Three years later, Gordon Freeman burst inaudibly onto the scene. The silence of gaming's most famously silent protagonist was particularly highlighted in Half-Life's sequels, in which he was joined by accomplice and romantic interest Alyx. Gordon's atypical, ordinary background and mild-mannered appearance gave players a realistic vessel to identify with, while Alyx provided near-rhetorical dialogue to help fill in his absent dialogue. Detractors argued that Gordon's lack of a perceivable personality and muteness at important plot moments undermined him as a hero.

Maybe this is an argument underlined by 2007's BioShock, in which players led a silent protagonist into harm by blindly following the suggestions of what turned out to be a malevolent stranger. BioShock's revelatory plot exposes how much more can be explored within the realm of silent protagonists. The game wouldn't have been anywhere near as impactful with a talking player character, after all. Maybe what and prove in combination is that gaming hasn't yet seen a convincing silent protagonist, one whose silence players truly feel comfortable with.

The Customs of Custom-Made Characters

Wizardry, a Dungeons and Dragons-style game released in 1981, let players compose a party of five characters with customizable races, moral alignments and fighting classes. It was one of the first games to offer character customization, a feature that would pervade future series like Might & Magic and early iterations.

Wizardry's D&D-inspired customization would find a spiritual successor in BioWare's Baldur's Gate series, but around that time were making more interesting developments. Released in 2000, The offered more pragmatic, personality-based attributes for customization, such as neatness and playfulness, allowing players to create characters with fairly discernable traits. enjoyed exceptional success and broad appeal, and millions of men and women used the life simulator's character customization for role-play and playing out dramatic scenarios.

Character customization spread into many genres, but continued as a staple of the Western RPG in the hands of developers and Softworks. Their most recent games, Dragon Age: Origins and 3 respectively, both offer incredibly detailed visual customization, as does the recently released Sims 3. However, Sports games like 10, PGA Tour 10 and Fight Night Round 4 allow players to superimpose photo-derived versions of their own face onto avatars, taking the concept of a virtual representation of self in a video game to whole new levels.

While this level of visual customization is impressive, it remains decorative compared to the ability to impose specific attributes upon a character. With The Sims series (rightly) keeping its edge, the lack of customizable personality-based variables holds back of social experiment-type gameplay. As for Western RPGs, developers may argue that players define their characters through their actions. Yet their games offer some personality-based variables, usually D&D-derived attributes like wisdom, intelligence and charisma. Surely there is more to a character's personality, even in fantastical settings, than these vague and tired tropes? In terms of personality, the character customization of hasn't progressed far from the days of Baldur's Gate and Wizardry.

Sexuality: Inclusive but Never Mandatory

Gaming's history of gender-ambiguous characters goes right back to Super Bros. 2's gender-confused Birdo, and maybe most famously with Chrono Cross' cross-dressing Flea. But a man playing as a woman has become accepted gaming practice, whereas the idea of a straight man playing a gay character provokes more adverse reactions.

The first two Fallouts, post-apocalyptic RPGs, were the earliest games to give players the option of engaging in homosexual romance and even same sex marriage. Their mantle was famously taken up in 2001 by The Sims and then by three years later, both accommodating for gay and bisexual player characters. This inclusive approach to player characters' sexuality went on to feature in other games like Bully, and Dragon Age, with those examples coming under intense media scrutiny for bringing sex and sexuality to a medium alleged to be the mainstay of children.

Video games are becoming more inclusive regards sexuality, notably by featuring more maturely written gay characters like IV's Gay Tony' Prince and BioShock's Sander Cohen. However, mandatorily gay or bisexual player characters unquestionably remain a rarity.

Fighting games offer diverse and plentiful rosters, so it's not surprising to find many examples of gay and bisexual player characters in that genre. Yet for the majority of them, their sexuality is superficial and irrelevant, unsurprising given the simplistic nature of the genre. Party-based RPGs offer some examples like the comic relief of Shadow Hearts: Covenant's gay character Joachim Valentine. Survival horror Fear Effect 2 features a more mature take in the explicit relationship between two of its female protagonists, Hana and Rain, although game director Stan Liu played down their status as lesbians in post-release interviews.

In terms of a gay or bisexual central character, one has to go all the way back to Curtis Craig, the protagonist of 1995's psychological horror Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. Craig starts out the game seemingly straight, but later confesses to a therapist his concerns over being bisexual, revealing feelings for his openly gay best friend.

What A Puzzle of Flesh exposes is not primarily the need for gay player characters although there certainly is a deficiency but sexuality, something so important to self-identity, typically bears little relevance to player characters and their actions. Maybe it's asking too much of a medium that still has trouble handling sex, but it would be great to see more games consider their characters' sexuality, whatever it may be, in ways that aren't inappropriate, offensive or plain attention-seeking.

Breaking the Racial Stereotype

The first black player character appeared early in gaming's history, thirty years ago. Basketball on the 800 featured two playable characters, one white and one black. Skip forward 18 years and you haven't missed much in terms of black player characters. Then came 1997 and with it Final Fantasy VII, bringing with it Mr. T lookalike Barret Wallace. While Barret was popular in the East, his use of Ebonics was met with harsh criticism in the West where he was subsequently accused of being a racist stereotype.

1998 and 2003 brought less controversial ethnic characters in Grim Fandango's Hispanic Manny Calavera and Beyond Good & Evil's Jade, although the latter's indistinct skin colour made her racial origin a mystery. But gaming continued to be predominated by white player characters, except for one significant exception.

Over the years, the controversial Grand Theft Auto series has presented several ethnic player characters including San Andreas' CJ, IV's Niko Bellic, Chinatown Wars' Huang Lee, and The Ballad of Gay Tony's Luis Lopez. While prone to mild stereotyping, the series does reflect the increasingly multicultural nature of America and in particular New York. It does it appropriately too by touching on suburban racism, be it casual or more aggressive. Nonetheless, GTA remains the exception as most developers hide behind their fantastical settings to truly explore race in video games, fearful of alienating their audience and coming into trouble through poor handling of sensitive issues. But it's not just about underrepresentation. Like with player characters' sexuality and gender, failing to explore race from a protagonists' perspective ignores what still makes up a huge part of contemporary life for many of us, me included.

By Sinan Kubba