Strength of Character on GameSpy.com is an essay by Valve Designer Marc Laidlaw to wrap-up their Developer Week. The article talks about character creation in games, going into some of what's behind Half-Life's Gordon Freeman, at one point paraphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald on the difficulty in creating a character (I'm guessing game designers usually just use Fitzgerald as an inspiration at the bar):

F. Scott Fitzgerald said something to the effect that if you try to create a "real" person, you'll be lucky to end up with a character. But if you try only to create a character, you'll end up with a caricature…something two-dimensional at best. We must aim high. It's a challenge that many of us take seriously.