In the early days, and I mean the really early days of home video games, you had Pong: two bars, one square ball and that’s it. Anyone could easily master the concept of Pong within seconds of seeing it.With Pong, there was no characters to root for, no villains to cheer against and no plot or story to conclude either. Pong was, besides being a pop-culture phenomenon at the time of its release, just a simple technological thing to do. Pong was just a video game, and that’s all it would ever be.
Fast forward to today, and video games are much more than simply something to play. Video games today are events, stories and lives to take interest in and be a part of too. Video game characters, especially, have evolved and grown over the years. While the erstwhile plumber was cute, he wasn’t really endearing. He didn’t say much, his emotions were limited and his experiences were fairly mundane. Heck, in his original solo adventure, he couldn’t even go too far backwards! He was just the thing that you used to finish the game.
Now, video game characters, like the ones featured in the Sony PSP are people, with expressions and emotions. They have a history and a purpose. They have a back story, and they are vengeful. They have facial expressions that video game players can relate to. They aren’t just video game characters: they’re tragic heroes and misunderstood villains. They live and work in worlds that are at once foreign to us but recognizable too. Today’s video game characters speak to us, and for us. We want to hear what they say, and see how they act and react. They aren’t just computer generated characters by designers, they are actors, with a script to follow and a mystery to unravel.
The advancement and evolution of video game characters is to be expected, since video games themselves have advanced and evolved. In the old days, video games usually took place in a finite world – that is to say that a video game player could sort of make out and define where and how the game would and should end. That made it easy to distinguish the character’s role. Today’s video games, like the ones featured on the Microsoft Xbox 360 or the Playstation Portable, take place in immense worlds where a lot of random possibilities can occur. That makes the character more random in his or her actions and reactions.
Today’s video game characters that live in the Sony PSP can be incredibly likeable and endearing too.They can have interest, emotions and depth that we can relate too and sympathize with. You can also bet that if a popular video game is released with a powerful and dynamic character, that that character will find himself on the big screen shortly thereafter.While that’s great for media companies looking to make more than just a few extra dollars, it presents a real opportunity to flesh out and give the main character some more depth. Because while today’s video games are impressive in size and scope, they are still, like the Microsoft Xbox 360, video games and they are still limited by its programming and design. But a movie or a TV program can really give new emotions to a character whom in some ways, already seems to be more than human.
- Freddy Mason
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