Power of the Character

You load up a game for the first time. You've been pretty excited about this game for awhile and even though you know the main character by the trailers released, you really don't KNOW the character. You know the name, the way they have looked, and the way they have interact with people. That is when the known ends. What you don't know is your own choices. RPGs and MMOs are known for allowing the player to become their own character. You pick a sex, pick a race, and pick a class. You think that would be it, but no. Your decisions are just starting. What you say or do in a game will last til the game is over. Every choice you made till that final confrontation is in line with what you think that character is. Even when they show a sequel to a game, you know that character and what he or she did. Not anyone else. You. So when you see a trailer to a RPG you see your character. He or She may look different, but it's still your character.

I'M GOOD WITH WHAT YOU SAID

Black or White? You Pick.

What makes a character our owns anyway? Is it the stats? The way to communicate with NPCs and team members? Who said that we can either be bad or good? Does it have to be black and white? One of the things that Bioware is known for is their dialogue wheel. In the dialogue wheel you talk to someone and they respond back. In Mass Effect for example. Here you have up to three choices (up to 5 or 6 if your stats are good enough) and they each have a different way to say things. The setup is like a dial. The up dial is the positive response. It is here where you get Paragon points where you become a little more like a hero. The central dial is the neutral response. Here, you are not so good and not so bad. It's here were where your choice really don't make much of an impact. The down dial is the Renegade response. Here you say something hurtful or if someone didn't improve. Doing so will lean you towards the "bad" guy. The other two is just for show, it allows you to have another thing to say even though it won't matter in the end. The results, no matter what you choose, will be the same. Even with all that choices, you still really didn't make a choice at all. Sure, in Mass Effect you make a choice between saving Ashley or saving Kaiden,  comment genocide, or kill Wrex. All those choices do play into Mass Effect 2, except not commenting genocide. But, is that it? Ashley or Kaiden wasn't in Mass Effect 2 long enough to make me feel like I really did something important. If I talked Wrex out of the situation and not killing him, why is he in such a small role in Mass Effect 2? In order to make sure we FEEL like we did something that matters those surviving characters will need to have a bigger role to do in Mass Effect 3.

LIFE'S JUST A MOOD RING WE'RE NOT ALLOWED TO SEE.

What Dragon Age: Origins did so well was taking that wheel away. There are no good or bad answers. What you had was your own thoughts and your own feelings to deal with. Instead of having a choose between good answers and bad answers, you listen to what they have to say. It's not clear if you actually made the right choice til it's too late. While it's super easy to make the right choices in Mass Effect, it's that much harder to in Dragon Age: Origins. I don't say Dragon Age II because they added the Mass Effect dialogue wheel into the game.

What about the characters that is already made for you? Are they our own and do we put ourselves into them? Yes. It may seem strange that Solid Snake or Zelda are our own feelings, but think about this. In most games today you are giving the choice to do whatever you want. While there is no dialogue wheel or customization of the characters. You are giving the choice to act upon actions. Want to beat Metal Gear Solid without a single life lost? Is that you making your own Solid Snake, or is that something that the game makes you do. You can say that it's something that the developers have originally intended, but what about the amount of weapons the game has? We can play a game anyway we like. In doing so, not only are we focused on the tasks at hand, but we see ourselves in the character we are portraying. We are the actors of this medium. We act on our actions.

AS IF BY HIDDEN SIGNAL 

We only guide him. Nothing more

There are a games out there were we have no choice, but to act. God Of War, where you play as Kratos. A fallen Warrior who seeks revenge whenever he can. You do this, you do that, but the one thing that remains the same is the killing. You have no choice BUT to kill. It's the way the character is and the way the story is laid out. In the Call Of Duty games you play as several characters through war, but instead of questioning the acts of war, you just go out do some stuff and kill. You can't abandon the mission or wonder if this was right. They had a chance to do that in Modern Warfare 2, but it all came back to revenge. Like God Of War Call Of Duty has a one mind focus on the tasks. You are not there to think about characters, you are there only to go out and fight. The difference between God Of War and Call Of Duty is the characters and settings. In my opinion Kratos is a much better character than any of the characters in the Call Of Duty games. That's mainly because we know a great deal about Kratos throughout the series. Instead of focusing on what's unknown by us. The team at Santa Monica Studios took Kratos and make him a flawed character. Sure we have no choice of the actions, but the actions of what we have seen before we take over gives him that edge that games like Call Of Duty lack. What if we never saw why Kratos is in a revengeful path. What if we never knew that he was tricked by Ares on to killing his family? Would we view Kratos differently as just another thug, or do we add our own back story.

I feel the best characters in games today has that sense of our own actions. Any character that allows us to add our own personality and our own actions is far more interesting than any thing else. While there are a few great characters in gaming that we really can't control like Kratos. We can just guide him into whatever path that is there. Enjoying it as the same way we enjoy any Show or Movie can do.