Just finished playing Monument Valley, in which the most sympathetic character is indubitably the Totem, a sentient piece of masonry that looks suspiciously like a block of supermarket cheese but which selflessly assists you in solving puzzles. You, being the protagonist of a video game, cheerfully accept its help before moving on to the next level, at which point the Totem busts through a wall in order to follow you. The last you see of it, it’s sinking beneath the waves in a desperate attempt to keep pace with your magical floating platform, and while it’s less likely to generate filk than the death of the Weighted Companion Cube, it’s nearly as affecting.

(The player avatar, for her part, makes no effort to stop, turn around, warn, or assist the totem, which honestly diminished my pleasure at taking that role for the remainder of the game. Yes, I know it was a cut scene, but even a failed attempt would have been nice.)

But that sequence got me thinking about the Totem, and the Weighted Companion Cube, and about how they and characters like them are generally beloved out of all proportion to their screen time and interaction with the player. And I think a lot of that can be put down to absence.

Specifically, it’s the absence of detail in player interactions with them. They engage in a few broad-brush behaviors, easily interpretable, and that’s it. What they don’t do are highly detailed, idiosyncratic things, and that’s the secret of their success.

Because as they’re designed now, they give us very few points of interaction, and the ones we have aren’t specific. So it’s comparatively easy - note the adverb, it’s kind of important - to create characters who will engage with players on all of those few points, earning for them clean, unreserved player affection.

Start adding more points, however, and things get trickier. The more points you add - a voice, specific anecdotes and mannerisms and phrasings, complex behaviors - the more likely it is that you’re going to add in something that isn’t going to ring true to a particular player’s conception of the character. And with that first “no way my Totem would do that”, the fantasy of the relationship with the character ruptures, suspension of disbelief is strained, and the magic starts to flee.
It can work for plot arcs, too. Consider the sneaky-good narrative arc of Rock Band 3: Go from the garage to the stadium. That’s it. That’s all there is to the A-story. There’s no mid-level to the story to trip you up with “my band wouldn’t have done that” or “God, my lead singer’s a jerkwad and if I actually had any narrative control, I would have fired his sorry lumberjack-looking ass back in Topeka”. Yes, there are tiny grace notes of story - riding through the fast food drive-through in a limo, realizing just how little the band was getting paid for a gig - but these exist gloriously free of context. Self-contained, they’re there as seasoning, not indicators of any larger path the player must take against their will. And in the meantime, the main plot arc contains absolutely nothing that would ring false in its details. You play, you get better, you get bigger. That’s it, a story we can all aspire to and ride along with with no bumps or disconnects.
Obviously, it doesn’t work in all cases; part of Monument Valley's power is the way in which it stands out. And sometimes you need your supporting cast to talk and act in complex ways that don't always align perfectly with player desire, wherein momentary dissonance ultimately serves the larger fantasy. But in the right context, it draws out player attachment and emotion not through complexity, but through simplicity, elegance, and a lack of artifice.

So hats off to the Totem. I don’t know much about you, Totem, but I know that I was sad when you were gone. And in a very real sense, that’s all I ever need to know.