In a novel, a film or a play, the writer decides what the protagonist does. In a video game, someone else decides, and that person is holding a controller in a room you will never see.
That is the whole craft problem. Every technique for developing a character assumes the writer controls the character's behavior, and games break that assumption on the first input.
I ran at the structural inverse of this while building a world called Passenger, where your consciousness rides inside a stranger's body for exactly twelve hours as a witness with zero control. You cannot even see the host's face, because it blurs in every mirror and every photograph.
Building that forced the question early. If a character makes no decisions and has no face, what is left to build them out of, and the answer turned out to be what they notice, what they refuse to look at, and how they judge what the host does with the body.
Games arrive at the same answer from the other side of the problem. The player supplies the decisions, so the writer is working with everything except decisions, and every technique below is a version of that.
The two kinds of protagonist
Games solved the control problem by splitting into two camps, and almost every game you can name sits in one of them.
An authored protagonist has a fixed personality that the player operates rather than writes.
Geralt makes wry, tired, morally exhausted choices whether or not you like it. Kratos in the 2018 God of War is a man who cannot say his son's name without flinching, and no dialogue wheel lets you play him as cheerful.
Joel in The Last of Us does the thing at the hospital regardless of what you would have done, because that is who he is and the game does not ask.
A player-authored protagonist is closer to a container. Commander Shepard, the Sole Survivor in Fallout 4, the Warden in Dragon Age: Origins. These characters have a job and a voice but their morality, their loyalties and often their history are assembled by the player over dozens of hours.
When an authored protagonist fails, the player spends forty hours watching someone make decisions they would never have made and resenting the game for it. When a player-authored one fails, there is nobody in the lead role at all, just a set of stats and a name the player picked at hour zero.
| Authored protagonist | Player-authored protagonist | |
|---|---|---|
| Examples | Geralt, Kratos, Joel, Arthur Morgan | Shepard, Sole Survivor, Dragonborn, V |
| Arc lives in | The protagonist | The companions and the world |
| Best at | A specific, earned transformation the writer can guarantee | Investment, ownership, replay value |
| Fails as | The player resenting a choice they did not make | A hollow lead nobody can describe afterwards |
| Dialogue | Choice of tone, not of person | Choice of person |
| Ending | Fixed and meant | Branching and often unearned |
The authored protagonist can be given a real arc because the writer still controls the ending. The player-authored one cannot, which is why those games move the arcs somewhere else.
Why the companions carry the story
In a game where the protagonist is a vessel, the actual character development happens beside you.
Mass Effect is the clearest case. Shepard barely changes across three games, because Shepard is whoever you decided in the character creator.
Garrus does change. He goes from a frustrated cop who wanted to bend the rules to a vigilante who bent them all the way and watched his squad die for it, and he arrives in the third game as someone who has made peace with being a soldier rather than a crusader.
That arc is authored start to finish and you watch it rather than steer it, which is a strange thing to say about the character in a game where you make every decision.
Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate 3 and Persona all run the same trick. The party members get the growth and transformation the lead cannot have, and the player supplies the emotional attachment by choosing who to spend time with.
This is worth stealing for prose. Splitting a cast so that different people carry different jobs is closer to writing with multiple perspectives than to writing an ensemble, and it works because the reader's attention is a resource you are allocating on purpose.
Ludonarrative dissonance
The word is ugly and the problem underneath it is genuine. It is what happens when the story insists on one thing and the mechanics reward the opposite.
The famous example is Uncharted. Nathan Drake is written as a charming rogue, an amiable treasure hunter you would enjoy having a drink with, and across a single game the player guides him through the killing of several hundred men.
Nothing in the writing acknowledges it, so the character the cutscenes describe and the character the gameplay produces end up being two different people.
Spec Ops: The Line built an entire game out of noticing this. It hands you a standard military shooter, lets you use white phosphorus on what you assume are enemy combatants, then walks you slowly through the aftermath of what you actually did. The gap between the story and the mechanics stops being an accident and becomes the subject.
For a writer, the transferable lesson is that a character is defined by what the work rewards, not by what the narration claims. If your prose keeps telling us a character is compassionate while every scene rewards her for cruelty, you have written the game version of this bug. Fixing it is the same work as building believable characters anywhere else, which is making sure the behavior and the description are describing one person.
The room develops the character
Games can develop somebody who never appears, and they do it with furniture.
Environmental storytelling is the technique where a space carries the characterization, and Gone Home is a whole game of it.
You walk through an empty house and assemble a teenage girl's life out of mixtapes, a hidden note, the specific things she chose to keep and the specific things she hid. She never speaks to you and by the end you know her anyway.
BioShock's audio diaries do it for a dead city. Dark Souls does it almost entirely without words, using item descriptions and the placement of corpses to explain who a character was and what they were doing when they stopped.
Prose has always had a version of this. The difference is that a game forces the reader to physically travel through the space and find things in a chosen order, so the writer's job becomes deciding what is findable and what is easy to miss rather than deciding what the reader is told.
Games can make the audience complicit
Complicity is the mechanism no other medium has access to.
When you read about a character doing something terrible you sympathize or you recoil, and when you press the button that does it you have done it yourself. Games can implicate the audience, and the good ones build on that rather than decorating with it.
The Last of Us Part II is built on the move. It spends ten hours making you hunt someone, then hands you that person as a playable character for another ten and asks you to hunt the woman you were.
Both halves of the game are correct about the person they are following, and neither one lets you out of what you did in the other half.
Undertale runs a colder version. Kill everything and the game notices, remembers across a fresh save file, and tells you what you did.
Nobody has to write a paragraph about consequence there, because the save file is the paragraph.
That is the sharpest weapon in the medium. It is also why conflict and how it resolves works differently in games. The resolution has to survive the player having chosen it, which means it needs to be satisfying in several directions at once instead of just one.
Forty hours changes the pacing entirely
A film gives you two hours. A novel gives you eight or ten. A single playthrough of Red Dead Redemption 2 or Persona 5 runs past sixty, and a lot of that time is the player doing nothing narratively relevant at all.
Arthur Morgan's decline in Red Dead Redemption 2 works because it is slow enough to be lived with rather than watched. His cough shows up early and stays background noise for hours. The transformation accumulates in the way camp conversations shift and the way he starts writing in his journal, and no single scene has to deliver it.
That is a pacing tool prose does not have. What prose can borrow is the idea that arc beats can sit much further apart than a three-act structure suggests, as long as small reminders keep running underneath. The relationship between what changes a person and what merely happens to them gets easier to see when a game stretches the change across sixty hours and you can watch which parts stuck.
The other half of that math is repetition. A player will hear a companion's idle line four hundred times. Games handle it by making the character's core behavior extremely legible and then rationing the depth, which is why a great game companion tends to have one very loud trait and one quiet thing underneath it that takes twenty hours to surface.
Practical takeaways for writers
Decide early whether your character is authored or a vessel, because the two require different books.
If they are authored, commit to the ending and let the reader disagree with it. If they are a vessel, move the real arcs to the people around them and stop apologizing for a flat lead.
Check that your scenes reward what your prose claims. That is the ludonarrative test and it catches a surprising amount.
Let a room do characterization work at least once. What someone keeps, what they hid, what they never got around to throwing away.
Space your arc beats further apart than feels safe, and run a small physical reminder underneath the gap.
FAQ
What is character development in video games?
It is the process by which a game's characters change, deepen or reveal themselves over a playthrough. Unlike other media it is split between the writer and the player, so it happens through authored cutscenes, companion arcs, environmental detail and the choices the game lets you make.
Which video games have the best character development?
Red Dead Redemption 2 earns it by spreading Arthur Morgan's decline across sixty hours so it is lived with rather than watched. Disco Elysium puts the character's own competing internal voices into the mechanics, so the arc is which voice you keep listening to.
The Mass Effect trilogy does it through the companions, with Garrus moving from frustrated cop to broken vigilante to a soldier at peace across three games while Shepard stays whoever you built. The Last of Us Part II does it by making you play both sides of a revenge story and refusing to let either half off the hook.
How do writers develop a character the player controls?
Mostly by removing the need to. Either the protagonist is authored and the player only chooses tone, or the protagonist stays a container and the arcs are given to companions, antagonists and the world. Trying to force a strict arc onto a character whose behavior you cannot predict is where most game writing falls apart.
What is ludonarrative dissonance?
The gap between what a game's story says and what its gameplay rewards. A protagonist described as a reluctant hero who mechanically kills hundreds of people without comment is the standard example. It matters because players read behavior, not description.
Can novelists actually learn anything from game writing?
Yes, mainly three things. Characterise through spaces and objects rather than description, split your cast so different people carry different arcs, and check that your scenes reward the behavior your narration claims.
Why do so many game protagonists feel flat?
Because a character built to accommodate any player's choices cannot have strong opinions of their own. The flatness comes out of the design constraint rather than out of lazy writing, and the good games compensate by putting all the personality into the party.
