I wouldn't count Bioshock Infinite unless the player character has a personality too. The girl would be more like Andrew Ryan except she's next to you, though I'm not well-versed in that series. As for MVC3 the only story detail I wanted to know more about was between Wesker/Jill and the X-Men characters since a few entrances and victory quotes suggested that Wesker wanted to take mutants in to study. The tension that would create between Wesker and Magneto would be one of the few things that would make the story more than "The Marvel/Capcom villains team up. The Marvel/Capcom heroes fight each other but eventually get on the same side. Heroes and villains fight each other. Galactus shows up."  

Nothing remotely meaningful to add (and this operates on the very questionable assumption anything I do say in a comment is meaningful :) ), just wanted to show some appreciation for the article for essentially articulating many though I'm in agreement with in far better fashion than I have. Props! 

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with the author of the article (though it is well written and thought out).

There is a legitimate time and place for movie-style storytelling in videogames. However, that doesn't mean we should rely on it. Ultimately, videogame storytelling will gravtitate to doing things that ONLY videogames can do. Movies don't give you in depth monologues about the thought processes of every character; that's what books are good at. While there are times when videogames SHOULD resort to cutscenes (See: end of Portal 2), this should be done sparingly.

The problem with a talking protagonist is that if they talk too much, they risk saying something that doesn't gel with what the player has in mind, causing a level of dissonance to fall between the character and the player. In Portal and Portal 2, Chell does pretty much what the player would do (or rather, would want to do). However, once the character starts talking, this can break. The simple fact is that there are different types of narrative (and this goes for movies too): story driven, and environment driven. A story driven game would be a game like Dead Space: Extraction, an environment driven game would be something like Bioshock. Dead Space: Extraction is about the story, with talking protagonists with clear wants and fears (as well as hallucinations). Bioshock, ultimately, is about Rapture. The stuff involving the player character is circumstantial at best: The thing that keeps everyone interested is Rapture, and without it, there would be no Bioshock.

This is true of movies as well. Some movies are about plot (okay, most), but others (Fargo, [insert Western here], Moon, Lost in Translation) are about settings. Their progression revolves around the bleakness/lushness/weirdness/interestingness of the setting. While none of these have silent protagonists per-se, you will notice that these types of movies will generally be less dialogue-dense and will spend more time focusing on interesting camera angles and shots of the scenery and the effect that it has on the characters.

Silent characters should not be ubiquitous, but they have their time and place.

Oh man, I really liked this, but I'm torn between traditional narratives and the visual ones found in games. A large part of me enjoys games like Half-Life, Shadow of the Colossus, and BioShock because they feature a unique form of storytellng that only games can convey. But the fact that I'm playing a silent protagonist takes a lot of humanity and substance out of the story. To me, Gordon Freeman isn't a character at all, he's a mere shell/vessel to get the character through the game. And while that may be the intention of the developers, the game has been hailed for its story, and I can't help but see Freeman as pointless. To me, he seems like a benign tumor on a beautiful woman. Ew!

I love context, so when games sacrifice it for artistic direction, it bugs the shit out of me.

While I agree with much of what Jonathan has to say, I don't think the point of the article was do away with silent protagonists. I believe it was to get people to rethink the push some members of the gaming community have that somehow tradtional storytelling techniques hold back gaming storytelling, aridiculous assertion, that I've seen quite a bit here and elsewhere as well. See quote: 

"There is room for talky and room for silent. There is room for cutscenes and room for environmental storytelling. Stop talking about what is a more pure form of storytelling for a game and start talking about what works best for each individual game."

Advocating using all of the tools in the toolbox doesn't mean throwing some of the truly unique new things. It just means using what's most effective for the purposes of what the storyteller is trying to do. Silent protagonists, and audio logs and one's own personal desire not to have some dissonace from the controlled avatar just don't cut it in in particular games or in particular situations. Dissonance isn't inherently bad and one is not to like all things about every protagonist. There'a huge leap between individually not relating to everything about a character or work and it being objectively bad that a lot of people can't wrap their heads around as, speaking very cynically, many people are mentally incapable of accepting an audience larger and more diverse than their individual person. 

And I were to somehow warp myself into the mind of someone that actually somehow feels they are embodying the character of a silent character and somehow more immersed, what happens if a game requires me to do something I don't want to do? Wouldn't it be in theory be more off-putting to have a character do something I wouldn't want to when it is an empty shell for me to assume myself in rather than an established character for which it might make sense? Setting aside the people that objected to it for moral reasons beyond how it was delivered, wouldn't "No Russian" in Modern Warfare 2 have gone down just a little easier for some if the player avatar had an established personality and voice that had fully-accepted what had to be done or was pulled out of the first person camera for a cut-scene? By most accounts I read, going through it in the very style only games can offer was one of the reasons people resented Infinity Ward for that scene. For as much crap critics gave Infinity Ward for using a cheap "out" allowing the scene to be skipped, an out seemed exactly what many people wanted. I wouldn't have changed "No Russian" at all but then I don't have it in my head that I am somehow my character and need to be 100% in sync with it at all times

I understand there's a almost an obligatory self-servingness to the gamer audience that maybe sports audiences are the only remotely close comparison to because of the shared desires of  winning, but the change in nature of the medium doesn't throw out thousands of years of history and I assure history shows me most stories would never be told because what I would do would end them early in the first act. Frankly, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Kubrick nor any other storyteller could care less about telling my story or any other random person's story anyway; they were teling their character's story. I don't see that somehow changing with video games nor needing to change. Even with RPGs I play giving the illusion of player choice I'm never not aware I'm still operating within the confines of the story of a Bioware or Obsidian character.

The solution to better storytelling is not to use one technique mostly for the misguided purposes of just using the technology and another sparingly because it's roots are from elsewhere. It's to use everythng a storyteller does use with purpose. This false dichotomy of storytelling styles and what benefits the industry more that goes on is nothing more than personal preference masquerading as inarguable truth. What benefits the industry is good, profitable games and, where applicable, good stories to enhance them. And I don't care how a good story is delivered to me so long as it's a good one.