| abstract
| - A big factor in many video games is a sense of immersion- the feeling that you yourself are involved in events playing out in another world. Many games try to do this by implying that the protagonist is simply an extension of the player- an avatar. The trouble with avatars is that giving them the potential to do anything makes it hard to make them do... well, anything. Thus other games prefer to give you characters with a life of their own, you just get to play as them. So, here is the Sliding Scale of Player and Protagonist Integration.
* Advisor: The protagonist has a personality of their own and, in-universe, their own free will. They explicitly acknowledge the player as another entity from whom they are taking advice. They may consider you to be either a generic 'voice in the head', a spirit from a vaguely defined 'other world', or they might just come straight out and break the fourth wall. Naturally, the latter option tends to be reserved for more humorous games.
* Controller: The most common type. The protagonist has their own personality, which they will act on in story situations, but the player directly controls them throughout the action. Probably the vast majority of characters fall into this category.
* Heroic Mime: The protagonist has a personality, borne out by how others interact with them, but their lack of specific dialogue allows the player to imagine how they speak, if not how they act. Link is a classic example of a Heroic Mime done this way- it's clear he does talk, we just don't see the exact words. His actions, however, are largely fixed.
* An Adventurer Is You: The protagonist is created by the player. They will usually not have a predetermined personality, but allow the player to choose how they speak and act through dialogue options and a Karma Meter.
* AFGNCAAP: Expanding on the principle of a Heroic Mime, the AFGNCAAP has no predetermined traits, allowing the player to imagine the character however they want (though the game may impose some limits on how you can act). Best suited to text adventures, such as the Zork series, where the lack of graphics makes it easy to avoid showing the player, though the Myst series also stars an AFGNCAAP in first-person view. Gordon Freeman is often seen as somewhere between a Heroic Mime and an AFGNCAAP, since even though we know a bit about him and he has a predetermined appearance, his persona has so little impact on the game world that he's little more than an excuse for the player to be there.
* You Are You: The player explicitly is the protagonist. At its purest level, this involves the implication that the 'game' is actually some form of communication software, controlling actual events elsewhere in the world in real time- Uplink being a prime example. The Non-Entity General will often fall into this, as in Command and Conquer. Less extreme examples might include a number of puzzle games where you're given a cursor to influence the game world, but there's no actual character you're interacting with. Note that both ends of the scale essentially consist of the player acting as themselves- the difference is where the role of 'protagonist' lies, either with the player or with another in-game character. Which, come to think of it, makes it less of a sliding scale and more a circle.
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