How do you feel as an android?

Meryl, stop getting shot!

Many games over the years, though I would argue not enough, has been trying to pull the heart strings of their audiences for an emotional bond with it's characters. May have been through graphical fidelity or clever writing and musical cues. Not as many games have created characters that feel as though they have thoughts that rationalize their way to their conclusion, reasoning behind their words and the feelings they portray. And above all else, most of video game emotions are still based on a very two way scale of good and bad. Certainly there are exceptions to the rule and I applaud those that tread the lines of gray. Because life isn't clear cut, and there are no right answers. Life is a question of instant reaction to what we perceive around us and what our experience say the outcome should be based on previous examples of those events or similar. What does this tell us about emotional game characters?

It tells us that they're predisposed to act according to the event, not the experience. Much like a well trained sociopath, social cues are imitated and acted out because that's what expected. But there is nothing behind the veil of their disconnect to the other people. Assuming you're an android and you look at the world through logic coding and mathematics, you don't understand the social concepts of emotions because those are based on experience and the biologically bred instinct for survival of you and yours. How would an android then fear death if fear is an irrational feeling to guide our escape?

What does this mean?

The problem facing us is the need to have thinking characters. And what does thinking characters need? Questions. Because like you and me, it's not in the answers that we define ourselves. It is in the questions we pose every day. Not all questions have answers and some we spend our entire lifetime trying to figure out. An android does not have questions, it seeks answers. Curiosity for them isn't about the quest, it's about the raw data that adds to the database of knowledge that they can use to behave more naturally. But there is no experience extrapolated from the data.

Having played many games recently which characters that think about the situation they are in, I found most of them never asked many questions of themselves. Mostly they judged the situation and as an android or sociopath, they acted according to what the situation seemed to warrant. Sometimes that meant doing nothing (because they had no answer/data) and that resulted in ruins. Furthering solidifying themselves as shell like creations with strings and cues but no motivation of their own.

I am very curious how we would all play games if the characters we played seemed to be guided by their own desires and thoughts rather than our goals of achieving the best ending. And if we would be as careless with other characters beside our own if they also seemed more driven by a sense of life rather than being magnetically connected with our own character for no rhyme or reason. Most of all though, how could we as players be broken down and merged with the experience of bonding with those characters if it didn't mean shooting someone, stabbing someone or otherwise inflict physical damage or becoming the savior of the world? I can't emotionally resonate with military shooters because I've never been in a fire fight and I don't have the experience to imagine how that would feel. I can emotionally resonate with a fallen comrade in those games though because I have friends that mean a lot and I wouldn't be happy if they died. The possibilities for emotional investments in characters are so underused in today's games because no one is playing games that revolves around actual human experiences and interactions, for the most part.

In regards to romantic relationships, there is no real me.

Once a rather famous android said that the reason he didn't want his memories and knowledge transferred over to a computer was because of the risk that the essence or "flavor" of those memories might be lost in the transfer. Implying that he had learned to distinguish between raw data and experience. The connection of dots between what happened and what that meant. I wish there was more video game characters that share that trait. That somehow show that they understand what is actually going on rather than being reactionary in ways they are supposed to be.

Finally, there needs to be some amount of conclusions that characters come to that isn't completely crazy. In fact, it would be nice if the games made sure the character actually came to some conclusions other than "I am as unsure about this whole thing as the guy controlling me." It's not reassuring and I can't find myself sympathetic with a character in a state of panic if I don't get what he's actually in panic for. I don't know him enough and his character traits are not obvious enough for me to know what would cause his panic either. Simply put, he's acting the way he's supposed to in order to convey something rather than being something.