Role Playing Games. RPGs. Games in which you develop a character over the course of the game, increasing attributes, learning new skills, and shaping the nature of your character. In many games, however, that character is, due to the open-ended nature that is required, often a mute, practically faceless person, with very little in the way of personality – otherwise, it would prove difficult to conform to one’s personal image of what that character should be.

There is another way, however, to roleplay. In an open-world game such as Red Dead Redemption, or Grand Theft Auto IV, the character is fully defined, with a name, a specific look and fixed skills – you may want to improve your Speechcraft, but this doesn’t even exist within the game, as the dialogue and interactions between characters are pre-scripted. There is, however, a large amount of roleplaying to be done, should you wish to do so.

While playing Red Dead Redemption, John Marston (as I played him) was a bad man, but one who wanted to be nothing other than a humble farmer, living out his days with his wife and son – while this is what he desperately wished he could be, though, his nature, and his past, prevented him from being that man. But while he was forced to hunt down his former friends, he wasn’t simply the outlaw he used to be, despite the fact that this approach would have allowed him to finish his task more quickly.

I found that I would usually stop to help retrieve a stolen wagon, or go after a horse thief, and where possible, take a bounty alive. I would only hunt the animals I needed to make money or complete a challenge, and rarely accepted challenges to shoot eagles. Ignoring thieves or bandits was the sensible option for my Marston, and stopping to help a rancher only prolonged the time until he could return to his family, but my John Marston wouldn’t have been able to look his wife, or his son, in the eyes knowing that he had left someone else’s wife to suffer.

Wherever possible, I tried to find the “good” solution to a problem, but my John Marston, while wanting to be a noble, honest man, was also a pragmatist, and sometimes the right choice simply wasn’t an option. Sometimes, people had to die, but my Marston would at least see to it that death came as quickly and painlessly as possible.

In GTA IV, the opposite was true – Nico Bellic was a willingly bad man, and I played him as such. While he was fixated on getting his revenge, he would, however, sometimes undertake a mission purely on a whim, to let off some steam. Nico Bellic as played by me was a mercurial psychopath, a man beholden to no one and as capable of altruism as he was of wanton cruelty – but not reliably either. In GTA: Vice City, I played Tommy Vercetti a little differently. While he was undeniably a criminal, he was also, within the rules of his own code, an honourable man, honest and true to his friends. If one of those friends should betray him, however, his response would be swift and extremely prejudicial.

A lot of this took place inside my head, of course – there simply aren’t the options in many open-world games to imbue my actions with this depth of meaning, but a game isn’t simply played on a TV screen. It is also played inside your head, with your imagination, and it’s there that some of the greatest stories happen.