Maybe the question should be: 'do characters have a consciousness' like in 'are they aware of what they're doing?'
I don't know this, but in the Baldur's Gate games, if you left your characters awaiting for too long, they would start commenting on this, they would say things like: 'hey, i don't wanna wait here any longer- or can we get on with already' or 'there is no purpose just standing around all day'.
This, to me, suggest a bit of awareness, but the point is still that this awareness has been scripted into the game by the game devs.
To compare this even further a bit, does Data (a character from star trek) have a soul? Or is he just a very intelligent machine with a very clever Artificial Intelligent (AI) programming?
A wellwritten character in any game would certainly feel to the player like a real -ahem- live character. Bethesda, Obsidian, Bioware and other devs. have been trying to make these for ages now. And I do believe they're slowly getting there, being able to make characters somewhat act and talk like real people, with their own motives and reasons for what they're doing in the course of the game.
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