Once again it’s time to don those comfortable standard-issue Pontification Hats, ladies and gentlemen, for our next installment of Overused Gaming Tropes. Our topic for today is a relic almost as old as video games themselves: the heroic mime, also known as the silent protagonist.
I’m hardly the first person to speak out against this trope, and a distinction should be made: this doesn’t concern characters who don’t speak for lack of conversational partners. Nor does it concern characters who are explicitly mute. No, the path of the heroic mime requires that an otherwise normal person maintain disciplined abstinence from normal human speech, presumably communicating with his or her fellows through complex pantomime.
Heroic mimes are an old gaming technique often employed to place the player directly in the main character’s shoes. The logic went that if the character’s response was merely implied instead of explicit, the player’s imagination could fill in the gaps and give them a better feel for who that character was. Sometimes games go so far as to imply the character is speaking, and simply don’t bother to include his or her actual words.
There’s a simple problem with the heroic mime, though, and it boils down to this: it’s hard to get attached to a character you don’t know. Normally, audiences learn about a character through three avenues: actions, thoughts, and dialogue. Games don’t often give the player access to the characters’ thoughts, which makes dialogue especially important as a way to convey a character’s personality and role in the story. Without dialogue, a heroic mime is little more than a cipher.
Gordon Freeman, of Half-Life fame, is one of the most egregious examples of a heroic mime. His franchise is one of the most influential in recent gaming history, but because of his curious reluctance to talk, we can’t really say we know anything about Gordon as a person. He’s supposedly a physicist, but aside from wearing glasses and pushing some things though the Black Mesa laboratories, he never demonstrates this onscreen. Without a clearly defined personality, Gordon becomes little more than an arm to hold a gun, acting wholly at the behest of other characters. One could even argue about whether he’s truly the protagonist at all.
This also demonstrates the second big problem with the heroic mime: other characters take the reins of the plot, making the protagonist a passive-rather-than-active figure. If he or she never really communicates his or her nature or intentions to the audience, how can the player character be called the protagonist? It’s arguably worse for immersion when the player’s surrogate in the game world exists only to further the aims of other non-player characters.
There are a number of ways to play with the heroic mime trope, and almost all of them end up with a richer experience. Some games, most notably the 16-bit classic Super Mario RPG, actually make a joke of the protagonist’s ability to communicate through charades. Others, such as Bioshock 2 and Drakengard, make the protagonist explicitly mute. But these are really just poking fun or acknowledging the fundamental problem, not solving it.
The real answer, well, is just having the protagonist talk.
“But James!” I hear you protest, “voicing a character can ruin them! Look at Metroid: Other M! They ruined Samus by giving her dialogue! They took a proud, feminist heroine and turned her into a whiny wreck!”
Well, yes, I answer, but you’re aiming at the wrong problem. The problem isn’t that they gave our favorite power-armored warrior woman a voice. It’s the terrible voice they gave her, whimpering out terrible milquetoast lines out of the mistaken belief that femininity requires submission and insecurity. Other M wouldn’t have been any better if Samus had kept to her usual stoic silence; she would have still been jobbing for a plot gamers have condemned as weak.
Bad writing is bad writing, regardless of its source. A truly voiceless protagonist has little personality; a character without personality is an empty vessel. And an empty vessel can’t really have a story told about its exploits.