The film There Will Be Blood is about many things. The Oil Boom of the late 1900's, the dissection of the birth of Evangelicalism, and the examination of a father and son's relationship are all covered in the film, but without a doubt, the film is truly about Daniel Plainview. Portrayed in the movie by Daniel Day-Lewis (who won an Oscar for the role), Plainview is an extremely conflicted character. He is at both times charming and reviling, pitiful and shrewd, distant and relatable. You watch the character grow, and through his actions become invested in him, and by virtue, the film itself. And even when he commits a horrifying, brutal act at the film's close, you do not necessarily feel anger, remorse, or disgust, but a combination of many different emotions that cannot be fully dissected until well after the film is over and you are sitting in a coffee shop with your friends discussing it.

Character development is an absolute necessity to the art of storytelling. You'll find it in some facet in every form of literature, from See Spot Run to a biography about Abraham Lincoln. Even entertainment that is considered less than highbrow usually features some sort of development. Consider a film like Role Models. It's a pretty generic comedy, but there are full character arcs that are closed by the film's end, even if it's completely cliched (guy who is a jerk and hates kids becomes nice and likes kids). If both your average summer comedy and children's storybook can feature some semblance of a character arc, why is it so hard for videogames to do the same?

Character development in videogames is usually limited to 1.) the appearance of the character, and 2.) arbitrary story beats that seal the deal in defining what the appearance has already sketched out. Take Gears of War. There are monsters that live under the planet's surface. They look like monsters, they kill people. Easy enough. There is some limited backstory in a vague voiceover from a "queen" of some sort, but development is pretty limited in terms of motivation for what stand as the "bad guys". Ironically, the heroes don't come much better. The main character, Marcus Fenix, is a guy in jail who did something that put him in jail, and now he's out of jail and wearing armor and fighting the underground monsters. He has a buddy who is looking for his wife. If you haven't played the games, you can probably already guess the outcome of all of this without too much trouble, especially if you've ever seen a Michael Bay movie.

Gears of War is fish in a barrel, you say? Well, when you step back, it's actually more akin to par-for-course of many of the most popular titles of today. What is Master Chief's character arc in the three Halo games? He's fighting the Covenant. Why? Because that's what Master Chief's do, apparently. I know, I know. Action games are action games. So, I'll switch it up. What about Street Fighter? Off topic, too? Shouldn't be. Ryu goes around for four games fighting countless people because... well, essentially because that's what he does. Some people work at Burger King, Ryu beats people up and moves on. Surely some sort of real character development can be squeezed in there somewhere. Surely there's got to some context to this?

I'm sure there will be a lot of "Well, what do you expect? It's a fighting game". Sure, so was Ong Bak or Kung Fu Hustle, technically speaking. But those movies had character arcs all their own. We understood why the characters were doing what they were doing, and why it mattered to both them, and us as the audience. We identified with the heroes, not because they 'looked cool', or because we were supposed to, but because we got to know them.

What about games where story is king? Let's crack open that old chestnut, Final Fantasy VII. Sephiroth has a semi-decent arc. He was technically a good guy, that found out much of his past was not what he thought it was, and then goes on a rampage. Okay, we're good so far. It's pretty basic, but it works as a skeleton. It's not really until he takes the jump from personal revenge to "I'm going to destroy the whole world" that it sort of comes off the rails. Why is he seeking to do this? What benefit does he have? Bitterness carries a long way, but I never felt like I understood why the character would make that kind of jump in scope. He was crazy? Well, that's very convenient in terms of wrapping it up, but I guess it will do.

To those that would say that Final Fantasy fits a very traditional Japanese storytelling style and character development is limited to that method, well, you would be correct, but not correct in terms of justification for hollow character arcs. The Metal Gear Solid series is unquestionably Japanese (and often that lovely sort of Batshit Japanese), but it still manages to tell a full story across four games that actually features character development. In each sequel, the series did a great job of telling us new things about characters we had already known. That is the very definition of serial character development. You play through two games knowing that Big Boss was The Bad Guy, and by the close of the third game, you find yourself hard-pressed to hold that to be true. By the end of the fourth game, your opinions of every character you have spent nearly ten years with may be completely different from when you saw the credits at the end of the first.

Games are unique in that they have the benefit of time and interactivity to develop characters. People complain about eight hour games, but consider that Apocolypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, or the aforementioned There Will Be Blood use a fraction of that time to tell a story that feature full arcs for multiple characters. Eight hours should be plenty of time to explore the depths of a character, and have that actually mean something by the end. Not only that, but you are the character. You are the one steering the story. By that very nature you are already invested, because these things are happening to you. Not even Citizen Kane cane lay claim to that. That puts the foot in the door already. Lazy design or corporate bullshit tend to be responsible for slamming it shut, toes and all.

Some games have taken advantage of the medium to do character development right. Psychonauts is a prime example of this. Take an interactive experience, and make the levels you inhabit character development unto itself. Brilliant. Perfect. Half-Life 2 presents character development through conversation, facial animation, and clever writing. Gordon Freemen is a unique exception to the rule in that he is almost featureless in terms of character development, thereby allowing you to craft the fabric of the fiction yourself. If your heart jumps to your throat when Alyx becomes injured, it's because of good design choices on part of Valve, and your own actions. Even so, the prospect of Episode 3 worries me. Will this type of storytelling build to a satisfying, character-based conclusion, or will we fall into those tired standbys that seem to plague the industry? God forbid we end up with the G-Man turning into a tentacled Endboss. Bonus, if there's a time limit.

In closing, we have production values that rival Hollywood, artists of the finest caliber, technology that evolves on a seemingly yearly basis... but it sometimes feels like we are missing the most important part of storytelling; heart. Sadly, we seem trapped in an industry that mistakes "polygon" as the sole definition of "three-dimensional".