PERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
Shoot first, ask questions later
STEVEN POOLE
At one point in Christopher Nolan’s 20 20 film Tenet, lead actor John David Washington’s character complains at being left out of the loop to arms dealer Priya Singh. “I’m the protagonist!” he objects. “You’re a protagonist,” Singh replies dismissively. This is a truth that videogames usually try to hide from us: each player wants to feel that they are the world-altering hero of the story, even though many thousands of other people playing the same game are the world-altering hero of exactly the same story. If someone tells you they saved Termina and restored the moon in Majora’s Mask, it makes no sense to respond: “No, I did!”
The word ‘protagonist’ first appeared in English in John Dryden’s preface to the first printed edition of his play An Evening’s Love, or The Mock Astrologer, in 1671. Dryden notes that he has been accused of making “debauch’d persons”, such as the gentlemen of this play who spend a night flirting with two Spanish women, “my Protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama”. (Indeed, Samuel Pepys saw the play and deemed it “very smutty”.) In strict usage the protagonist, from the Greek for ‘first actor’, is exclusively the leading character; Greek had other words for the second (‘deuteragonist’) and third (‘tritagonist’).