When people say that video games are dumb, they actually have a good point. Yes, video games are full of masculinist power fantasies and predatory monetization schemes, but this doesn’t mean that video games are a complete waste of time. Rather, being literally dumb—that is, without speech—is essential to how many of the most iconic video games operate. Decades-old mascots of the medium like Nintendo’s Mario and Link don’t speak at all in their original games, and aside from an occasional “Let’s a-go!” or pain-induced grunt, these characters have remained rather terse. Speechlessness is so deeply embedded in the history of video gaming that we take it for granted, at least until controversies arise, as when stars such as Jack Black notoriously lend their voices to gaming icons like Minecraft’s Steve. Nonetheless, even in games about acquiring vast levels of power and otherworldly abilities, the lack of fluent speech has played a significant role in shaping the popular art form. Mario, for example, was originally a “silent protagonist”—a player-controlled character who never (or rarely) speaks—and he has persisted as a pop culture icon in part because of his very circumscribed ability to talk.

When Nintendo announced The Super Mario Bros. Movie, fans worried about how they would represent Mario’s limited voice in a feature-length animated film. Video game adaptations are (in)famously hit-or-miss endeavors—the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros. was a critical and financial flop of supersized proportions—and the revelation of Chris Pratt as the new voice of Mario came as a shock. The question of how Mario would communicate in an animated film was superseded by the question of how Pratt could credibly lend his voice to gaming’s biggest mascot. (Could the hero of Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World speak for the Mushroom Kingdom’s diminutive everyman?) The level of concern that met the announcement of Pratt’s casting highlights the often tacit investment that fans have in silent protagonists, characters whose lack of speech defines them as much as their colorful outfits. This anxiety over how to adapt silence into voice invites us to consider just how significant aspects like speechlessness, nonverbal characters, and disability are to video game narrative and characterization. From The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Undertale to EarthBound and Chrono Cross, mesmerizing virtual worlds that promise endless adventures are only an illusion that, paradoxically, the useful limitations of the silent protagonist make possible. Adding more fluent speech to a character like Mario actually seems, at least to fans, to take something essential away from the beloved plumber and our past adventures with him.

When disability and gaming are discussed together, the focus is often on questions of accessibility and rehabilitation. How are games’ demands for split-second reactions and long periods of focus barring more people from enjoying them? And how can games help achieve therapeutic results in clinical settings? However, disability is also a central, if often unspoken, thematic concern.

Games traditionally feature a host of variously disabled and othered creatures (e.g., zombies, mutants, cyborgs), which, in turn, rely upon our cultural stigma against bodily difference to generate fear and intrigue. The media consistently present stories of disabled people “overcoming” seemingly insurmountable odds or developing savant skills, and such narratives dominate the plots of popular role-playing games especially. With power-ups, upgrades, and magical abilities, so many games are all about overcoming the body’s limits and transforming from a regular person into an unmatched god who saves the day. The discussion of disability representation in video games has been gaining significance in the last decade, but as with race and gender, what Christopher A. Paul calls the “toxic meritocracy” of video gaming culture and design regularly sidesteps issues of structural inequality in the industry. Games seem to demand that one should just “get good” rather than question the assumptions about ability and identity that undergird the medium’s largest series like Fortnite or Call of Duty.

If video games work generally as showcases of players’ skill, focus, and patience—in a word, their ability—then why has the ability to speak fluently been relatively unnecessary for the medium’s icons? The silent protagonist is a long-standing convention that arose from the technical limitations of early video games. When data storage is expensive—and games consist of simple sprites, sounds, and algorithms crammed into mass-produced ROMs or arcade cabinets—it makes sense to exclude any aural or written language not essential to the game play experience. Silent films, after all, could rely on the immersive effects of limited title cards and live music. Mario first appeared in the 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong, a game about climbing brightly colored platforms and avoiding obstacles to save your beloved from a gorilla, no speech necessary. Mario’s girlfriend, Pauline, does repeatedly shout “HELP!”, but the player-controlled character doesn’t need to say a word of his own for us to follow the cultural script of rescuing the damsel in distress.

From this perspective, speechless heroes are the default for gaming as a narrative form, rather than the exception. The text-based “speech” of nonplayer characters like Pauline contextualizes the game experience, while any necessary instructions simply adorn the arcade cabinet or game manual. As the medium’s technology evolved, Mario gained an iconic, yet still quite limited, Italian-ish voice. But some characters like The Legend of Zelda’s Link have intentionally been kept silent even into the era of voice acting. As Nintendo’s longtime sound director and composer Koji Kondo explains, “The most important thing about the Zelda series is that the player becomes Link … if we’re trying to convey the player’s emotion through Link, but you hear Link talking in somebody else’s voice, that creates a disconnect between you and the role that you’re taking on.” Limited speech, then, has helped make silent protagonists blank canvases for projecting ourselves into the game world without making the characters any less compelling.

Still, even if the convention of the silent protagonist is about immersion, what is it about speechlessness that is supposedly so easy to identify with? Rather than repeating catchphrases in an exaggerated accent, a silent protagonist doesn’t say anything that you wouldn’t say. Moreover, this lack of words acts as an invitation to the player’s imagination to fill out how they might respond to the speech of nonplayer characters. It also opens up space for other nonplayer characters to win over the player with their own—sometimes clever and heartfelt, often cringey and formulaic—responses to the game world. The silent protagonist, and by extension the player, acts as the receiver—what narrative theory would call the narratee—of so much information, rather than the narrator or even a speaker. “The more transparent the receiving instance and the more silent its evocation in the narrative,” explains the pioneering narratologist Gérard Genette in Narrative Discourse, “so undoubtedly the easier, or rather the more irresistible, each real reader’s identification with or substitution for that implied in­stance will be.”

Speechlessness is a point of entry for players, many of whom appreciate the reprieve from the regular world of chatter into worlds whose social interactions vary wildly from our own.

Video gaming’s silent heroes are most often “blank slate” or “everyman” characters with whom identification comes easily, but the canniness with which we can project our thoughts and feelings onto them comes with risks. Dysfluent speech—i.e., speech such as stuttering, lisping, or logorrhea that fails to meet our expectations for fluent articulation—is ripe for metaphor in literature, and non- and semiverbal characters in particular are rarely represented as capable of communicating for themselves. Marie Myung-Ok Lee, for example, critiques the way that modern novels reduce autistic people’s experiences to stylized language and literary effects: “With autism there is often, not metaphorically but literally, a lack of voice, which renders the person a tabula rasa on which a writer can inscribe and project almost anything. … As a writer, I say go ahead and write what you want. As a parent, I find this terrifying, given the way neurotypical people project false motives and feelings onto the actions of others every day.”

Nonverbal characters are regularly left without a voice of their own, and instead of having fleshed-out personalities, they remain marginal yet paradoxically function as larger-than-life symbols. As David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder argue in their seminal disability studies work Narrative Prosthesis, disabled characters are frequently used as narrative props and bearers of metaphorical significance, while the social status of disability is regularly ignored. Think of the pity Tiny Tim commonly evokes in A Christmas Carol, or how the hunchback of Shakespeare’s Richard III marks the short-lived reign of the “rudely stamp’d” king. And in his study of the dysfluent fictional characters created by authors from Herman Melville to Don DeLillo, The Disarticulate, James Berger shows how linguistic disability specifically becomes the vehicle for addressing modernity’s anxieties about personhood and sociality.

There is a long-standing literary tradition of making meaning out of dysfluent speech, as if every stutter reveals a personal flaw or another hole in the social fabric. Like the stuttering of the biblical Moses, which God ensures is a desirable trait for a prophet, the dysfluency of the protagonist’s language is a link to divine significance. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom we are the royal knight who personifies courage, in Dragon Quest XI the chosen champion of the World Tree, in Chrono Cross a blue-haired hero predestined to save his timeline.

There is, however, a big difference between playing as a silent protagonist and reading a novelist’s trendy metaphorization of neurodiversity or speaking disability. Video games take advantage of our tendency to find meaning in dysfluency in order to assist immersion. Not speaking makes protagonists all the more intriguing, whether or not their silence relates more to their own limitations or those of the medium. Dysfluency works as a way into a new world, to make that world and its characters more fun, more immersive, and more memorable, rather than a key to coming to simple conclusions about a character. In contrast to the barriers often erected by social misunderstandings of dysfluency, a lack of speech reduces the gap between player and character.

As much as games are about pursuing marvelous and mundane activities—slaying dragons, cultivating farms, getting married—they are shaped just as much by what the player cannot do. Even the biggest sandbox games like Minecraft are about crafting a specific experience, rather than making every experience possible. And from this perspective, the ability to speak is perhaps the most important power to limit. There is no option to tell Pauline, in the original 1981 appearance of Mario, “Sorry, I won’t help you.” You can only dawdle around or stop playing. Although a game in which you can say anything to nonplayer characters might be on the distant horizon, the illusion of player choice always leads to a relatively small number of meaningful outcomes. By minimizing the representation of the protagonist’s speech, games further the illusion of the player’s agency without needing to account for many dialogue options.

Disability is, to put it simply, narratively convenient. For example, both recent Zelda titles—two of the most popular video games in the last decade—begin with a profoundly disabling moment for Link. In Breath of the Wild, the player qua Link awakes with amnesia from a healing chamber and eventually learns that the people of Hyrule have lost terribly in a battle against the kingdom’s foe, Calamity Ganon. It is up to this protagonist to regain his strength and marshal a counterattack. In the first minutes of Tears of the Kingdom, we play as Link, as his strength is drained through his arm by the dark powers of Ganondorf (Ganon’s human incarnation). For the rest of the game, Link’s arm is replaced by an ancient prosthesis that grants him godlike abilities like fusing objects and passing through terrain. These contemporary Zelda titles showcase the significant, practically clichéd, extent to which disability conveys game mechanics and story. You wake up with narratively convenient amnesia; you lose your powers and must develop new ones; you need to save someone who can’t save themselves, etc. Narratives centered around acquiring power to overcome obstacles run the risk, however, of sidelining the reality of disability experience. So many “overcoming” narratives fail to keep in mind that for most people, the social and economic challenges of disability don’t simply evaporate with the development of a few new skills.

Amid Link’s quest to develop his abilities, Breath of the Wild does make a point of canonizing his persistent silence. According to Zelda’s in-game diary, Link is—shockingly enough—a quiet guy. Zelda surmises that his muteness as her guardian knight is caused by his anxiety at assuming the role of a public hero, but he’s been quiet as long as she’s known him. After spending so much time by his side, she learns that “With so much at stake, and so many eyes upon him, he feels it necessary to stay strong and to silently bear any burden.” In the social world of Zelda, silent perseverance is the mark of the anxious hero, and the legendary Link remains rather quiet because that’s just who he is and how he responds to his circumstances.

While it’s easy to point to video games’ use of speechlessness for technical and immersive reasons, silent protagonists are rarely diegetically silent. The player never reads or hears many words coming from their avatar, yet the conceit in-world is that a nonplayer character is hearing their speech and responding in turn. Beyond Link, true diegetic silence or verbal dysfluency is rare in contemporary releases, but still a myriad of classic games embrace the convention by taking the protagonist’s silence quite seriously, or better yet, humorously.

Chrono Cross (1999) is a sprawling RPG by Japanese developer Square Enix in which you start playing as Serge, a blue-haired and bright-eyed young man whom the game’s menu describes simply as the “SILENT PROTAGONIST.” Serge one day finds himself transported to another timeline and meets a host of enemies and allies on his quest to untangle the game’s time-bending narrative.

One of the main draws of the game is its roster of 40+ possible allies who could join in the grand adventure. While Serge, for the most part, is limited to simple responses to the game’s other characters, those characters are given a distinct way of speaking via text boxes that feature their portraits. Close companion Kit speaks in a kind of slangy Australian English. Other characters repeat nonsense sounds in their dialogue, such as Turnip—a bizarre turnip homunculus—who ends many words with an unnecessary “-eth.” The canine companion Poshul even has a lisp and stutter, presumably to convey her being a different species. A range of communication disabilities, verbal tics, and dialects are represented textually to help distinguish this extremely large cast of characters. Despite learning a host of unsettling facts about the evil forces at work in his world, Serge occupies a conventional silent protagonist role by saying very little in response.

Chrono Cross uses the convention to great effect in an iconic moment mid-game when Serge is possessed by another character. Suddenly Serge is granted his posse’s text boxes and extended dialogue, and for the player this is an uncanny moment of disidentification. You then find that you are no longer controlling Serge’s movements, and for much of the rest of the game play the role of “SILENT PROTAGONIST” in a very different body. A game about unsettling and redefining identity and fate, Chrono Cross relies on conventions of dysfluent speech to immerse the player in its litany of characters and narrative twists.

Since silent protagonists go back to video gaming’s humble roots, even older games than Chrono Cross take aesthetic advantage of their heroes’ limitations. EarthBound (1994) is a fabulously quirky RPG in which you play as the silent protagonist Ness, a small-town boy armed with a baseball bat and emergent psionic abilities, who assembles a team of friends to save the world from an alien invasion. One of the first “boss”-type characters faced in EarthBound is a gang leader named Frank—followed by his maniacal robot assistant—in the back of an arcade. When you first encounter him, Frank teases you for your (conventional) inability to speak—“C’mon, can’t you at least say your name?”—before proceeding to say “nasty” things to you in battle. After you’ve bested him and his robot, Frank admires your strength and offers to heal you free of charge. In this single early moment of wholesome and subversive humor, EarthBound suggests a world where even a knife-wielding bully could one day grow into a friend who’s happy to talk to you.

Perhaps the most popular EarthBound-inspired game is Toby Fox and Temmie Chang’s Undertale (2015). Undertale drops you into an subterranean world inhabited by a host of quirky, loveable, and traumatized monsters, and the game’s conceit of befriending, rather than slaying, the creatures questions the hallowed premise of most RPGs: kill monsters in order to get stronger. Undertale is a love letter to role-playing games that persistently subverts the genre: The “experience” traditionally gained from vanquishing monsters is restyled as “execution points”; your “LV” [level] represents your “level of violence.”

Undertale makes us ask why we get such satisfaction from watching monsters die and our stats go up—couldn’t the genre have been different? What fans call the game’s “pacifist route” highlights friendship over aggression, even though treating everyone with kindness makes the game noticeably harder. The highlight is listening to its extensive cast of hilarious monsters and navigating a game world that’s so self-referential, even as your character says or does little of note. Lead creator Toby Fox says, “The character doesn’t say very much because then you can identify with them better. … The more details and personality I add to ‘you,’ then the harder it is to get absorbed into the role.” Fans have developed elaborate theories of who exactly is narrating Undertale and how exactly your character relates to everyone else, which speaks to the immersion and interest that silent protagonists paradoxically provide.

As much as the medium necessitates limited verbal skills, silent protagonists also offer critical perspective into video gaming’s ability to communicate with an audience. In CrossCode (2018) you play as Lea, an avatar inside an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) whose malfunctioning speech module greatly disrupts her ability to communicate. Your ally Sergey manages to hard code a handful of words for you throughout the game, but more often than not Lea communicates with body language and facial expressions. Lea’s speechlessness is not portrayed as a tragic condition in the game world, though there are several instances of characters getting frustrated at her lack of fluent speech. Lea’s personality is thoughtful, enthusiastic, and snarky, if initially reserved, and she develops an entourage of sweet and quirky friends—one of whom doesn’t notice Lea’s speaking disability until after they’ve spent several hours together.

The story of CrossCode suggests that Lea’s friendships and warm heart are not so much in spite of her speaking disability but partly because of it. Going into detail would spoil the game’s carefully paced sci-fi narrative and its critique of the video game industry, but given Lea’s set of bodily and environmental conditions, the version we control grows into a compassionate good listener determined to do good in her virtual world. We highly value vocal fluency and eloquence in our “real” world of soundbites and short video content, but CrossCode instead highlights the expressive potential of a silent embrace—on top of the potential for speechlessness to convey character lessons better than dialogue. Players must navigate a digital dystopia fueled by the interests of the surveillance and entertainment industries, but playing as Lea suggests a utopia where fluent speech is not a prerequisite to developing meaningful relationships.

Silent protagonists don’t show us how to “overcome” or compensate for disability. Rather, their limited speech is what makes their games’ narratives possible. Speechlessness is a point of entry for players, many of whom appreciate the reprieve from the regular world of chatter into worlds whose social interactions vary wildly from our own. After all, everybody experiences moments of speechlessness. Your character’s silence just makes it easier to listen to everyone else. 

Publicity still from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (2023). Photograph courtesy of Nintendo.