Though game protagonists have often been gratuitously silent, there are times when reticence makes narrative sense. As compact discs became widely used, though, those limitations largely disappeared - but the silent protagonist, for reasons beyond the scope of this article, lives on through popular characters like Link and Mario. Though Pokémon have always said their names in the anime, their video game equivalents in Red and Blue communicated in cries so tightly compressed you would be forgiven for thinking you were trying to catch 151 dial-up modems. As a result, if a character did talk, it was only in a brief, scratchy sound byte. Lines of voiced dialogue would take up ridiculous amounts of space on an arcade cabinet’s motherboard or an NES cartridge. In the medium’s early decades, game characters often didn’t speak because of technical limitations. If you’ve played video games, you’ve likely played a silent protagonist. If a narrator is speaking, it may be because someone else isn’t. Travel to the end of the map in Immortals, and Zeus and Prometheus will still be there, bickering away.īut what problems are these omnipresent disembodied voices designed to solve? What video game tropes does the narrator subvert? And what challenges does narration create for the developers tasked with making it a seamless part of their virtual worlds? To answer those questions, we spoke with the writers, voice actors, and audio designers who have worked hard to write, voice, and implement narration into games like Immortals Fenyx Rising, Maneater, and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. When you stop to chat with an unimportant NPC in Biomutant, their dialogue will still be relayed to you in the David Attenborough-ish voice of David Shaw Parker. When your killer shark flops across a beach in Maneater, taking chunks out of every landlubber in her path, actor Chris Parnell is ready to provide error-filled context for your senseless violence. Narration in these big, open games pushes back against the isolation inherent in the large, often sparsely populated worlds they present. The past year has seen the release of Maneater, Immortals Fenyx Rising, and Biomutant. Larger games have featured narration too, including the gruff voice of actor James McCaffrey guiding players through the stories of Max Payne and the unreliable narrator Varric Tethras in Dragon Age II, but inclusions such as these have historically been few and far between. The Stanley Parable features an unreliable narrator that players choose to obey or disobey. It was a game where players could choose to obey or disobey the disembodied voice guiding the titular Stanley through a nondescript (and, occasionally non-Euclidean) office building. Davey Wreden and William Pugh’s first-person adventure game presented players with a Gordian Knot of ludonarrative dissonance and harmony. And, arguably, The Stanley Parable is where the trend peaked. But, as indie games rose to prominence, so too did voiced narration as a storytelling device. Games had occasionally featured narrators before the indie explosion of the late ‘00s and early ‘10s. “That’s not how it happened,” you might say, echoing the Prince’s commentary in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. In Dear Esther, you explored an island as an anonymous man told you a story, his voice thick with the strains of sorrow and regret. In 2011’s Bastion, you were a little guy running around as your actions were described by a disembodied cowboy voice, thick with the essence of whiskey and chew. It’s a concept as old as stories, but in games, you can mostly trace the use of a narrator back to a trio of indies released around the start of the last decade.
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