The Silent Character Trope

Silent protagonist as a unique video gaming trope – a nice view and great examples by a redditor from /truegaming subreddit.

What fundamentally separates video games as a medium from book or movies is the interactivity - YOU are experiencing the medium, rather than observing it. As soon as your character gains a distinct personality and traits, you can potentially lose immersion value in the game. Yet this is a two-sided coin. If your character's traits and personality are determined primarily by your actions in the video game, the protagonist gains characterization without sacrificing immersion.

I believe the silent protagonist is the best way in video gaming to succeed in this. By removing dialogue, you remove the most alienating factor between the character and the player. You are never faced with "I would never say that" situations, which can seriously break immersion.

There are plenty of games where this has worked obviously. Bioshock is one where your character becomes strongly determined by both your actions and your character's existing background without protagonist dialogue. The Half-Life series is the shining example, where the legendary status of THE FREEMAN is created solely by your actions.

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On the other hand, silent characters in games run the risk of sounding like empty dolls as explained by Ed Smith in Vice

People talk about the fantastic storytelling in Half-Life 2, the way information and exposition are threaded into the game’s architecture and scene design. But then you get to the dialogue exchanges and people are speaking directly into Gordon Freeman’s face, and he’s just staring back at them, completely silent, like a maniac. Same goes for the Call of Duty games. There you have characters enduring the worst situations and pain, being shot, watching friends die, seeing whole buildings—including the Eiffel Tower—collapse in front of their eyes, and they say nothing, not even an “ow” or a “woah.” Portal does it. DOOM does it.
Outside of cutscenes and written, unspoken dialogue options, games in the Killzone, Metro, and Fallout series do it; Dishonored does it; Skyrim and dozens of others. They all do it. And it’s crap. There’s no more effective way to eject me, mentally, from a video game than putting me in a scene where I cannot respond to what the other characters are saying. [...]

Except in video role playing games which are designed to be this way […] Trying to write and design games this way is, I’m sure, much more of a challenge than creating a mute protagonist and leaving the player to decide, but it creates more interesting fiction. The fundamental promise of video games, for me at least, is their ability to not just let you watch and hear, but also vicariously feel what it’s like to be other people. I don’t want to just be me, parachuted inside a silent 3D body. I want to observe and learn and experience the lives and outlooks of others, and I think it’s still possible for that to happen even when I’m actively inflecting a character’s behavior.

Video games need more people. I like how Amanda Ripley gasps when something frightening happens in Alien: Isolation. I like how Red Dead Redemption‘s John Marston shouts to his opponents during gunfights. Just small things, but those characters’ voices lend games a commonly absent touch of humanity. When I play a mute, personality-less avatar, I’m not a person—I’m just a cold, technological vector, a mere aspect of a video game that has absolutely no explicit feelings. I understand the mute protagonist as a device, one intended to remove the conflict between player, character, and story, but I think that conflict, even if it’s being lost by the writer, is more interesting than a convenient sidestep

Silent protagonist in other forms of media – since I don’t fuck with games that much and most of my contribution in terms of mutism would be from Genshin Impact and visual novels.

In movies or series for example, two of the best main examples I can think of is bringing back our final girl from the last post which included the horror movie Hush, the heroin here is both deaf and mute and this brings a different approach to surviving the situation imposed by the psycho home invader. He plays with her disability, almost perversely since he realizes she can’t hear him or scream. It brings another layer of horror and tension to the story that wouldn’t be present if she wasn’t a silent protagonist, and the story indeed, cooked. It’s scary and amazing.

The second protagonist I can think of is our baby Isha from Arcane, girl didn’t say a single word in the whole story, was put there as a plot device for Jinx and still conquered all the Arcane fandom. Despite being silent in voice, everything about her screamed personality, you could understand her from her gestures, actions and behavior with other characters which is a good way to test this dynamic when putting disabled characters, in this case with mutism, there are many other types of communications to explore, specially in a fantasy universe, from already existing Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) – which as an already existing template for people who can’t speak, either due to mutism from trauma, physical disability, neurological, neurodivergent people, or anyone who needs it – To more creative forms from the world the characters are inserted such as certain types of magic, or magical items, beasts or high tech, sometimes even musical instruments.

Bringing silent characters, in my opinion, creates a challenge for the writer to project since we are mostly based on dialogue and thoughts, but what if I can’t speak, what if you aren’t in my mind, such as a second person narrator, or a third person who isn’t omniscient. How should you represent these characters? And how to make it in a way the viewer, player or reader can effectively understand and be conquered by, not in the sense of a morally perfect character, cause no one’s like that. But hating or loving, you can’t admit it isn’t good. I think bringing diversity in, with these limitations as rather an adaptation than something fixable can be very interesting.

Other random recommendations since I have the habit of leaving youtube recommendations anyway are short movies or short animations, or just shorts. They generally employ this method for simplicity, strategy or lack of resources since most of them are independent. ANYWAY, enough, take it, a short animation called Spring.

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