When silence is golden

Playing Metroid Prime 3: Corruption this week got me thinking about the "silent hero" in video games. I recall having similar thoughts about The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess when it was released last year. Here we are 20 years after the original Metroid and Zelda games, and our heroes remain (except for a few grunts here and there) as silent as their original 8-bit incarnations. Long after other games have adopted a more cinematic approach by voicing all of their characters, Twilight Princess continues the voiceless, text-based presentation of its predecessors. The latest version of Metroid has strayed a bit farther from its origins, adopting a voiced dialogue format--cut-scenes and all--but Samus herself remains silent.

I'm sure the developers of both franchises feel a certain pressure to get these characters up to speed. The silent protagonist was a necessary limitation of prior generation hardware and programming, but current systems have no such limits. Today's players clearly want games that look and feel like movies, or at least offer a more realistic presentation. As one of my students put it recently, "Who wants to read a bunch of text? If I wanted that, I'd read a book!"

Do we really want to hear Link or Samus speak? What would be gained, and what would be lost? To what degree does their silence define their iconic identities, and to what degree does it limit them? Interestingly, these questions aren't unique to the medium of video games. They are the same ones faced by artists like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton at the dawn of the sound era in motion pictures.

The case of Chaplin, in particular, is instructive because, more than any other single performer, he enjoyed complete autonomy and artistic control over his work. After 1918 he essentially ran his own studio, and his filmmaking choices reflected his own personal aesthetic. More importantly, Chaplin intimately understood the Little Tramp, both as an actor and as a director. He understood how to use the language of film to communicate this tragicomic persona to an audience. As Chaplin described him, "A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure."

When City Lights was released in 1931, Charlie Chaplin had spent nearly three years making the film. During that time, Hollywood completed its conversion to sound. Chaplin was well aware the public had lost its taste for silent movies, and he was advised by many of his closest friends to rethink his approach to City Lights and add dialogue to the film. But Chaplin knew the Little Tramp could never speak. The character was an icon, the most recognizable human figure in the world. After more than 70 films portraying his most beloved character, Chaplin understood that the Tramp's silence defined him every bit as much as his trademark baggy pants and bowler hat.

Chaplin believed that a talking tramp would be a kind of betrayal, a renunciation of the relationship between Chaplin and his character, between the Little Tramp and his audience. City Lights, of course, went on to become Chaplin's greatest achievement, a comedy of unbounded genius, subtlety, pathos, and satire. Five years later in 1936 (the year of talkie gems My Man Godfrey, Camille, and Libeled Lady), the Little Tramp made his final appearance on film--silent as always--in Modern Times. Then he disappeared forever.

What do we ask of these silent heroes? I would argue, as others have done, that they serve as our surrogates in the worlds they inhabit...be it Hyrule, the GFS Valhalla, or depression era Manhattan. We project onto them an image of ourselves that would be impossible to transpose onto a character with pre -scripted dialogue. The fact that Link, Samus, and the Tramp are less "fleshed out" than their speaking counterparts allows for a certain malleability in the details of their personae. No amount of branching dialogue choices can match the limitless internal dialogue possibilities I can create in my own head. In this regard, their silence is their strength.

I should point out that I'm not suggesting Nintendo's flagship characters (I'm omitting Mario here for obvious reasons) bear the same richness or subtlety of character achieved by Chaplin in City Lights. No video game character has evolved that far, silent or otherwise. I do, however, believe the expressive boyish presentation of Link in The Wind Waker, coupled with its exciting adventure narrative, comes rather close to our experience of Chaplin in certain portions of The Gold Rush, such as the famous cliffhanger scene where the tramp and Big Jim must balance the cabin from inside to prevent it from falling off the edge of a cliff. I'm imagining the game version of this scene holding my Wii controller sideways...but I digress.

So what does the future hold for Link and Samus? Metroid Corruption suggests that developer Retro Studios has taken us to the threshold of a fully voiced Metroid game. A talking Samus would seem the next logical step. Will such a move erase a signature characteristic of the Metroid series and further homogenize the gameplay experience, or will it help keep the franchise alive and relevant? Twilight Princess, on the other hand, provides little evidence to suggest that Nintendo wishes to dramatically change the Zelda formula. Can a silent Link continue to innovate as so many of the prior Zelda titles have done? Early glimpses of Phantom Hourglass suggest that maybe he can.

One more look at Chaplin may be helpful. Late in his life, in an interview with The Guardian, Chaplin was asked if he thought the Tramp could find an audience today. His response:

I don't think there's any place for that sort of person now. The world has become a little bit more ordered. I don't think it's happier now, by any means. I've noticed the kids with their short clothes and their long hair, and I think some of them want to be tramps. But there's not the same humility now. They don't know what humility is, so it has become something of an antique. It belongs to another era. That's why I couldn't do anything like that now. And, of course, sound - that's another reason. When talk came in I couldn't have my character at all. I wouldn't know what kind of voice he would have. So he had to go.

Silent by necessity, then by design. Despite the success of City Lights, Chaplin knew he couldn't sustain a silent character in a sound medium.  He also knew the Tramp could never speak, "so he had to go."

I wonder what Nintendo knows.

Update: Leigh Alexander has posted an insightful entry on her blog that includes a portion of my post. Several useful reader comments are included there too. You can find it here. If you're not a subscriber to Leigh's blog, you should remedy that situation post haste.