In any form of narrative from literature to the small screen and the big screen characters are you're bread and butter. Now that does seem a pretty obvious statement to make but when this is applied to games it's only in recent years that this has become more of a thing. Characters are used to draw the audience in, we can relate them, sympathise about them, hate them and laugh at them. That's only scratching the surface, the point is we connect to them and care for them. In the early days of gaming though when you only had a handful of pixels at your disposal, it's kinda hard to create a very convincing character that your audience will feel an emotional connection, let alone craft a story for them to progress through. PONG, Spacewar! and maybe to an extent Space Invaders but that one is debatable, the first characters that stick out in my mind is the Mario franchise and even then it may be more to do with their iconic nature rather than an emotional one that people remember them for. You're really looking at the RPG genre for these emotional characters, games such as Baldur's Gate. I mean if you look at the FPS genre, DOOM, Quake, Marathon, all games where you inhabit a character but it's not character driven as such. Same for RTS games and many other genres during that time.
It's only really in the last ten or so years where "character driven" has become a much more mainstream concept, almost a buzzword that every new game likes to pull out when discussing it's campaign or story, does Call of Duty really need it? To me there is one game, well trilogy of games that really push the point of what characters in a game can do. I'm of course talking about Mass Effect. Now what ever side of the fence you sit on regarding it's rather... Controversial ending, you can't deny that it's characters are, for the most part, incredibly well done. Personally I didn't feel the story delivered in the end but during that ending there were some fantastically crafted moments between characters. And whats also interesting about Mass Effect's cast is the different reactions people have to them, for instance I dislike the character of Tali, she has, what I find to be, an annoying personality and a voice similar to a cheese grater. But yet she's other people's favourite character. Same with Garrus, Kaiden or Joker. I think it also proves as well that you don't need a good story to make a good character, just good acting, dialogue and a handful of scenes for your character to shine for people to enjoy them. And interesting appearance ain't too much to ask for either. Whether that be human or otherwise, I don't think it really matters nowadays, many people can still relate to a character even if they look the least bit human.
For those that do with mo cap and animation technologies on the rise we're beginning to see much more realistic character movements and emotions tie package this up with higher fidelity models and larger memory budgets the more subtle emotions, especially those on the face, are slowly being mastered. When this technology is fully realised within a game environment I hope to see fully immersive characters, characters that you forget about the polygons and animations and almost believe them to be real. That's the thing that games have over every other medium out there for telling stories, the immersion, the ability to interact with the environment you find your self in. It attaches you more to character's knowing that you, the player, can and will affect their outcome. That they may live or die depending on your actions. Again just look at Mass Effect 2, and the brilliantly done final mission, the suicide mission. Every character you recruit can die. So as you build you're relationship with them through out the game there's a sense of it being temporary, that you may end the game and your favourite character may not be there by your side.
And isn't that what the best stories do? Make you care about the character you're reading or watching, so when they're threatened with death we're on the edge of our seats almost begging for them to make it out alive. For me Toy Story 3 proves this point beautifully. I think to understand why fully you have to really see it from my point of view. When the first two came out in, what 95 and 99, as a child it was mind blowing to think that my toys came alive, I remember having my own Woody doll and Buzz Lightyear and hiding to see if they'd come alive. They didn't. As I grew older though Toy Story remained as my "childhood film" so when the third film released you could bet I was first in queue. In 2010, I was in my penultimate year at high school and uni was becoming a much more real thing than before, it was no longer some mystic light at the end of the tunnel of secondary school but a tangible thing. One of Toy Story 3's themes is the idea of moving on into adulthood, leaving you're childhood behind, and guess who would soon be going through said process, I'll give you three chances. So the film was aimed very much at the audience who had grown up on the characters of Woody and Buzz, who have that emotional connection that I rarely forge with fictional characters, and as I'm watching the film, the furnace scene appears, and my heart is in my mouth and I'm on the edge of my seat and I know that if anyone of those characters don't make it out alive, I'm walking out the cinema a broken man. Now apart from being a powerful scene in it's self it proves all the points I've said above, from their actions, their dialogue, or lack of, as the accept their fate and the facial expressions as they cling to one another in their final hour.
I'm still waiting on a game to make me feel the same way as well as Pixar has, and I believe, and hope, that with the increases in technology, the larger focus on narrative and characters that I'll feel the same hopelessness that I did as I descended into the furnace alongside Woody and the gang.
Sources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_story
http://gamasutra.com/features/20060324/cifaldi_01.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10216
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php
http://www.designersnotebook.com/Workshop/CharacterWorkshop/characterworkshop.htm
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