Gamsutra: Game Protagonists Need Evolution

This week’s cover story at developer oriented Gamasutra covers the stereotypical roles given to most player characters and analyzes just how they can evolve to become more interesting and more realistic as games go forward. Author Ben Schneider analyzes what makes the classic hero and uses literature (you know them books your grandparents used to read) and movies to draw iconic images of the game character and then goes on to talk about how game characters lack some of the options of their literature counterparts because of the confines of modern game storytelling.

The whole article is interesting to me because while in college studying game design one of the key concepts put forth in a Digital Storytelling course was the concept of the iconic heroes, the roles and basic function of characters in a story. This piece mirrors in a lot of way that discussion and many of the conclusions I came to as a writer about the inherent weaknesses in game storytelling.