Cellphones Wallpapers and wasted narrative space on videogames

Watching season 2 of the Netflix series Bloodhounds (2023) I noticed something really interesting. Throughout the series cellphone wallpapers serve as important character constructors, showing us in a glimpse a variety of personalities when a fast action series would have no other way of doing so without breaking the pacing.

The cellphone wallpapers convey to the audience what's important for each character; family, status, a hobby, or their own self image.

This characterization extends to the aspect of the device itself, with one being filled with childish stickers, that we can assume are from his little daughter playing with his cellphone on down times. This is a quick, cheap, effective and deep character development tool that takes fractions of a seconds to convey and understand in a cellphone obsessed society like ours.

One of the main plot points of the first episodes (small spoiler alert) even involves a character having a wallpaper of him posing with his boss's watch; which serves to connect this low level henchmen (who would have no means to purchase that watch) to his wealthy, criminal boss.

All of this got me thinking as usual on videogames, and if there are similar uses of wallpapers on the medium.

The first games that came to mind were the ones where the cellphone is an important gameplay element.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (2009); lets call it SHSM from now on, has a cellphone that serves as a narrative device for receiving messages, taking pictures and aiding in navigation, among other uses. Despite the important mechanical role of the device, there is no use regarding the personalization of the background or any aesthetic aspect of the device itself. No jumpscare, no changing the background as the player goes through the story, nothing.

The player can even call a fair amount of phone numbers with unique effects like Konami telling you that even they can't help you. But even then the phone background when calling remains the same, only showing the name`s or id when calling, but no pictures. 

In a game that makes a lot of changes in character`s outfits and monster design based on the players choices, it seems weird that something as simple as changing a texture never crossed the designers mind. 

I could make a whole article only on how SHSM handles changes in look to symbolize internal character change.

To showcase a few examples:

Characters have different looks depending on the psychological profile and actions of the player. Being more sexual, rebel, affected by addiction, among other things.

Monsters mutate between several key variations and all the possible combinations in between according to some internal variables related to the behaviour of the player.

So again, that makes it weird that they did not use the main tool of the game, the cellphone in the same way.

If we look at popular cellphones of that era, the screen real estate allowed for background images, however the interfaces didn't leave much room for appreciating background images, and lock screens were not that common back then. 

So it may just be that modern cellphone uses allow for greater focus on that kind of customization on the background front.

Lets then take a look at some examples closer in time.

Grand Theft Auto V (2013) uses cellphones as an important narrative and mechanical tool and they take advantage of that in a more complete way than SHSM. 

GTA V features three playable characters, each one uses a different model of cellphone, even updating the aspect of the phone for future releases.

• Michael's phone clearly resembles an iPhone 4/iPhone 4s. In the enhanced version, it gets updated to an iPhone 5c.

• Franklin's phone looks like a Samsung Galaxy SIII. In the enhanced version the phone takes the shape of a BlackBerry Curve 9380 and/or a Google Nexus S.

• Trevor's phone looks similar to a Nokia Lumia 820 or 730. In the enhanced version, it resembles a Sony Xperia E. This one even features a broken screen, alluding to this character's chaotic and destructive nature.

These different phones clearly reflect their owners real or perceived socioeconomic status and personalities. This is a conscious choice by the developers, with real production budget allocated to changing the phone's 3D model. NPCs also have their own unique cellphone models.

Already a big step up from SHSM`s use of the device. 

Another improvement from SHSM is its pictures on ID callers. 

This is a good opportunity to see how each character perceives the other, however the same character has the same id picture regardless of the phone we are calling from. Another missed opportunity for narrative depth or even growth, if the picture was changed after big character moments, betrayals or falling offs. 

This could have been a limitation of how the game stores pictures, using the same atlas for all characters. So it makes sense they would decide not to change this further into development.

Post Link: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DOEFzA-DeW8/?hl=en

Looking at one post by user darkviperau on instagram, we can see that NPCs have their phone screens imitate whatever the user is doing on their own screen, so the texture atlas could have been only one of many technical limitations.

Phone wallpapers are still underutilized, being very generic and never changing or being used in the narrative.

You can only change your phone wallpaper and theme in online mode. 

I guess we will see if GTA VI expands on this aspect of the game`s narrative or ditches it entirely.

If we continue traveling closer to present times, we start seeing better examples of characterization through cellphone`s wallpaper and icon themes.

In the game Watch Dogs 2 (2016) the main character`s phone features a custom DedSec theme for icons and background and similar to GTA V, it serves as a diegetic in-game menu.

This phone’s wallpaper or theme never changes as the game progresses, so the character's narrative journey is never reflected on his most personal device.

We could have had the background or theme change from a more rebellious and youthful vibe to a more serious and decided, even radicalized personality, as the game progresses and the guerrilla warfare takes its toll on our protagonist. 

Since the sequel, Watch Dogs Legion (2020) features a dynamic protagonist system this would be the ideal opportunity to use the changing the phone, background and theme to reflect each one of the characters we are incarnating. A quick way of presenting it to us as we saw done in the Bloodhounds TV Show.

What does the game actually do? It ditches the diegetic menu and replaces it entirely for a non-diegetic, fairly generic looking menu. Despite the cellphone continuing being a main tool for hacking and controlling devices it loses narrative presence.

No Players Online (2025) main gameplay language is a first person shooter and walking simulator, but from time to time the player gets to use a computer (no cellphones this time, since the game`s story occurs in the 90s).

I wanted to highlight not only the use of the wallpaper image and icon theme, but the widgets on screen as well. Not only that. The files on the downloads folder, search history and favorite sites also change depending on the character profile you are exploring.

The background also changes in some surprising ways that would spoil the story too much (and are also hard to explain without the full context).

From digital to physical framed pictures, Sally Face (chapters published between 2016-2019) uses family pictures on the game’s background to show how relationships between characters evolve. You see new family members, couples being formed, and even some posters travel places as the people move. All in the course of the many years we follow this character's lives.

The game also uses its more abstract paintings to foreshadow events without conveying any direct information.

The last two games mentioned are by far the best examples that I have seen so far regarding the use of pictures and digital personalization elements to reinforce narrative construction and evolution that comes close to what I saw on Bloodhounds.

Closing thoughts

There are of course plenty of indie games that use similar aspects as a main mechanic, such as A Normal Lost Phone (2017), Duskwood (2019) , Mystic Messenger (2016), Sara Is Missing (2016) or SIMULACRA (2017) among others.

However when the phone or computer is just another element of the game it seems like these aspects get relegated or forgotten entirely, despite being a powerful narrative tool. 

Obviously none of the mentioned games are bad or even worse for not having these aspects used in their narratives, but in many cases it seems like a missed opportunity if we take into account the production costs or even how previous games on the series handled this.

The idea of this article is not that you run and make a wallpaper changing mechanic on your videogame, but to showcase that some simple and cheap spaces are often under-utilized when we are crafting and guiding our narrative. We can do a lot more with the medium and recently we have seen a lot of examples of this.

It Takes a War (2025) for instance, uses the in-game chat of a counter strike clone to tell most of its story, spliced with moments of traditional cinematic, and first persona exploration narrative.

I invite you to look for other wasted spaces that could be of amazing use to complement your next videogame narrative.

Let's Not waste any time!

Now, I'm asking you, dear reader.

Let me know in the comments below what videogames that you know of, utilize some often wasted narrative spaces.