Editor's note: The final part in Louis's interview with BioWare Senior writer David Gaider. Catch up with parts one and two, then read on about Gaider's favorite video-game characters and where he stands on games as art. -Rob

Louis Garcia: You talked about how characters are really important to you in books, but what are some of your favorite video-game characters that you’ve written?

David Gaider: HK-47 was a blast. He was funny just how he worked out, too, because both droids T3-M4 and HK-47 in Knights of the Old Republic didn’t have any dialogue.

I had some extra time, so James Ohlen said, "Well, could you write some dialogue for this character?" I complained at first: I sighed, "He’s an assassin droid. What the hell am I going to write for him?’

I wrote him in a week, and the reaction was phenomenal. I had fun with it. The characters I write just for fun seem to be the ones best received.

I remember Alistair actually is one in Origins who I really enjoyed writing just because -- most people don’t know this -- we had an entire version of Alistair where he was this grim, veteran warrior. An older and just a very serious type who was distrustful of you, and he wasn’t much fun.

Nobody liked him because he was so untrustworthy. We really wanted to set this up as a romance interest as well as a good buddy for a male player, and it wasn’t working.

He touched on that Carth [a KOTOR character Gaider also wrote -Ed.] vibe a little bit much, but he really hit a bad note with the male players. So, it came down as one of those revisions where we just couldn’t fix him.

Even though it was painful to make the decision to start all over, it really worked out well. I think Alistair and the fact that he’s fun really came across. He was quite a popular character.

“I’ll probably get flak for this, but I always pictured Shale as this sassy black woman trapped in a body of rock.”

Shale was another character where I had to go back to the drawing board. It did touch on HK-47 a little bit, but to me it’s very much a different character. HK-47 was sort of a heartless killer, and he was funny in his heartlessness in a Bender of Futurama kind of way.

I know I’ll probably get flak for this, but I always pictured Shale as this sassy black woman trapped in a body of rock. That was the image that worked for me while I wrote [laughs]. I really enjoyed Shale as well.

Morrigan was different. Morrigan was hard to write.

It’s funny. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this comic series called Sandman? It has a character named Delirium, who was one of the Endless. When I first started writing Morrigan, I made her like Delirium in the way she talked and related to reality. She never knew what planet she was on.

And again, that wasn’t working. Then I went to more of a hard-edged personality. It was difficult to find that place for the person who’s romancing her -- I wanted the player to feel like he got through the armor that nobody else could. I think I found it, and that felt very gratifying, but she was a hard character to write. A very, very hard character to write.

LG: Do you have an opinion on the video-games-as-art topic?

DG: You know, I think it’s kind of a silly question. Because, of course, video games are art.

Is it art that everyone’s going to appreciate? No. What art is there that everyone appreciates?

Video games offer an opportunity for us to have these stories to interact with. Take paintings, for instance. You look at them, and you can appreciate them. But video games, it’s art that somebody can experience. It’s different. It’s not something that everyone will to grasp immediately.

And I also think that it’s a very young medium. In terms of the potential to tell stories, we’re just scratching the surface.

Games have told some wonderful stories. I mean, look at something like Planescape: Torment. Tell me that isn’t art.Sure, somebody might consider some parts to be juvenile. Somebody might look at that and go, "Well, there’s combat, you’re killing things -- what’s artistic about that?"

You know, don’t get caught up in the forest for the trees. Like I said, we’re scratching the surface now. Given fewer technological limitations, we can achieve something even greater.