A Player Is You

Heroic mimes are all over the place in the video game world but what is about this archetype that seems to immerse the player into the game world? Video games are designed to entertain the viewer as well as general wish fulfillment and the silent, player character is designed to be a player surrogate. However with today's gaming, design and production, you will rarely find such a character except in portable games or remakes of older games. I basically answered my own question but what makes this pparticular character archetype so appealign or what psychological advantages that it gives the player?

Also, in terms of immersion what separates Morgan Freeman from Mario?

Well, Morgan Freeman is an African-American actor who has an awesome voice, and Mario is a fictional Italian plumber whose vocabulary usually consists of "It's-a me!" and "Wa-hoo!"

As you said, but it also offers a greeeeeeat advantage if you want to do storytelling through your world! Half Life (It's Gordon, bytheway?) has this in spades - almost all the story is through the environment, and I've heard the same with Bioshock 2? I dunno. But it allows you to put your own personality onto the character, really.

Also, you forgot to note that Mario is not God.

My mistake on Gordon Freeman.

So with Gordon, you can project your own perosnality into the character but it wouldn't be his truer character or lack of thereof?

edited 26th Apr '11 10:28:24 AM by G.G.

It's the attitude of what the character does. Gordon Freeman is, quite literally, a free man, he's fighting for the survival of the world with the tools he has in a future that's rather grim. He's realistic looking and is often busy dealing with all sorts of evil things.

Mario is a plumber jumping around in a kingdom full of mushroom people, fighting cartoony turtles and eating mushrooms to suddenly grow twice his size, all to save a pink princess from a giant fire breathing turtle.

In this case, it's the environment that makes the character, with the player adding on the details. The main character is built and reacts to the world as necessary, because Gordon Freeman is definitely not jumping on aliens and Mario doesn't have a gun, but the way the character gets things done and how he or she goes about it and the individual experiences are created by the player character going through the game.