SILENCE IS GORDON

Why does the mute protagonist still loom large over the landscape of firstperson-viewed games?

- JEREMY PEEL

The strong but silent type – burly enough to carry a suite of armaments without fatigue, yet not so talkative as to impose an unwanted personality on the player, nor to trouble a nascent sound card with quips and monologues – has been a fixture of the FPS genre since its inception. As technology and storytelling techniques have developed, normalising performance capture and the presence of actors in our action games, that status quo has been challenged numerous times. Yet, unlike other artefacts from the ’90s, the mute archetype has never quite gone away.

Their persistence raises fundamental questions. What is a firstperson avatar for? Is it about beaming a player into a fantastical land as themselves, to imagine how they might deal with their discombobulation and growing power? Or is it an act of roleplay, in which you holiday in the body of a fixed character with their own whims and motivations? (Even if they choose not to voice them.)

Before arriving at Valve, Erik Wolpaw had written with Tim Schafer on Psychonauts, the charming 3D platformer with the conversational bent of a point-andclick adventure. Its protagonist, Raz, was an enthusiastic kid away at summer camp to meet his heroes, the titular telekinetic secret agents. He didn’t merely speak – Raz was positively chatty.

“The first thing Tim showed me in terms of the writing for the game was a fake MySpace website he had created, that had all the campers and messages between them,” Wolpaw tells us. “So those relationships were really important. They were a lot easier to delve into if the protagonist was talking. And for whatever reason, it seems like thirdperson characters talk more often.”