The Tale of Mutie McMuterson

Have a think about your favourite player characters, or PCs, of the last five years. That’s characters that you play as. I’ll bet that at least one of them is a mute. Am I right? Of course I am.

Yup, it seems that the mute character has become more and more popular over the last few years in gaming. You’ve got Chell from Portal (I swear I’ll stop going on about Portal soon), Jack from Bioshock, Gordon Freeman from Half Life, whatever the hell your character is called in Fallout 3, and about a million others. You know the type. They typically crop up in FPSs, dumbly running, jumping and shooting as you tell them to, never questioning why they’ve been plopped into a world that more often than not wants them dead. How has this become popular?



Maybe it’s just the rosy tinge of nostalgia, but I don’t think it used to be like this. Remember the strong characters we used to get? Lara Croft, Solid Snake, Sam and Max? There’s hundreds more that I can’t list because otherwise we’ll be here all day. Can you really imagine Lara dropping in on an ancient temple populated by unspeakable horrors and not having anything to say about it? Hell no! I’m sure she’d voice her displeasure at their ill manners before blowing them away.



And you have your mascot characters. Mario, Sonic, Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, you know the type. They couldn’t keep their mouths shut for more than five minutes (apart from Mario, admittedly) but we don’t see their ilk anymore. Some would argue that we have their spiritual successors in characters like Ratchet and Clank, but the days of the true console mascot are long gone.

So are we to assume that gamers have simply grown up and have shed the bombastic characters of the 80’s and 90’s and now want subtler heroes? Yes and no. While Mario and Sonic are still around, they get considerably less ‘screen time’ now. We still have our strong, third person characters in those like Kratos from God of War, or Nathan Drake from Uncharted, but now we have the silent protagonists multiplying like fat kids at an ice cream van.

The silent protagonists bug me, though (like you haven’t already figured that out). I can see why they’ve become popular, don’t get me wrong. A silent character doesn’t need a voice actor, so you instantly save money that way, and possibly more importantly the player can basically imprint themselves onto them. That way, they really become part of the action and the immersiveness levels go through the roof. Hypothetically, anyway.

(I’m not really sure if ‘immerseiveness’ is a word. Spellcheck says no, but it stays.)

My specific problem is that I don’t want to ‘be’ the character I’m playing; I want to hear their story. Why are they here, why are they doing what they’re doing? Like I mentioned earlier, they do as they’re told with no comment or protest at all. Ok, some games explain that problem away, such as Bioshock’s ‘Would you kindly’ phrase, but it just seems a bit cheap to me.



In fact, let’s look at Jack in Bioshock a bit more closely. At the start of the game, he’s survived a plane crash, been plunged into the sea, has swum out to a mysterious lighthouse, and has taken a bathysphere down to a previously unknown underwater city. At this point I’d presume he’s in shock, but even so, at no point does he utter anything like, ‘What the f*** IS THIS?’ You know, like any other human being would have done?

Maybe this is just me being overly picky, but that really gets me. It seems rather insulting that some game developers think that we can’t get involved with our PC if they have a voice and personality of their own. Come on, we’re intelligent adults! We can handle it! Don’t change them all though. Portal would go a bit wrong if Chell started telling GLaDOS where she could stick her cake.