And yet, because games offer the user an agency that other media don’t, developers face a choice: Make protagonists as malleable as Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard, or risk producing discordant moments, times when our wishes conflict with those of our onscreen avatars. With a lighter touch than GTA’s, this approach can work well. It wasn’t until two sequels later, when Claude had a cameo in GTA: San Andreas, that we even knew he had a name.Īs the audience matures, more games embrace the opportunity to portray “complicated” characters, some of whom are memorable and some of whom merely smolder with generic rage, but all of whom have preprogrammed minds of their own. He was a skin with no substance, an empty vessel for the player to possess and a foil for the outsize non-playable characters that composed the rest of the cast. Many hours into the ambitious story of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar Games’ technically proficient but narratively unfulfilling tripartite-protagonist blockbuster from 2013, it hit me: I missed Claude, the totally unambitious avatar from GTA III.Ĭlaude took the strong, silent type to the extreme: He wasn’t just taciturn, but completely incapable of communicating.
