Heroic Mime/Playing With

Basic Trope: A good guy who never talks.

• Straight: The player character never talks.
• Exaggerated:
  • See Featureless Protagonist.
  • The hero literally cannot make any kind of sound. At all.
• Justified:
  • The player character is mute.
  • Alternately: The player character has nobody to talk to.
  • Also alternately: The player character is The Silent Bob. He doesn't need words to get his message across.
  • Or the player character is a badass monk who has taken an oath of silence.
  • On the same note as alternately: The character never has a chance to talk, everybody else is talking too much to notice you, or at least until they need you to make a decision.
• Inverted: The player's character is so incredibly wordy that all NPCs can't get a single word in.
• Subverted:
  • The player doesn't talk, until the last cutscene.
  • Once people don't notice his message, he yells it out.
  • The Hero does talk, but not very often. Like a true heroic mime, he doesn't talk to NPCs, and rarely talks in cutscenes.
• Double Subverted: At which point he clears his throat and says nothing.
• Parodied:
  • A complicated charades mechanic is used for interaction with NPCs.
  • The hero IS a mime.
  • The hero is immune to being Muted. What is there to mute, anyway?
• Deconstructed:
  • He is driven paranoid by the fact that one little mistake on his part can kill him and leave the Big Bad free to take over the world.
  • One part of the game sees the player character separated from the party and as such unable to talk to NPCs.
• Reconstructed:
  • He doesn't talk because he feels his work is too important to waste time on trivial things like small talk.
  • The player character meets Alice, whose brother is also mute. She helps him find the rest of the party.
• Zig Zagged: A game series where some of the player characters of certain games in the series do not talk, while others do.
• Averted: The player character talks, expositions and holds conversations on equal line with the rest of the characters.
• Enforced: "If we have the character say something the player doesn't want to say, it will make the game less immersive."
• Lampshaded:
  • "You are a man of few words."
  • When asked if he ever talks, the hero just shrugs.
  • "ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME!?"
• Invoked: The hero doesn't like idle-chit-chat, and finds that not speaking is a small price to pay for not being bogged down with small talk when he's got a world to save.
• Defied: "What, you're expecting me to shut up and be one of those 'never open my mouth' type people? I like talking."
• Discussed: "How come you never talk?" "..."
• Conversed: "You ever notice how the main character in these types of games never talk?"
• Plotted A Good Waste:
  • The protagonist doesn't know the language everyone else is speaking in, has an actual speech impediment, or is a robot who simply lacks the necessary hardware.
  • Or it's just to prevent the player character from saying something the player doesn't want to. Or the way the player character talks is through a separate microphone-type peripheral.

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HERO: (motions toward the Heroic Mime page)