the short playtime (it’s probably only 10 hours long) but I’ve never, ever been drawn into a game where I feel the emotional roller coaster of these people’s lives. I felt earnestly bad about giving into the frantic scene and shooting that guy but how glorious it all was that it managed to pull me in so completely. (What’s worse is that the guy I killed, while a bit loco is pretty much innocent).

I think, however, that this will come down to a potato potatoe debate. Some players probably feel a disconnect when they are ‘forced’ to play a pre constructed character and many will prefer to have a voiceless character in the Bioware style games because any voice acting just wouldn’t be their voice. (Let’s not ignore the fact that you would have to hire at several voice actors to deliver the same lines, at least 1 male and 1 female and if you didn’t have one for your human, dwarf and your elf, the nerd rage would be overwhelming. So that’s a minimum of 6 more voice actors and you would still have some nerd be annoyed because they didn’t like the particular voice actor).

But I’ve come to realize, for me, I cannot be invested in a character that I play unless they have their own voice and are free to emote. I don’t need to play Trent the Barbarian if Trent has no personality in the game. I am much more eager to play Ethan Mars, the guy who has the shittiest life in the world of Heavy Rain and when in pain, cries out to be heard.