Characters are a vital part of a game, they constitute what is considered a game and allow the player to be engrossed within the virtual worlds. If you want a better example; Imagine playing half-life without Gordon Freeman or G-man, imagine Mario without Luigi. DON’T WORRY!!! Its not the end of the world I was just making a point, but you can see already how un-effective ‘gameplay’ is without core characters. People generally play games to entertain themselves and escape into different worlds. They want to be different people in these worlds and that’s what the characters allow them to be. If I wanted to entertain myself for a couple of house I wouldn’t want to play as me sitting around doing stuff that I do (generally, because I play games in my spare time and well that would create some kind of paradox…Me playing, me playing a video game, about me playing me).
Characters in any kind of situation or form need to always be believable on some level. Look at characters such as Neo from the Matrix. People can associate with his character since although fictional, there is a sense of the story being very real and possible whether now or in the future. His character is one that majority of adults can believe, a middle aged man who works as a programmer in an office and lives a day-to-day ordinary life (possibly not so much with the night time alter ego of Neo being a hacker but still….). Characters have to have something in common with the genre of people interested, for example Peter Parker is a geek which would appeal to comic book readers since they generally are geeky (there’s a geek in everyone whether they like or not). His alter ego of Spiderman appeals since it makes it almost possible for an amazing ability to be associated with geeky and intellectual people and therefore the character becomes more interesting and almost believable. For me ever since I was a kid I was hoping to god that a radioactive spider bit me even though I generally hate spiders. It would be so cool to be able to shoot webs from my wrists and climb buildings, although England would be a bad place for Spidey since there aren’t many tall buildings. Radioactive Spider where are you…
Film characters are great although to make them believable, good acting is involved. Characters such as Joker in Batman would not have been as effective if either Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger couldn’t act the part. Imagine Joker being played by Sylvester Stallone, actually scratch that the humor would make it worthwhile. Anyway, a good character always needs a good history, connection to the main story, other strong characters that are related in some way and most of the time they need a stereotyped. History plays a huge role in the development of a character, it can connect the character to the current story and allows the character to become more real. Other strong characters make the story more believable and create better flow. A stereo typed character bridges the gap between several audiences. People are all different and whether we like it or not stereotype is the only way we can be compared to each other. A character that breaks away from stereotype begins to become more interesting since majority of people do not like to be stereotyped and would rather be seen as someone else. People that play games, read books and watch movies escape to become someone else for a while and therefore the characters start to have a similarity with the audience. Characters make a game but good strong characters set the benchmark in entertainment, whatever the form.
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