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re: Protagonist types

also:
Mold/Slime
Bacteria/Virus

Sim Earth allows the player to develop coniferous plants into intelligent beings called Carniferns. So plant is a valid protagonists. It also allows radiates (starfish/jellyfish), mollusks, robots, arthropods, insects, trichordates, crustaceans, fish, cetaceans, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs, avians, and mammals. All covered by plantprotagonist, animalprotagonist, robotprotagonist, I think.

I don't think Sim Earth has anything classifiable as protagonist so its diversity is not very useful in regards to the subject of this thread, but I've never played it so I wouldn't know for certain.


Well.. I don't know about the virus part, but Spore at least has the initial stage as some form of micro-organism until the game transforms into more strategic game. fl0w has some other type of micro-organisms that appear more complex than bacteria, so.. microbe, micro-organism, something. Seems like it'll be wordy no matter what we use. Micro-organism or something that is close to it would be best since it covers a wider scope and is less specific. Combining fungi with this as the Wikipedia article suggests might not be a good idea since I don't think there are cases where they're controlled in such microscopic scale.


Gish is the only game I know for this, and the player controls a tar ball in that to be exact. But slime would probably cover it.

I would think microorganisms are covered by animalprotagonist.

Blob Wars
Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid
Blob Wars: Blob and Conquer
Globulation 2
The Blob
Mercury Meltdown (not sure if this is animateobject or living blob)
Has blob/slime protagonists

animateobjectprotagonist
Sack of Flour, Heart of Gold. Has a sack of flour as a protagonist.

SimEarth is probably covered by silentprotagonist or unseenprotagonist. In the geologic and evolution time scales, there is no protagonists (other than silent or invisible). In the civilization and technology time scales, the intellegent race (all members) might be considered a type of protagonists. Unlikely thought.

re: re:

Although true, I don't think this is what people would expect.


A bit wordy, but would be nice to have.

Anthropomorphic would be broader, but this would also include animals and pretty much anything else that isn't human but has human traits, like: it can talk, have human-like intelligence (e.g. Ôkami), some human-like features (e.g. swirling wind with a face - or even just regular animal that can make human-like facial expressions, e.g. Pluto), or some others. This would also include Mickey Mouse and the like.


I had thought of unknown protagonist but then I forgot what I meant it for (was thinking of FPS games only).

I would go with unseen as unknown may limit this too much.

Silent protagonist would fit for some other cases. Gordon Freeman would fit this, actually :) Some FF protagonists only said "..." in any of their dialogs, so they would fit this as well.

re: re:

"guiding one or more blobs of mercury" --Wikipedia

Doesn't say much, but I guess both protagonist types (animated & blob) should apply whatever the case.

Edit: No, reading at some review it seems that you aren't controlling the mercury but the "board" it's moving on (by tilting it and letting gravity do the job). So neither actually work.

I've played the PSP version last week. The mercury blob is completely inanimate, just follows some basic physic rule...

That's the impression I got from the review. So the game/s should be tagged with physics and protagonist ignored (or possibly the new and shiny "unseen protagonist" added as well).

Baby protagonist ?

infantprotagonist perhaps?

I think that anthropomorphic is too general and applies to too many games, animateobjectprotagonist sounds better to me.

EDIT: Should human-like animated object such as Army Men, Toy Story or even Pinocchio should be tagged as animateobjectprotagonist?

Do you think we could add more ~protagonist tags?

For animalprotagonist games, we could add all animal types such as lionprotagonist, catprotagonist, dogprotagonist, etc... And more general tags like felineprotagonist... Thus, "The Lion King" would have "animalprotagonist", "felineprotagonist" and "lionprotagonist" tags.

Others : etprotagonist, fairyprotagonist, etc...

Generalize them first as much as you can, then specify more if you notice some sub-type that seems to occur more often.


= alien protagonist

re: Protagonist types


Does this tag apply to games in which the protagonist get switched only once or twice during the game ?
In Princess Crown, you begin the game with a certain protagonist (about 25 hours of play), then you're switched to another protagonist (about 10 hours of play), then to a last one (about 5 hours of play). It's quite the same for Fire Emblem GBA.

re: re: Protagonist types

Yes. Although I wish tag strengths were in to have some method of expressing this fact in some manner.

Been thinking of adding more types, but I can't think of nice names for them.

First one is, generally speaking, the unique, different from the rest, or special-kind of protagonists. They have something others don't (usually not just some item), they're somehow different/special from the rest, or they're unique. These are common in especially fantasy games, but some others have them as well. There's probably more interest in non-special protagonists, but those can be found with tag negation.

The protagonist of Ultima series probably fits this type. Not sure if Link from Zelda series would also.

Also for the one-of-a-kind protagonists, like Raziel in Soul Reaver.

In case of X-Men, this wouldn't really apply since pretty much everyone else around you have special powers as well. I'm not sure Abe was any different from the others of his kind either, but I never played those games. "Elites" shouldn't fall to this either, as in, people who're just "better" than the rest without anything tangible setting them apart aside raw skill unless that was somehow highlighted as being unnatural, one in a billion kind or some such.

And then there's things like (Lewis Carroll's) Alice. A fringe case where this tag could work as much as not, as all the games are in her imaginary world. Of course, we could consider her "special" for simply the fact that she can get succumbed into these weird fantastic worlds inside her own head (and she's quite often declared insane [which she is AFAIK], so that's another point for being different from the rest).

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In related note, I'd like to add some military/soldier protagonist type as well that catches any and all military personnel (officers, commanders, regular troopers, and all) but I'm not sure what to call those.

This would be for games like Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, Rainbow 6, etc.

Also for Black Ops folks. And probably air force folks as well.

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And there would be perhaps nice to have some generic tag for "professional" protagonists, the kind where you control a character who's been trained and whose job is exactly what you're doing in the game. Just that "professional protagonist" sounds silly.

Although the most common instances are probably the same as for the military protagonist, this would also catch many more instances as it is more generic.

There's those doctor games for one, fire rescues, police detectives, etc.

re: Protagonist types


I've clarified frog. frogprotagonists would not be general enough, amphibianprotagonist was used and covers all the supposed amphibians that science currently holds a consensus about (ie: pluto is no longer a planet; Albanerpetontidae, Anura, Apoda, Triadobatrachus, and Urodela are currently considered amphibia, this wasn't always so, and may not always be).

Correct me if I'm wrong but are the 'giant monsters' of Japanese fame basically rebranded/rebooted 'titans' of greek mythology? how about 'titan' for the presence of gianormous god-like being(s) or Japanese giant monsters and titanprotagonist for when such beings are a protagonist?

re: re: Protagonist types

IIRC, Titans were quite human-like in their appearance much like the younger (Olympian) gods who overthrew them. Although I have no recollection of any mention of their size, besides what has been implied or visualized in popular media.


It could be split to giant/gigantic protagonist and monster/monstrous protagonist, although I'm not sure there's enough cases of the latter in any other cases but in the giant monster fame.

And giant monsters do cover King Kong and similar creatures too, which isn't quite as titan-like as godzilla (which also belongs to the group) :)

Some of the games where the tag has been used are not for protagonists through, I seem to remember some Power Ranger-like games where I'm quite sure you don't get to play as one, so converting would require some checking on that aspect.

But Kong was worshiped as a god in his homeland, reduced to "King Kong" only when captured for purposes of entertainment.

The description of Greek gods and titans and giant is very popular as of late. However, it is not new.
Clear back to the fourteenth century B.C. The greek myths described gods/titans as giants. The separation of gods from titans had not yet been established in the myth. Various rabbi and historians have equated the giants of Genesis with the Greek gods and titans (between which they made very little distinction) even in B.C. times. Closer to our time, employees of the White Star Line named their biggest class of ships, Olympic-class and the biggest ship of those was named Titanic (and was originally to be named Gigantic). Clearly, Titans have long been considered large, even before the movies. I think people would understand titanprotagonist means a really big mythical/fanciful non-human protagonist generally covering Gojira to Blunderbore

Back to the subject. A more accurate, less encompassing word is 怪獣 (kaijū). I have no objection to using kaijuprotagonist, as the Kana might discourage people would don't recognize it. and "ū" seems to be disallowed. In this case, giant protagonist could conceivable be covered under the general category of feyprotagonist with the sub category of giant protagonist if and when feyprotagonist is accepted and possible subsequently split into sub categories..

How should multiple player controlled protagonists be handled? Like Lost Vikings, Joust, multiplayer sports games, or Super Mario Bros. 3?

Isn't this what your multiprotagonist tag was for? At least that's how I understood it and that's what the description seems to say.