then pre-quel? I played the game…you see the amazon mom and others? and there were vampires.
Thanks, I’ll check them out. ^^
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There’s Hollowed Minds too if you haven’t read it. It’s murder mystery
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I’ve had it on my list for a while but haven’t gotten around to play it (or rather I forgot until now 
). Thanks!
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Oh, also Sherlock Holmes - An Affair of the Heart.
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The whole “not main character” narrator is a thing in a lot of stories. Watson was already mentioned but theres also Ishmael and Nick Caraway to name two more famous examples. It’s done for many reasons, but a key one is to provide an amount of distance to the MC and cast their story in a different light. The story might be about some great figure going on an adventure(like hunting a semi-mythical whale) but the story of that adventure is being told by someone who was just there for the events, not the actual person undertaking the quest or whatever. Which sounds exactly like the idea being raised. In fact, in this genre where the player character is so often that chosen one is going off to fight the dark lord, playing as somebody who was just along for the ride would be a great subversion of the usual types of stories we see.
On your point about being able to reload saves, I do agree that for most characters in games their ultimate superpower is in fact the ability to be essentially immortal and redo any sequence of events ad infinitum. There are of course plenty of games that either address that in some sort of way or represent being able to respawn as a key part of the player character. So far it’s not really a thing in IF as far as I know, mainly cause when you reload you have to restart the whole game usually.
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@JBento Tried that one and liked it a whole lot. 
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There’s a quest sequence in BG2: Throne of Bhaal where the NPCs load a saved game.
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It’s not? It’s just a throwaway line that literally doesn’t work in the genre of video games.
Those are narrators, completely unrelated to the main character thing and what I’m talking about.
That’s still infinite second chances any time I want so it still mean the line doesn’t work at all.
Dontnod tried that trick in Life Is Strange 2, the result… judge yourself, I don’t care about that strom of cliché and stereotypes.
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Even Life Is Strange 2 has you play the main character, you’re just not playing the guy with Superpowers. At the end of the day the game still stop happening if you just do nothing and the story is about dealing with having to protect someone stronger than you from others and themselves.
So if anyone started screaming that he isn’t the hero / main character and doesn’t get second chances, it would be dumb too.
Maybe I’m missing the point but I can totally see an IF where the main plot is about a hero who goes on a quest to slay a dragon, but you are not that person. Arguments about the semantics of what ‘main’ is supposed to mean aside, having the player character be someone who is not only not the chosen one character, but having a very visible chosen one in the story is a clear subversion of the usual premise IFs.
And I mean that having to restart the entire game is not the same as reloading a quicksave before a fight or big decision. It’s not nearly as chafing to a player’s suspension of disbelief when the diagetic narrative is presenting a life or death situation hinging on your choice and to remake that choice you have to play the entire game again. It becomes much more jarring when you’re in the final battle and to fail means the end of the world, but really if you did fail you would just reload the save and try the battle again.
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I feel we’re talking past each others because I never once mentioned any chosen ones and that concept is completely unrelated to being a main character or not. There are hundreds of stories where you have a chosen one who’s barely more than a background character. Hell, it’s a whole genre of fantasy stories nowadays.
It being less convenient or not isn’t really the point, the point is that the game pointing it out just remind me I CAN restart, which break immersion even if I wouldn’t actually restart.
I guess my point is that the trope where a game paints a scenario as having no second chances or framing the pc as not being the hero will only ever make sense within the narrative of the story, because it’s just a story. Obviously you can restart the game, put it down and never play it again etc. You are as you point out, always ever the ‘main person’ cause you’re the one playing the game.
When games use tropes like that it’s relying on a level of suspension of disbelief that I feel is really not unwarranted.
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Also, I just want to point out, you as the player interacting with said game have infinite lives as the character you’re playing as, meta wise. The character with respect to the world they are in absolutely does not. I mean… unless they do and that’s part of the story/world. That’s kind of like saying any game that has a checkpoint system that loads after the main character dies in combat is immersion breaking if it doesn’t just soft-lock you out of playing the rest of the game forever. I feel like you always have to have even a little bit of suspension of disbelief when playing any videogame in that respect because, meta-wise, it’s just a game. But dying and respawning in a game like The Last Of Us shouldn’t be immersion breaking. In fact, it should show you that death can happen to anyone in the world and that no one has plot armor, so it should seek to raise the tension even further, because you ideally care about the character you’re playing as and actively don’t want them to die. That’s just my take on it though.
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So, what would it look like to you, for a playable character to not be the “main character?”
I have seen a few novels — not games — where the viewpoint character is not the main character. For example, To Kill a Mockingbird has Scout as our narrator and viewpoint character. She experiences the main plot (Tom Robinson’s trial) from the outside, as the main character’s daughter. Likewise, The Rest of Us Just Live Here has the main cast living in a world where YA novels are real, and the adventure typically happens to other people, while Mike and his friends have to live with the consequences of those adventures. The other one I can think of would maybe be the movie In This Corner of the World, which is WW2 told from the perspective of a Japanese housewife just trying to keep herself and her family alive.
Are you suggesting a game where the protagonist lives in a world where major things happen around or to the protagonist, but they are unable to control those events, only react?
As for your comment on being able to put down the game or return to an earlier save, there are games like Undertale, which records when you return to earlier saves or restart the game and react to that. I’m not sure how you would avoid the whole “I-can-put-this-down” — it’s just gameplay/story segregation. There is possibly the way Wayfarer does it, by allowing the story to continue and giving you unique paths for failed stat-checks, thus discouraging save-scumming.
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Tbh I hate most prophecies/legends in stories. Just feels like an asspull most of the time for the MC to be a special little chosen one.
I like the way Dragon Ball did it with Super Saiyan though, because Goku, a merciful, pure of heart Saiyan was the one to become the first one in however long, instead of someone as malicious as Vegeta was. Also helps that it was vague, and could have happened to somebody else first. Also, Frieza’s fear of it (as well as other Saiyan-related shit) caught up to him in the end, and that’s just beautiful.
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I’m not a literary prof so this is just me talking out my ass, but how much of the MC=protagonist is a modern story telling style? Moby Dick, Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, really anything by Jules Verne, all are told from the perspective of someone witnessing someone/something amazing rather than Ahab or Nemos perspective. Seems a lot of classic literature is centered on protagonists other than the narrator.
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The idea of a narrative framing device, one expression of which is to tell the story from the POV of somebody who the story is not actually about, has also been around a long time.
It’s a literary technique that can be useful for thematic, characterisation and even practical reasons. Having the POV character be someone who isn’t the main character is especially useful when that main character is supposed to be some sort of larger-than-life person who by design doesn’t have that much in common with an average person. The narrator can very easily be audience surrogate, author surrogate and their own character whose viewpoints and biases very directly affect the reader’s perception of the story being told.
It’s not really been much of a thing in IF cause reader agency is the main thing about IFs; if you’re reading a story where your choices are taken into account and has an effect on how the story goes then of course it’s very natural for the PC to be the person the story is about.
Now that it’s been brought up I honestly think it’s a great device to use for a prospective game that allows for the PC to be a relatively blank slate and thus more easily accomodate self-insertion from the reader, while also having a relatively set main character of the story, who would themselves be a different character entirely.
They’re around. For example in 80 Days you play as the loyal valet trying to support your employer’s wager that they can make it around the world in no more than 80 days.
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