Being the avid gamer that I am, I do tend to run into a lot of things that annoy me in video games. One of the bigger annoyances for me happens to be the nameless, voiceless protagonist. I honestly believe at one time there was a video game programmer who legitimately thought that a character that had no voice and was named by the player would enhance the gaming experience, but that guy’s long dead, I’m sure, and the current users aren’t as pure, at least in my opinion. As I understand it the logic behind the use of such a character is for enhanced player emergence, but for the most part I don’t believe that it works, in fact I think that it takes away from the experience. If well executed this might work, but for the most part the executions I’ve witnessed thus far are messy to say the least.

For those of you who might not completely grasp the concept I’m referring to, I will explain in more detail. This nameless/voiceless character is one that at the beginning of the game is given a name chosen by the player. Generally, this type of character will, during voiced scenes, be referred to by some vague title like kid, guy, sensei, friend, or whatever else you can think of. The list goes on, including basically anything you might use if you’ve forgotten someone’s name and don’t want them to notice. Another characteristic of such a character is that they have little to no speaking roles through the course of the game. Generally at most you’ll find these characters grunt and scream. If they must convey a message, it will be delivered through text messages, sometimes giving a multiple choice style answer systems controlled by the player, although these systems usually lead to the same or similar results. Such characters are Link from the Legend of Zelda series, Misato Arisato of Persona 3 , and Souji Seta Persona 4.

Now some of you might have just gotten confused by that last sentence. So far, I’ve been talking about characters without names and voices, but in my examples I just used names; weird, right? Well that’s where my issues begin. Many of these characters actually have names in other media or just officially, yet for some reason the designers of the games choose to strip them of their personalities. I’ve always maintained that taking away from a game rarely makes it any better, and this is just such a case. I don’t know about the gaming public as a whole, but I know that having a character that I have to name that doesn’t speak never helps my immersion into the game. For the most part, it only makes me wonder why all the characters seem so against using my name, why they all insist on calling me by peculiar nicknames and why when everyone is speaking I am always just standing silent staring at walls and such. When I have to name a character I will often just pause for a bit and go research to find out what the character's name actually is.

Nowadays implementation of this type of character just seems to be a half-assed effort at creating your own character. In the end I’d personally like characters that are complete, not half made dolls. If you want the player to create a character, then make a game that allows them to do just that: create a character from scratch, looks and all. At least in that case this would be justified. In a massively multiplayer online game, or something of that type where the game is driven by the players more than the story itself, this isn’t an issue, because the character and story are farther from each other, but in a deep story-driven role playing game, this only serves to detach the character from the story and to make the experience less enjoyable.