A protagonist is NOT you

Give the player with too little agency and he becomes The Village Idiot. Too many goals and too little freedom to do anything else cause this. In games, the Village Idiot is not retarded or crazy per se, but of such an incredible naiveté and intransigent narcissism that he truly believes he is the Chosen One and that the world would fall apart without him. People easily recognize his weakness and ask him favors they could perfectly do it themselves.

The prime example for The Village Idiot are, again, the Zelda games – or rather what the Zelda games have become. In them, Link is a man of obvious emotions because he should only be reflecting what the gamer was obviously supposed to feel. After all, as Stefan has correctly stated, Link is always designed to work as an avatar. But that never works! Because our protagonist is only a reactor, this will place the burden of the entire game on the NPCs’ shoulders – and thus we judge Link by the very problematic relationship he was with them.

This will take place regardless of whether you try to fill the void left by writers with your own imagination. Whenever writers leave an empty character in the hopes we treat them as an avatar, but forgets the fact the game happens to have narratives, that character will always fall somewhere between the Idiot-Asshole spectrum. That will become its characterization. However, note, that is not the same as saying this character is developed in any way.

Character development happens when change in involved. Basically, when you start the game playing one person and, by the end of the game, this person has changed. It is another person. Sure, you can still interpret Link’s actions any way you want, but that still won’t make him a developed character, for Link’s actions never changed: he will still be running fetch quests for Gorons or whatever.

There is one game, however, that manages to marry narration with the idea of an avatar most intriguingly. In Half-Life 2, we play as Gordon Freeman. Like Link, he is designed as a blank slate – one that games can project themselves and relate to. But unlike Link, we don’t complain about Gordon lacking in characterization.

And that’s because Gordon Freeman was written as an avatar. The only times Gordon Freeman, the character, is awake is when the game is on. There is nothing Gordon knows but you don’t, and vice-versa. In fact, Gordon doesn’t even age when you are not playing the game. In between games he is always either knocked out or placed in a mandatory form of stasis by the G-Man. That is the genius of the G-Man figure. The G-Man embodies the game contract. He is also an entity of whom other characters are fully aware. There is a most revealing piece of information that is revealed by Dr. Breen near the end of Half-Life 2. Supposedly, Gordon’s “contract was open to the highest bidder”. This is most likely the contract which Gordon has with the G-man and, therefore, us. After all, we bought the game. We were the ones that gave the winning bid… at Gamestop!

Gordon Freeman is the one free exception to the rule. He truly is an avatar living in a narrative-filled world – because he was written to be one! The other protagonists are not avatars. You are not them. They are not you.