Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
Steven Poole takes the lead and explores the role of the protagonist
A at one point in Christopher Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet, lead actor John David Washington’s character complains at being left out of the loop to arms dealer Priya Singh. “I’m the protagonist!” he objects. “You’re protagonist,” Singh replies dismissively. This is a truth that videogames usually try to hide from us: each player wants to feel that they are the world-altering hero of the story, even though many thousands of other people playing the same game are the world-altering hero of exactly the same story. If someone tells you they saved Termina and restored the moon in Majora’s Mask, it makes no sense to respond: “No, I did!”
The word ‘protagonist’ first appeared in English in John Dryden’s preface to the first printed edition of his play An Evening’s Love, or The Mock Astrologer, in 1671. Dryden notes that he has been accused of making “debauch’d persons”, such as the gentlemen of this play who spend a night flirting with two Spanish women, “my Protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama”. (Indeed, Samuel Pepys saw the play and deemed it “very smutty”.) In strict usage the protagonist, from the Greek for ‘first actor’, is exclusively the leading character; Greek had other words for the second (‘deuteragonist’) and third (‘tritagonist’).
Because the Greek ‘agonist’ fundamentally means ‘competitor’ (Greek drama festivals were competitions among playwrights), it also has a long association with physical competition, fighting, and other kinds of struggle or suffering – it’s where we also get ‘agony’ and ‘agonising’. And the leading character in a videogame certainly fits this bill, suffering untold ignoble injuries and often literal, though not permanent, deaths on the way to potential completion of the quest. What are the Hunter in Bloodborne or Super Meat Boy, to take two very different game heroes, if not protagonists in the sense of prime sufferers?
For John David Washington in Tenet, however, being the protagonist means something more than simply being the one who survives brutal violence, as he does near the beginning. His claim to be the protagonist is an assertion that he is the prime mover of the story, that he has agency to make things happen this way or that. (It is also a claim to be in a story, somehow to know that he is in a movie, unless his mother named him ‘The Protagonist’, which would imply an impressive degree of foresight on her part.) Whether this is true or not of his own situation does not become clear until the very end of the film, where he is able to say, this time with complete confidence, “I’m the protagonist.”
Notoriously, of course, in videogames we are not protagonists in this way, because the story arcs, or even the multiple branches thereof, are scripted, and our actions cannot have narrative effects that the designers have not foreseen. Videogames can, like Tenet itself, involve us in mind-bending scenarios about the flow of time, from Majora’s Mask to Jonathan Blow’s classic Braid and so forth, but the solution is always predetermined. It is to compensate for the unspoken fact that, as the player of a videogame, you cannot truly be the protagonist, that so many games pump you up in other ways, festooning you with weapons and cool wisecracks, laying on thick the heroic affect. Philosophically speaking, however, the player can only be really free by consciously choosing to adopt, instead, the role of antagonist (the character who attempts to frustrate the protagonist’s schemes) to the designer-protagonist: trying at every turn to break the game by doing what was not intended. In this sense, and a propos of a recent Twitter kerfuffle, QA testers, whose job it is to do precisely this, are an integral part of the drama of game development.
Yet in another sense we are all the Protagonist from Tenet, precisely in the scene where, having ‘inverted’ himself so that he is moving backwards through time, Washington fights himself: the other him, who was (is) moving forwards in time. Here the character is both protagonist and antagonist at once. And in videogames we are always really fighting our past selves – whether they are made visible (as, for instance, ghosts of previous best times in a racing game) or just live in our minds as the competitor whose last attempt we have to improve on. We may not be the protagonist of what, on the surface, is the game’s story, but we are both protagonist and antagonist in the absurdist psychodrama that is the deep experience of playing the game: it’s you, against yourself, again and again, to save the world.
Steven Poole’s Trigger Happy 2.o is now available from Amazon. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole.net
In videogames we are always really fighting our past selves – whether they are made visible or just live in our minds