for this and one can hardly attribute it solely to the decision to make Jak talk, but making
that change was not something that was seen as a substantial improvement to the
game.
InThe Suffering, immersion was one of our primary design goals, and having the
main character, Torque, not talk was a big part of that. In particular, the game hinged on
the player determining what kind of person Torque was and whether or not he was
guilty of the heinous crime that landed him on death row at the start of the game. It
seemed odd to have a game where you were determining the main character’s moral
nature where you did not actually get to become that character. During development
there was discussion about making Torque’s personality stronger by having him talk,
but in the end we decided that supporting the players’ ability to become Torque was
extremely important in terms of players caring about the game’s story. If Torque had
been more strongly defined as a character, players would have been left feeling that
everything about him was already predetermined and that they could not control his
fate at all, or that whatever they could control was strictly canned.
The quest to have a character that players can project themselves into is some-
thing that is far more important in games, where the player is supposed to be in control
of what happens, than in any other media. In Scott McCloud’s great bookUnderstanding
Comics, he spends a chapter discussing the iconic representation of characters in car-
toons and how this allows readers to project themselves into the characters much more
than in photo-realistic works. Throughout the book McCloud draws himself as the nar-
rator and host and uses a very abstract and cartoony style. Explaining this choice, he
states: “That’s why I decided to draw myself in such a simple style... I’mjust a little
voice inside your head. You give me life by reading this book and by ‘filling up’ this very
iconic (cartoony) form. Who I am is irrelevant. I’m just a little piece of you.” The more
abstract the notion of the character, the more the audience will be able to fill in the
blanks with themselves. McCloud states that this is why cartoony imagery is so perva-
sive in our culture; people can become much more involved with iconic imagery than
they can with more detailed and thereby specific representations of reality. Similarly,
this is why abstract characters are so prevalent in computer games.
Whether or not to have a specifically defined central character in your game is a
personal decision and depends on what you are trying to accomplish. You can tell a
richer conventional story if you have the player control a very distinct character, but
you can suck the player into the game much more if you keep the main character iconic
and allow players to feel like they are in charge of determining that character’s person-
ality and fate. Personally, I believe that the advantages of having players feel that they
are the hero outweigh the advantages of having a strong character. Keep in mind, your
game can still have terrific characters in it, and indeed, without strong characters your
game will fail to have much of a story at all. Instead of trying to imbue the main charac-
ter with a lot of personality, make the NPCs players encounter in the game memorable
and interesting. If players find these characters annoying, that is acceptable; it means
that they have enough personality for players to feel strongly about them. But the play-
ers’ character should be sufficiently amorphous and unformed that players can think of
that character in whatever way they see fit. And fear not, after spending forty or more
hours with that character, players will come up with their own ideas of what motivates
Chapter 11: Storytelling 221