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In the videogame industry, characters are probably best known as brand ambassadors -- symbols for a company, a console or a series of games. Sometimes, like Halo's Master Chief, they do all those things at once. But, before any of that can happen, these protagonists need to draw us in the fiction that makes up their game world. Games don't tell stories the same way other media do, because the focus on interactivity will eventually push you down a path.

The modern Prince of Persia games make up one of my favorite trilogies because they spool out a complete character arc for their royal lead. When taken as a set, you see a brash youth's sense of entitlement unleash chaos in the first game, The Sands of Time, and even the angsty missteps of the second game, Warrior Within, can be slyly explained away as necessary conflicts that get resolved in the final installment, The Two Thrones.

Ben Mattes, who worked on those games and is a producer on the upcoming Prince of Persia at Ubisoft's Montreal studio, put forth an idea that kind of threw me for a loop while some of the Crispy contingent and I were at Ubisoft's recent press event in Paris. As he talked about how the new game is unconnected to the old ones, Mattes stated that players didn't fall in love with the previous Prince character so much as they were enamored with the story and gameplay that moved through him. At that same press event, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot announced a sequel to Beyond Good & Evil, followed by a clip of Jade, the main character, and Pey'J, her avuncular sidekick, sitting down at the side of the road next to a broken vehicle. Part of what endeared Jade to me in the first game was her overarching selflessness, her real-world problems (finding a job, making money) and her triumph over hopelessness. This confluence of events got me wondering about the nature of characters in videogames.

Even in a bad book or movie, stories don't always move in one direction. Characters are the waypoints to surveying the scope of a tale. You can get a sense of all a story's participants by seeing how multiple characters react to an event or a shift in the status quo. In the vast majority of games you're experiencing the narrative unilaterally, in one direction with one character. Without the privilege of circumspection (or at least a little backtracking), the tyranny of a plot's momentum means that you're only ever getting the lead character's point of view. (That may be why BioShock's misdirection gambits and plot twists worked so well.) So it frequently falls on supporting characters and bad-guy antagonists to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to rounding out what we know or how we feel about the character we're playing. But that depends just as much on the construction of the persona that we're controlling.