That’s a good column, and insightful about the effectiveness of the mute PC. I think that it also may also help players project themselves into the PC’s role. It’s important that the PC be defined as a teenager at the beginning (by Mr. Wong’s message), or the opening of the game would be creepy rather than sweet, but beyond that the PC can be you. — I guess that’s a pretty banal observation about the AFGNCAAP, as some folk discuss around pp. 81-2 of this book.
I think this is especially true where a game wants to show the player befriending an NPC (which may be something more than the PC befriending the NPC). A game doesn’t have to cater too much to my particular tastes to get me to come to like an NPC, or at least to suspend disbelief enough to play the role of liking her. But if it shows me what the PC is doing as they befriend the NPC, that can block my identification; I’ll think, “That’s not how I make friends.”
Galatea is an interesting comparison here. You have to show the PC’s remarks, because the game is or can be partly about how the PC comes to realize that Galatea is alive and deal with her emotions. (For the PC, Galatea is a person that he sees as a machine; for the player, Galatea is a machine that we see as a person.) Usually this works very well for me, but I think it breaks down in the ending where you stay up all night chatting with her, because you have to tell us we chat rather than letting us do the chatting. Which again is probably inevitable, but it means we’re told what we’re doing rather than actually doing it. And that could be a problem even if we did have the choice of topics during this chat — what I say on that topic could be very different from what I’d choose to say. When we’re drawing Galatea out, it’s very different, perhaps because the quips uttered hew pretty close to the topic, and because the focus isn’t on what the PC says but how he feels.
(Was that obnoxious? I do find Galatea completely captivating, it’s just that one ending I don’t like that much. And that may be partly because I completely had to use the walkthrough to get it.)
I do wonder if you’re right that you couldn’t achieve the blank protagonist in a text-based game, because of the need for a narrative voice. Failsafe does something similar, where you don’t get anything about the PC other than the commands you type; maybe you could do a conversation game like that in which you only hear the NPC’s quips, not the PC’s. Maybe an IF adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
That’s a good column, and insightful about the effectiveness of the mute PC. I think that it also may also help players project themselves into the PC’s role. It’s important that the PC be defined as a teenager at the beginning (by Mr. Wong’s message), or the opening of the game would be creepy rather than sweet, but beyond that the PC can be you. — I guess that’s a pretty banal observation about the AFGNCAAP, as some folk discuss around pp. 81-2 of this book.
I think this is especially true where a game wants to show the player befriending an NPC (which may be something more than the PC befriending the NPC). A game doesn’t have to cater too much to my particular tastes to get me to come to like an NPC, or at least to suspend disbelief enough to play the role of liking her. But if it shows me what the PC is doing as they befriend the NPC, that can block my identification; I’ll think, “That’s not how I make friends.”
Galatea is an interesting comparison here. You have to show the PC’s remarks, because the game is or can be partly about how the PC comes to realize that Galatea is alive and deal with her emotions. (For the PC, Galatea is a person that he sees as a machine; for the player, Galatea is a machine that we see as a person.) Usually this works very well for me, but I think it breaks down in the ending where you stay up all night chatting with her, because you have to tell us we chat rather than letting us do the chatting. Which again is probably inevitable, but it means we’re told what we’re doing rather than actually doing it. And that could be a problem even if we did have the choice of topics during this chat — what I say on that topic could be very different from what I’d choose to say. When we’re drawing Galatea out, it’s very different, perhaps because the quips uttered hew pretty close to the topic, and because the focus isn’t on what the PC says but how he feels.
(Was that obnoxious? I do find Galatea completely captivating, it’s just that one ending I don’t like that much. And that may be partly because I completely had to use the walkthrough to get it.)
I do wonder if you’re right that you couldn’t achieve the blank protagonist in a text-based game, because of the need for a narrative voice. Failsafe does something similar, where you don’t get anything about the PC other than the commands you type; maybe you could do a conversation game like that in which you only hear the NPC’s quips, not the PC’s. Maybe an IF adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.