Does the player character in a game set on a fictional computer have to be a blank slate?

[verysunshine]

I've played a lot of desktop simulators, like Her Story, Hypnospace Outlaw, and Analogue: A Hate Story. In these games, the player character is a blank slate. They have little characterization and little impact on the plot.

The game I'm working on has a player character with a specific backstory. I thought that meant the player character had to be a pre-defined individual. It would be weird to say, "You can be anyone. By the way, people are asking about the entertainment business your mom ran in the 1980s, when you were a child."

Dream Daddy isn't a desktop simulator, but it might have a solution to the specificity. The player character is a single father looking for love with another dad. Within that, there are many characterization options. The dad's former partner can be male or female. The child can be adopted or born into the family.

I'm not sure if making a more open-ended character would be better. My project is early enough in development that it's easy to change major details. What do you think?

[parttimestorier]

I don't think there's any reason the player has to be a blank slate in that kind of game. There's no reason the player can't be experiencing the simulation through the eyes of a defined character. It's not nearly as popular as the ones you listed, but I actually made a short email/instant message simulator for nanoreno one year that introduces a specific protagonist by name through the first emails you see. There's also Emily Is Away, another popular one in which the player character is a teenager who has a preexisting relationship with the eponymous Emily. And I don't think I'd say the player character in Her Story was a blank slate either, even if they might seem like it at the beginning.

(Minor edit: I had originally said "Emily Was Away" and that the protagonist was a teenage boy, but on second thought I realized I had one word of the title wrong and that the protagonist's gender might have actually been ambiguous.)

[cheonbyeol]

I'm not familiar with the type of game in question, but genrally speaking, I don't think the format needs to dictate the personality (or lack thereof) of the character. And personally, I don't like black slate characters in any type of media. The general advice circulating in the writer community, that I believe to be universal to any kind of media: what makes a character relatable is being flawed and human, and they have to be interesting enough for the consumer of that media to want to follow them. At least, that seems to be the majority opinion. There's always the minority who prefer self-insert and wish-fulfillment and maybe this subgenre is a niche serving them, but you probably know more about that. Still, just because there's a usual way of doing things, doesn't mean that's the best way to do things. You can try to do something different, always riskier, and maybe it'll flop, but maybe it'll get the hype exactly because it's something new.
Welp, this turned into a brainfart. Anyways, it's food for thought.

[Mutive]

I'm pretty sure nothing is mandatory. There aren't video game gods who smite creators who do foolish things like create non-blank slate protagonists.

With that said, most desktop simulators give their protagonists blank slates so that the player can feel like they're the main character (vs. that they're controlling someone else's actions).

Different games use different levels of customization for the main character. (Arguably, even with Analogue, you're given a character with a very specific job description because it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a Medieval peasant farmer to be floating about a derelict space station.) How far you want to take it depends very much on your vision for the story.

[HEXdidnt]

Also consider the broad range of definitions for 'role play' - it can be anywhere on the spectrum from defining who the character is by the way one plays the game, to having a strict idea of who the character is and playing based on that impression... but even then, the player can put themselves in the character's shoes and behave as they believe is appropriate to that character, or deliberately subvert the defined character, just to see what happens, particularly when dealing with people they've ostensibly known for years.

Blank slate characters have their uses, but a certain amount of predefined character helps the player get a feel for the situation they're in. A complete life story would be a little excessive, but I'd say it'd be useful to give the player sufficient grounding to point them in the right direction, and then let them decided how closely they follow that path.