From Mario to Commander Shepard, everyone has their favourite video game characters, but which developers have really managed to create convincing simulations of real people inhabiting a believable virtual world?

In the dark days of early game design, consumers were impressed enough by the spectacle of an interactive game experience played wholly on a screen to worry about how well realised the characters and situations they were enjoying were. No one ever stopped to ask what lead the invisible tennis players to face off against one another in Pong, or questioned the motivations of the brave lone pilot defending Earth in Space Invaders. We let games get away with glaring plot holes and shoddy characterisation that would have literary critics and even mainstream cinema audiences up in arms.

These days, things have changed a little. Now, it seems like every new game has an elaborate mythology built up around it, with sequels, prequels, Facebook experiences and tie-in novelisations galore to immerse yourself in. However, while the story around the game has advanced, the player character is often still an amalgam of crude stereotypes. How many uninspired FPS games force you into the ill-fitting armoured boots of a bad-ass space marine facing off against an implacable alien adversary?

We run down in no particular order some of the top examples in recent years of popular games that have gone against the trend, creating protagonists with more layers than an onion, back stories with bite and goals that are grounded in personal history. If we’ve missed your personal picks, let us know in the comments.

Be aware, although we’ve tried to avoid specific plot points, there will be spoilers ahead.

1. Detective Cole Phelps

Okay, so he’s a little too prone to accusing suspects of everything short of assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand and starting World War One, when all you meant to do was point out a small inconsistency in their whereabouts. And perhaps he doesn’t quite stand up to the gritty realism of Serpico, instead playing a more one-dimensional all-American hero type of guy.

Still, Cole Phelps has a few things working in his favour that make him our first pick for our convincing game character list.

First, he’s a rarity in his department, a man who cares about the job he’s doing, who doesn’t just want to get home to the wife. Phelps is a war hero, a Marine who returns home to find that the country he left behind has changed, and struggling to find his own place in it. As a cop cleaning up crime in LA, Phelps quickly finds that the ideals he brought with him are unwelcome in a corrupt and hidebound police service.

Phelps is hardly a perfect man, but there is no denying that he feels like a man, rather than a puppet to be manipulated by the player. His affair with the nightclub singer Elsa Lichtmann is a very human failing, reaching out to someone that inhabits and understands the same world as him, to lessen the loneliness of the permanent outsider.

The poignancy of Phelps’ sacrifice is one that left me with the realisation that I’d grown to inhabit his character more completely than any other recent game I care to recall.

2. Ezio Auditore da Firenze

Is it a bird? Is it a poorly built and decidedly un-aerodynamic Renaissance aircraft? No, it’s Italy’s favourite genocidal murderer and specialist in falling great distances into bales of hay.

Ezio, and his personality-vacuum future sidekick Desmond, star in the second installment of the Assassin’s Creed series. From the crushing disappointment of the first game (sorry Altair), Ubisoft have crafted a fine sequel, in which the political machinations of unscrupulous princes and priests in medieval Italy form a perfect backdrop to the story of a young man’s loss of innocence and search for the blood of those who wronged his family.

AC2 was more than just a cautionary tale about executing your enemies, or more accurately, failing to execute them entirely.

Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, the semi-sequel that makes a mockery of point releases, adds its own layers to the story. Without giving too much away, Ezio loses home and family once again, while gaining the respect of his compatriots and finding a cause that motivates him beyond revenge. Players who burned through the main story without taking the multiple opportunities to meander might miss out on some golden moments as well: bantering with courtesans, accepting Leonardo’s unusual romantic relations and exploring the story of his lost first love were all personal high points of relief from the repetitive grind.

3. John Marston

I wavered for some time between Marston and his Rockstar stablemate, GTA4′s Niko Bellic, before coming down on the side of the outlaw gunslinger. Both men are perennial outsiders, tough guys down on their luck but with the skills and determination to claw their way to the top.

What really lets Niko down, and let Marston sneak his way onto the list, is mostly down to the way mission structures work in GTA. If Bellic is such a tough guy, why does he let every needy nobody with his mobile number push him around? Sure, we can understand that he has to maintain his relationships with family and friends to stay grounded, to keep his humanity and loyalty alive in the face of violence and greed, but does that really apply to Roman?

The disconnection between his tough guy persona and the fact he seems to be forced into action at all the major plot points instead of making a decision makes him feel like too much of a puppet to make the cut.

John Marston is a different kettle of fish altogether. Despite borrowing liberally from the history of classic film Western heroes, especially those played by Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, Marston reveals a personality all his own as the narrative unfolds.

From the beginning, Marston has a clear motivation, to hunt down an outlaw to save his wife and child. But beyond that, things get a lot more complicated, and a lot more interesting.

Rockstar have taken the latent themes of anti-authoritarianism and distrust of civilisation from Old West mythology and woven them with a story of dangerous and dirty frontier life to produce a living picture that is much more convincing than earlier cowboy-and-indians efforts. Marston represents a tragic figure—like the best of the gunslingers, he’s already an anachronism, a warrior cast in a mould that is being superseded by the spread of town living.

He may be a mighty fine fighter, but against the true power of the US government, expressed through the newly-formed Bureau of Investigation that holds his family to ransom, Marston can never win. Despite his potency, and the respect that it engenders in the people around him, it’s clear that society can survive very well without him. The other characters fit into the world in which they live, while Marston drifts through it all like an angry spirit, existing only to hunt down the men he’s after.

In the end, all he’s managed to do is to kill the people he most resembles, the bandits, cheats, professional liars, long walkers and hard-bitten pioneers that transfomed a continent, then became obsolete.

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