Video Game Protagonists are Psychopaths

Last night I put Half-Life 2 back in the Xbox to relive what is if not one the best game of the last few years, certainly the most well received one. My experience with the Half-Life series has certainly not been against this opinion but I noticed something strange when I was playing it that stood out after just having put 100 hours into a JPRG:

Most video game protagonists are psychopaths.

I won't admit to coming up with this idea myself. Indeed the idea of Gordon Freeman as some kind of twisted vehicle for impassioned murder was brought to my attention about a year ago. I was thinking about it when I was replaying HL2 however and once I realized that I was playing the game like I had ADHD and the supporting characters still treated me like the messiah I began to wonder if this whole experience wasn't supposed to be Gordon's warped point of view where he is essentially put in a very long corridor and continues down that path with people patting him on the back every so often and giving him a bigger gun with which to shoot the next thing that doesn't give him positive reenforcement. It doesn't help either that I constantly find myself exploring nooks and crannies and playing around with the game physics when people are trying to relay important information about the gravity of what is happening in the world. I know it's a stretch to expect the players moment to moment actions to fit in with the narrative you are traveling through but when your only real abilities are to jump and shoot it becomes hard to think of Gordon as anything but this high powered weapon with a quick-save button. Furthermore if we see the Gman and the resistance NPCs as elements that just point Gordon in a certain direction and pull the trigger then why shouldn't we, as the players who are literally pulling that trigger, be equally responsible for Gordon's actions?

Obviously because giving the player that level of agency in this setting isn't fun and if you could potentially stop your progress by not interacting with the NPCs in the right way it would be infuriating.

Gordon isn't the only protagonist who suffers from his avatar status. I recently finished Persona 4 and had a similar issue with the motivations of your character. You get to name him and select his dialog choices and in what particular sequence he interacts with the other characters in that world. One of the major mechanics is a socializing system where you nurture your relationship with other people in the world through having conversations and spending time with them. It never really feels, however, like you're really bonding with them. The rewards for spending time with the other characters are highly valuable, perhaps even necessary for fighting effectively. I found myself on more than a few occasions just thumbing through dialogs I wasn't particularly interested in because I knew that I would get better spells if I did so. Instead of legitimately responding to the characters in a way that I would have I ended up just trying to guess what the game wanted me to say to them so I could move on to the next step more quickly. Maybe there's some implicit message in all of that about me or video games or people in general but it sure made me think that my character was looking at the people around him as puzzles that he could solve rather than people he had any real emotional investment in.

I guess the point here is that when you are trying to make a story with believable interactions between your characters the way most video games do it, where you are controlling a person like you would a remote controlled car, leads to some dissonance between what the game wants you to think you are doing and what you are really doing. It's good we have games like Burnout Paradise where you act like a lunatic because that's what you're supposed to be doing.