It really helps when Gruff Video Game Man is a real person

In almost every way, Sam Bridges from Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and its predecessor is the purest archetype of a video game character. He’s a stoic white dude with a gravelly voice. He’s a man of few words and determined action with strong feelings he buries deep. He’s got dark hair and stubble. He’s got a normal, dependable, single-syllable first name and a thematically appropriate surname. Like so many modern examples of the form, he’s a dad now. He is Gruff Video Game Man.

Gruff Video Game Man is the cliché who stares grimly out at you from so many boxes, posters, and trailers. He’s Max Payne, he’s Sam Fisher, he’s Marcus Fenix, he’s Joel Last of Us. He’s that guy from the new Call of Duty trailer who’s so bland he’s actually difficult to see; he’s the empty shell you pour yourself into.

He’s also the antithesis of “diverse” — heteronormative, masculine, and super white. He’s the expression of the lack of imagination among game developers, and the small-minded caution of game marketers, that have artificially constrained the demographic reach of video games for decades.

Here’s the thing about Sam Bridges, though. He is also Norman Reedus, an actor and a real human. And once Gruff Video Game man becomes a real person, he ceases to be Gruff Video Game Man at all.

Many actors have played Gruff Video Game Man before. Troy Baker, for example, portrays Joel in The Last of Us games, not only delivering his voice lines but using performance capture technology to express his movements. But Joel doesn’t look like Baker; he isn’t Baker. He’s a designed character, an archetypal ideal that’s been etched out by Naughty Dog’s artists and then filled in by Baker’s performance.

Hideo Kojima, the director of the Death Stranding games, is responsible for perhaps the ultimate Gruff Video Game Man: Solid Snake (or Naked Snake, Big Boss, etc.) from Metal Gear. Tall and rangy, with his trademark headband and the almost parodically grizzled voice of David Hayter, Snake is pure iconography. He’s a great character design, but he’s not really a person.

Kojima has taken a very different approach with Sam Bridges, even though the character is similar on paper. Kojima Productions’ unbeatably good 3D scans and performance capture mean that Sam doesn’t just sound like Reedus, he looks like him and moves like him, and even stands like him. It’s much closer to a filmed performance, where the actor becomes the character rather than puppets them.

And while Reedus — the tough guy from The Walking Dead and The Boondock Saints — is definitely gruff, and white, and all the rest, he’s also him. He has features you’d never design into some common-denominator of hunky manhood, even though he’s unquestionably a hunky man. He’s kind of stocky, with sloping, rolling shoulders and a bullish neck. He’s got an unreadable squint, a downturned mouth, and lank emo hair. His physicality is dense and bulldog-like, but he also has a quietness, a stillness, an interiority that speaks of vulnerability as much as strength. He also has that weird trick that great movie actors have, where the less he does, the more presence he has.

Kojima Productions has successfully captured all of this. That means Sam is much more than the collection of clichés he might appear to be, because he’s a person, with all the individual quirks that go with it. Reedus’ performance and Kojima Productions’ technology can’t make him a deeper character than he’s written — he’s still a pretty simple, stoic, reluctant-hero type. But those elements can, and do, give him humanity.

This trick can work for NPCs as well as player characters — and the scans and performance capture don’t have to be cutting edge, either. Cyberpunk 2077’s Johnny Silverhand is theoretically a pretty corny character, but because he is Keanu Reeves, he’s actually cool. You feel excited to hang out with him. If a likeness and performance have been captured just well enough, it can transform your relationship to a character.

But what Reedus and Kojima Productions have achieved with Sam does more than that — it dignifies a whole game. Maybe it even does the impossible, and dignifies Gruff Video Game Man himself. In an ideal world, he wouldn’t still be so dominant, and we’d have a wider spread of video game protagonists to choose from. And if all of them had the realness and humanity of Sam Bridges/Norman Reedus… just imagine!