Fallout 3 - The Fundamental problem of Sympathetic Characters

Although not specifically on Fallout 3 (it uses it as a basis though ) an article is available on 'The problem With Story' about the problems the writer has with the character creation part of RPGs.

I could have chosen any RPG here. Demon’s Souls, Dragon Age, Skyrim, anything that uses a face and character creator. But clearly, Fallout 3 creates a specific attempt to connect you to your character more than any other game of its type by actually having you experience your birth, childhood and adolescence.
By all accounts you should connect to this character the most, after having experienced literally everything they have as well. But you don’t. Walking through Fallout 3’s wasteland, I’m more struck by the sense of loneliness and despair than I am any type of grief when I’m killed by a fellow raider.
Why? What is it that whenever my character is killed or damaged, I have absolutely no concern for his wellbeing?

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Thanks BlackCanopus.
More information.

C'mon! One of the biggest issues of F3 was boring story... Don't know also why the author had problem with text dialogues. It's a matter how you are writting them not that they are texted. In BG or Planescape the immersion was realized in a variety of possible dialogue options, its style etc. That was the way you were choosing what fit you personality most. I prefer that solution than watching scripted ingame animations with two sentences and then a possibility to choose what to shoot first. blah

One commentator wrote :

I think your real problem with identifying characters comes not from being unable to see a face, but being unable to hear a voice.

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Okay, but what is, then, with completely deaf gamers ?

Well, I think it's a bit of a silly thing to expect your digital avatar to provoke concern for his/her well-being.

If you want to provoke sympathy for the protagonist - you shouldn't let the player be the creator. Then you need to create a character and have the player control him, like in Torment or similar games. You need to SHOW what happens to the character - and for that you need some kind of external view. As in, not first person perspective.

If you let the player control creation - then there's really nothing to empathise with - because it's all internalised.

You need something external and tangible for sympathy or empathy.

It's a very common misconception that people sympathise with themselves, even in real life. But the feeling is not of sympathy as much as it's a direct response to a tangible situation or sensation of pain.

Sympathy is actually a projection based on the inability to completely feel or empathise with another person. The feeling itself is useless and serves no beneficial purpose. People who reach out do it because they need something - not because they need to reach out.

Sympathy is a negative experience - which is another reason people actually don't sympathise with themselves. People don't want a negative experience, they just want to feel better.

Difference between a poorly written book and a good one. Even more is the player himself, sounds more like he is projecting his own lonelyness on his avatar then blaming the avatar.

I could have chosen any RPG here.

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And No, you could not have chosen any game with this result, unless you are the problem.

Actually, what occurred to me when I read this article is that my problem in RPGs is not my lack of sympathy for my own character, but with NPCs.
Some games like Fallout 3 try so damn hard to define my character's relationship with other characters, mostly by telling me what it should be, and I am strongly put off by it. I feel that if a game wants me to care about a character, it needs to let me actually experience a relationship. In Fallout 3, I really could hardly care less about my father or anyone in that stupid vault.

PS:
In old partybased RPGs, I would generally develop a strong connection to my party members, usually identifying with one of them as "my" character and the others as friends. In modern games I usually feel like a drifter who doesn't care about anyone or anything.

Because your player character dying is only a savegame away from rectification. And, in the first place, (s)he likely died performing routine tasks and suffered a bad 'dice roll'. That raider got two headshots in a row - oh darn, reload.

The article writer's primary mistake was not even mentioning Fallout 1. You do indeed feel empathetic toward the character at the end of the game. And why? Because it was unexpected and another outcome is not simply a savegame away.

DArtagnan said:

If you let the player control creation - then there's really nothing to empathise with - because it's all internalised.

You need something external and tangible for sympathy or empathy.

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That. If the world and NPC slowly start to tell you about your personal story or background (fought in a war, had difficult childhood, crippled and restored, wife and kids murdered ..etc., not that you got killed by x and need revenge) which is relevant to the main quest of the game, coupled with some visible animations of emotion with voice might make one care about their avatar. Travelling with companions and bonding with them would also give a personal feel to the game. I think all of this is difficult to do in an open-world game.

One character that stayed with me through a game was Raziel in Soul Reaver; his troubled background made me care what happens to him and his relation to Kain.

Superguest makes a good point about the old party based RPGs - I was much the same way. With time, many saves and through the sheer overcoming of odds, brings an odd kind of connection. I can still vividly recall resurrecting my cleric/mage in Curse of the Azure Bonds many times and not letting him die. I did it so many times that his constitution fell from 17 to 9!

I think it's erroneous to assume that a human face or voice are the main factors; I don't think it's just a simple matter of just adding these things to help create sympathy. Situational context and the perception of authentic human emotions are also important in developing true sympathy, as is the depth of emotional investment and the willingness to do so from the player. (Consider how easy or difficult it is for you or your character to switch off or ignore events that would cause a compassionate response for instance.)

I chose to make my first character in Fallout 3 an avenging angel, "cleanse the wasteland" type. I wasn't playing "me", (and I generally don't in RPGs, because they're simply not complex enough to deal with our responses) But rather an abstracted or imagined personality/created by me. My character's lack of sympathy in that game was partially due to the low quality of narrative, it's lack of cohesion lore wise and as a game in relation to the original games (a personal bias and a piece of meta reasoning!) It was also a bit of a rebellious response in reacting somewhat contrary to what is expected of your character.

Perhaps for the writer of the article, open world player centered RPGs with much freedom creates a vaccum of disconnection for him. He does seem to want to compare it to experiences with Mass Efffect's created protagonist for instance.

Ultimately he probably chose a bad example with Fallout 3 if he was looking for a rich tapestry of characterisation to refute the generalisation where he "finds RPGs to be the most bleak and disconnected narrative experiences a game can provide". The setting probably doesn't help either!

I've not played Human Revolution yet, but I look forward to experiencing it more after reading this article.

I have often a real problem when choices are forced upon me which I wouldn't want to take.

Like … having a few indefinitively vague phrases on the infamous "dialogue wheel" (I just don't like it), which turn out, when used, to actually contain a very different interpretation of the phrase than I had thought of myself.

Or, my favourite example : A wizard's tent in BG1. No matter which way of talking you choose, it always nds up with a fight - a fight I never wanted !

I hate being forced to do things I wouldn't do. Because the developers - for example - expect me to be a man who likes killing people.

Wich is why I don't like combat-oriented/combat-heavy games in general. It often occcurs to me as if the developrs were frowning upon diplomacy, and this outright don't include it. Always kill, kill, kill as the only possible solution to solve the conflict. Gah !

Everybody has good points, and this issue is exactly what I tried pointing out to some game designers.
Yes, If you are locked to the backside of your characters head, you won't relate too much. Also to a mute character, you won't relate too much. Also inexpressive faces and animations, and most of all lame personalities.
Most of the times designers put out all these shady personalities, oh he's a thief, oh he hates people, and lives for gold, so rarely you see a character with goods and bads, it's usually the final boss or something.
Bloodlines had great animations and faces, Legacy of Kain had great dialogues and voices, superb plot and personalities.
These Dragon age, Skyrim, ME creators really try to get to that, but they fail miserably.

Drithius said:

Because your player character dying is only a savegame away from rectification.

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Well said.

And perhaps because different people connect with their characters in different ways and the author has not played a character which makes him feel sympathetic, yet.

It's all about proper exposition for me. Torment was the best yet. It was subtle, and only slowly unraveled, so to speak. Fallout 3 exposition? Hitting the player over the head with it is not very effective.

Like borcanu have said: everybody has good points but let me emphasize (from personal perspective) 2 of them.

Variation on Drithius' "only a save away" and Alrik's choices problem: how can you care for your character if you know that he/she will die and, most likely, die multiple times? Probably everyone here tried to finish a game without dying but how often have you succeed? And, after 3rd or 4th death I simply say - fuck it, I will probably die doing this but who cares? Now, I am not saying that it should be possible to finish a game without dying just that multiple deaths are not compatible with caring.

And Alrik's point: you create a character. You lead it through the game until you are faced with set of choices none of which you want to pick... Well, you have to pick one, so you do but, from then on, it's not "your character" anymore. Again, it's impossible for devs to include choices which would suit everybody but that's the another reason why sympathizing with your PC is very difficult to achieve.

Well, my "choices" problem is rather that I'm not given choices which seem natural to me. Like Diplomacy, for example.

Plus, regarding party games, I'm too much of a "carebear" player, which means that I'm caring too much about the party members and want *all* of them to survive … There were a few choices which I definitively didn't like in Dragon Age 1 …

For me, what makes me 'sympathetic' (not the word I would use) with my character is the interaction with the world and PC around him. I had a real emotional attachment to my character in BG2 not because of the way I leveled him, but because of how he handled the situations of the game and how the relationships with the NPCs in my party progressed. I didn't need his birth or backstory for any of that.

yes , that touches something right there, considering complete freedom of choice is really hard to accomplish, taking away all choice is a simplified solution, that is what Legacy of Kain provided, and have done it majestically .
I.m sick of these games coming with the worst solution .. 3 choices which I HATE.

And on the same subject, why put a dialog when you have no choice, make it a damn cutscene, and work on that cutscene like it was a movie. When a cutscene occurs people pay attention, when a dialog is in, come on .. staring at the back of my heroes head, and a stiff doll talking to me

zahratustra said:

Like borcanu have said: everybody has good points but let me emphasize (from personal perspective) 2 of them.

Variation on Drithius' "only a save away" and Alrik's choices problem: how can you care for your character if you know that he/she will die and, most likely, die multiple times? Probably everyone here tried to finish a game without dying but how often have you succeed? And, after 3rd or 4th death I simply say - fuck it, I will probably die doing this but who cares? Now, I am not saying that it should be possible to finish a game without dying just that multiple deaths are not compatible with caring.

And Alrik's point: you create a character. You lead it through the game until you are faced with set of choices none of which you want to pick… Well, you have to pick one, so you do but, from then on, it's not "your character" anymore. Again, it's impossible for devs to include choices which would suit everybody but that's the another reason why sympathizing with your PC is very difficult to achieve.

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True in all ways, but consider the developers goal and he might want to tell you a story where choices are less relevant or not existing at all or he wants to give you full freedom and include no choices for that matter. You might like both games for what they are, like one of the two or none. Point of my argument here: it's impossible to suit everybody's wishes and therefore developers have to make the game they think is best.

I have never really identified with a character in a RPG as seeing it as a real person and if people really do that I would suggest to maybe lessen the load a little

For whatever reason I find myself in disagreement with most folks here, especially with the article.

The more the character is defined for me the less I bond with it (which is the complete opposite of books). The more the character has their own history and story the less I feel it is me and the less I care about them overall. I guess because I can't connect.

I fully enjoy fleshed out NPC characters - but then they are the ones I am interacting with so the more story they have the better. There the writing is critical, as is the presentation.

Its why I enjoyed FNV and DAO so much and cared about my own character and the companions I had in the story … versus a game like ME or Witcher where I had no connection to the main character. Also why I am not big on VO for the main character - unless I really like how the VO was done (voice, manner, etc.) its just going to push me away.

Course that is why I do bond so well with my character in a sandbox game. My character in Skyrim is a part of me so I care a lot what happens to him I also enjoy the companions but I have to fill in much of their history myself.

But I have a good imagination and seldom have a problem filling in gaps from the writer when it comes to stories - so this whole issue is seldom a problem for me.

I agree with your book versus game (and versus movie I would add) wolf. And this was exactly my point. In well written books you can fill in the blanks and let your imagination run free. Games and films are somebody else's visions presented presented to you in "as is" form.