“Call me Ishmael” Or: How I Learned To Love A Silent Protagonist and Hate Chris Redfield

          If you don’t recognize the quote “Call me Ishmael”, then chances are you haven’t ever read Moby Dick or just forgot about it. Either is completely possible.

The thing that is important, though, is how the character of Ishmael is set up right there from the very beginning. When creating a character, I don’t think that you have to establish EVERY LITTLE CELL ON THEIR BODY right away. You don’t have to give their entire back story or reveal major character points at the beginning. In fact, I think that it would be wisest to save some of those things for a Shyamalan-like¹ twist further into the game.

Need I say more? 

                You may not think that characters are all that important. I’ve seen people say that you shouldn’t really care about a character from a video game simply for the reason that they aren’t real. If that’s your viewpoint, then I would like to forcibly point out how you ARE WRONG. Even if something isn’t real, you can still have a very palpable sense of emotion connected to them.

If you feel that you shouldn’t care about something because it’s real, then have you never read a book whose characters really tugged at your heartstrings? The Kite Runner is probably one of those books that will leave you crying on the inside and outside. Have you never become enthralled by a character on a TV show? And have you never cared about what happens to them? I absolutely love the show “Monk”. I think that the character of Adrian Monk is incredibly well-defined. You care about him throughout the entire series, and when it ends I felt quite a bit of satisfaction.

Video game characters fall on the same line. You can’t ever really play a game without knowing WHY you are playing it. Even in Super Mario Bros for the NES, you knew that you had to rescue the princess from a castle. In fact, I would argue that certain video game characters go the extra step from movies or books, because YOU, the player, get to determine what the character does.

This goes much further than just getting to jump on some bad guy’s head, or just choosing to jump over him. In the Mass Effect series, the creators of the game did a brilliant job in making it so that YOUR actions as Commander Shepard had a very real effect on the other characters. You could make choices that killed off characters. You could go on missions where side-characters were shown in a different light from what you had known. In fact, in the second Mass Effect game, if you did NOT get to know your crew well enough, and talk to them enough, then it was likely that many of them would die at the end.

Yes, the fate of the galaxy is up to him...

Then you have characters like Booker DeWitt from Bioshock Infinite. While you may not get as much of a choice as in Mass Effect to define him, I still felt a VERY real connection to DeWitt. Bioshock Infinite did a great job in making you constantly have to reevaluate what your motivations should be as DeWitt, and what his role was overall in the game.

Okay...he does have style...

Silent protagonists are something that are almost exclusive to video games. I tried thinking of silent protagonists from movies or books, but I didn’t have any luck. It’s very difficult to actually start to care about someone who doesn’t speak, or someone whose face you never get to see (think of Chell from Portal 1 and 2). The overall idea with those characters is that we are supposed to identify them as ourselves, because they don’t have a defined personality for our own image to clash against.

However, I have a very hard time putting myself in the mind frame of a lady who has amnesia (or she may not, but you never actually hear her talk about how she ended up in Aperture Labs) and is being forced to run through a series of increasingly more dangerous tests run by a psychotic computer AI, all the while hearing about why “The Cake Is A Lie” and using a gun to create transdimensional portals.

I may become engrossed in the game and trying to solve the puzzles, or in the very sarcastic and passive-aggressive comments from GlaDOS, the psycho computer AI, but I can’t put MYSELF into that situation. Maybe it’s something wrong with me.

However, Chell becomes a very real character to me, despite the fact that I never hear Chell talk, see her face (with the exception of using portals to act as mirrors), or see any emotions on her face. And the reason that I believe that Chell became a real character to me was through that very silence.

Confused? So am I, so let’s try to work through this together.

Chell never once complains. She never says anything. She takes the abuse that GLaDOS throws at her with a stoicism that I envy. Really, Portal 1 only has 3 or 4 characters who you EVER MEET THROUGH THE ENTIRE GAME. GLaDOS is the only one who you actually interact with, and it is through GLaDOS’ increasingly sarcastic remarks that I defined what Chell was to me. To somebody else, Chell may have been a serial killer who was trapped in this laboratory to use as a human guinea pig. To someone else, Chell may have been something completely different.

In the end, though, Chell becomes what we want her to be through her very silence. Through the very fact that although she doesn’t talk, I developed a personality for her that was completely independent of what I consider to be my own very special personality. (Any Freudians out there who are starting to salivate Pavlovian style at seeing that last sentence, go for it in the comments section)

Which brings me to Chris Redfield, one of the main characters from the Resident Evil series. Now, right off the bat I am going to say that I am HORRIBLY biased against the Resident Evil series. I only played RE5 and RE6, which is probably why I dislike the series so much.

For a little bit of background, Chris Redfield is one of the main characters who has been present since the very first Resident Evil game. He saw the outbreak of some sort of virus that turned people into zombies, and he helped form a worldwide organization that tracks down people using this virus as a biological weapon.

Chris Redfield is NOT a silent protagonist. He is very vocal. For Resident Evil 5, he actually has a very good sidekick by the name of Sheva who is pretty awesome. However, for me, Chris was very damaged. He constantly neared the edge of whining about his last sidekick who supposedly died while taking out the main evil guy in a flashback that you constantly see through the game.

Now, there are those scenes that just made me laugh, like when Chris literally punched a giant boulder until it finally moved and fell into place in a river of lava during the final boss fight, but I never felt like Chris was adequately defined for me for as to WHY he should be so whiny.

Of course, in Resident Evil 6, things get even worse. At this point, Chris repeatedly endangers himself, a NEW sidekick, and his entire team for the point of getting revenge. I just couldn’t feel sorry for him. He constantly grated on my nerves. In the end, I was actually hating him, even though he was the character we were supposed to sympathize with.

If you are still following my ramblings, then let me say this. Despite my deep hate for Chris, I still have to admit that I CARE about him. Even if I only care about him in the fact that I would like to see him never appear in any game ever, I still feel emotions toward him. Which, at least by my definition, is the mark of a good character.

My hope is that the characters I make at least draw some sort of emotion, even if it is annoyance/hate. I’d rather that you hated my characters than feel nothing at all, because at least you’ll remember them. 

Admit it. You hate this one.

1) By saying this I definitely am NOT saying that I like Shyamalan. I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive him for the damage he did with “The Last Airbender”, not to mention how ridiculous “Signs”, “The Village”, “The Happening”, and “Lady In The Water” were. So make sure that if you DO decide to have a twist in the plot of your story, that it follows much more along the lines of the first Bioshock game or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.