Could your game have developed its narrative and told the same or a similar story without any of the characters?
This week I chose to play Fez, a puzzle platformer and believe that its narrative could definitely be developed similarly if the characters were removed from the game. It offers very little in terms of verbal exposition and worldbuilding, using only a 'guide' character named Dot to explain the game's mechanics as they come up. The rest of the story is represented visually through use of different environments that the central character travels through, and gives insight to the worlds that must be saved and protected.
I believe that the central character, Gomez, is an avatar. The definition of the avatar in this regard is "any game-unit that has action possibilities and that answers to the player" (Kromand, 2007). He is a silent protagonist who the player uses to traverse the different worlds in Fez, gathering fragments of a cube in order to restore the equivalent of a cube-god in this world. Because of the idea of the avatar, Gomez could be replaced with anything - a shape, a blob of color, and as long as he could still respond to the player's input and commands, the story could play out almost identically to the way I experienced it using the ideas of learning through experience and showing rather than telling.
Cube fragments glow and flash in a way that suggests you need them. Completing a whole cube makes Gomez do a little animation to signify that you've done something important. The narrative is simplistic, giving the player a call to adventure and the means of obtaining the elixir as presented in the hero's journey - collect small cubes to restore the god-cube before the world, along with you, is torn apart. And because of this, I believe that the story in Fez could be easily presented in a more abstract way, and even without the use of its characters.
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