"Building and Reconstructing Character - A Case Study of Silent Hill 3" Essay analysis

Given that my research project is centred on the “protagonist character”, and what representations are used by development teams in the construction of said characters, Petri Lankoski’s “Building and Reconstructing Character. A Case Study of Silent Hill 3” seemed like an excellent place to look for an in depth account of a character.

Lankoski begins the paper by stating the importance of the player character and the fact that they (if successful) could leave a good lasting impression about the game. This point is evident when you consider the culture of Cosplay that has flourished over the last few years, where people worldwide will spend a great amount of time constructing costumes to be able to take the “persona” of their favourite video game or anime character. Clearly from these examples the characters constructed in games have influenced the player, instead of the conventional opposite.

But Lankoski even as early as the introduction, mentions the argument that constructing a game personality for the player character is particularly problematic.  

“However, there are multiple methods used in games to inform a player about the nature of a player character: pre defined functions, goals, possible and impossible actions, and more traditional audiovisual means.”

It is these means that he explores in his essay, through a thorough case study of the Silent Hill 3 protagonist (and player character), Heather. To categorize how the personality of the player is perceived, Lankoski defines them as follows:

-          The goal and sub- goals of a player character (goals limit plausible actions for a player if s/he wants to progress in a game).

-          Possible and impossible actions (what a player/ character can and cannot do, and which are hard to do in the game)

-          Predefined functions of a player character (e.g. cutscenes, pre-designed dialogue, movement style, gestures and facial expressions)

In addition games use traditional audiovisual methods to reveal a player character like the external features of a characters (body,face,voice), proper and titular names, how other characters react to the player character, how the character is described by other characters or in game material and pre-existing knowledge about the character.

Already these categorizations form a useful guide at examining a video game character, but his subsequent look into Heather is quite insightful due to the analytical method and detail. From the essay I highlighted some of the crucial areas he looked at:

“Silent hill 3 starts to feed information about the player character in the user guide.”

“ Heathers goal: survival”

“...possible and impossible actions are used in this game to highlight how Heather really is quite an ordinary girl: the player needs to activate a special mode by pressing and holding down a button in order to get Heather ready to fight...”

“The dialogue (a player can hear and read only Heathers part of it)”

“Heather refuses to discuss with Douglas and escapes to the ladies room, which ends the cutscene. If the player tries to return to the hallway where Douglas is, Heather will refuse (possible and impossible actions and predefined function), written monologue.”

“The information revealed in pre-defined functions sets up the theme of the game; a journey to Heathers forgotten childhood. It also seems that a player mostly learns Heathers past at the same phase as Heather remembers details”.

Already a pattern begins to immerge about some of the techniques used by a developer to get Heathers personality across to the player. By limiting their actions with reasons (i.e.: Heathers an ordinary girl and as such struggles to fight shown by the fact a special mode has to be activated to fight, if she does not want to do something she will tell the player, etc). Furthermore by limiting the players “vision” into the game world (only hearing Heathers side of the phone call, only learning about Heathers past when she does, etc) it can maximise the opportunity for the player to “bond” with the character of Heather through shared receiving of particular information. The player can sympathise with her reactions this way much more than knowing the whole story and watching her “catch on”. This is really a method of the developer of controlling the Sjuzet of the story aswell, as via dream sequences, surreal moments out of the games chronological order, etc the player is both experiencing the twists of the narrative – in addition to the earlier point of bonding with the character. It’s interesting because it shows how closely linked the creation of a character is with all other aspects of the game.

The essay continues to go into the other parts of the early stages of play, identifying areas that bring up the classifications used by the author Lankoski, but it has already proven invaluable as it has opened my eyes to the broad spectrum of elements that are important to a “good” protagonist character – well a better phase would be complete protagonist.

I also looked at the essay: Games, Montage and the First Person Point of View (Michael Nitsche) but it simply covered a volume of the points brought up in this book: Video game spaces, which was a little disappointing – but the essay talked about an interesting topic of the switch between camera angles. Is it a montage? And if so what does it mean? Unfortunately though this isn’t really relative to my essay topic so I won’t be referencing it.