Highlights from our community-written blogs, featuring the emotional state of game characters and the rise and rise of the franchise.

Jason_Seip discusses how game characters tend not to show any emotion outside of cutscenes, any character development lost in a return to acting again as mechanical puppets. He's disheartened by even developers of Valve's stature to having characters or enemies reflect their mental state when you're playing, remembering attending a GDC session in which Half-Life 2's artists explained that doing so would distract from their primary aim of making a great action game.

But with no guarantee that the player would ever be looking in the right direction at the right time, it’s understandable that many developers might consider the expense of animating and staging such details a waste of time and budget. There's no denying the richness that would come with a game showing a little more heart, though – perhaps even lending new opportunities for gameplay?

Deadkat looks at the development of the videogame franchise from the early 80s up to the current generation of games, claiming that in the early days developers made the games that they wanted to make, whereas now the financial pressures involved mean any game needs to have the potential to spawn a franchise.

But is this perhaps just a rose tinted view? Shigeru Miyamoto designed Mario with the idea of being able to use him again and again. The popularity of the character led to the games being centered on him, but his inclusion in over 200 games since 1981's Donkey Kong was no accident. Is the current focus on developing franchises not simply an extension of this early strategy?

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