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On Making Videogame Heroes, Villains Realistic
Thanks to the IGDA for its 'Culture Clash' column discussing the increasingly complex nature of heroism and villainy in videogames. The writer suggests: "The white hat/black hat dichotomy of heroes and villains (PC and NPC) in most games is no longer sufficiently believable to the player, but is still theoretically acceptable given the earlier limitations of the medium", and goes on to argue: "Audiences respond poorly to blatant noseleading, and increasingly demand escalating shades of gray." Do you enjoy stereotypical portrayals of good and evil in gaming, or do you find, as Daryl Zero needed to be told: "You realize... there aren't any 'good guys' and 'bad guys'... there are just... just a bunch of guys"?
Good characterization (making those shades of grey) takes time. The player's time. So it becomes a tradeoff. To make a good story, you have to usually cut into the time you're actually playing the game (cut scenes, etc). At its forefront, the game is still the most important part. Otherwise you're just watching a movie. The key to all of this is finding some way to integrate the character development/story development into the game action itself.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
Would that not depend on the kind of game you play? For RPG:s multi-shade characters would work very well, and I would appreciate the variation (not just grey, bring on the whole colour-spectrum!), but for shoot-em-ups, isn't part of the premise that the characters you are shooting by the dozen are totally evil? War-games would be different again, "enemies" in that sense are also just people, but there is a war on. I'm talking your average kill-everything-in-sight game where you would not necessarily be wanting to justify your actions other than by "but they're *evil*".
Conker's Bad Fur Day was an execellent example of this. Though it's shades of grey had more to do with winning and losing than with good guys and bad guys.
For those who aren't familiar, the game ends with Conker "winning" by defeating the bad guy, but his girlfriend died in the process, so the game ends with him at a bar, asking for a bottle of whiskey...
You can forget all of the dick and fart jokes, what made CBFD a mature title was it's thoroughly morose ending.
I've said it before, and I shall now say it again:
Evil does not think itself evil
While villans in cheap movies may rub their hands together and cackle about how eeeeeeviiiil they are, in the real world those who do evil do not see themselves as evil.
The pusher on the corner doesn't see himself as evil, "Yo, I'm just givin' folks what they want."
Saddam did not see himself as evil, "I am maintaining order in my country - this person is a threat to that order, and to prevent others from becoming threats I must make an example of him. Uday, turn on the wood chipper."
Darl McBride does not see himself as evil, "I am running a business. This is my chance to make money."
If you want your villans to be believable, try to get inside their heads and make their actions make sense from their perspective. It's taxing, it's scary, but it makes for a believable villan.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I prefer my villains to be the moustache-twirling, top-hat-and-cape wearing villains of yesteryear. You know, the type who tie young maidens to the train tracks, twirl their handlebar moustaches, and laugh that villainous laugh, "mwehehehehehehe!"
I think I agree with the point being made here. Deus Ex: Invisible War did a wonderful job of providing you a story with nothing but shades of grey. Technical difficulties aside, this is the only game I know of where there is no clear right/wrong path (feel free to suggest others). Even the first Deus Ex didn't do that. Playing even the first few maps of this game, you are confronted with a lot of possible paths you can take, most of which conflict with each other. I actually had a difficult time making decisions (as I probably would have if presented with similar choices in real life). So, yes, I believe that the future of gaming (or at least more realistic gaming) lies along this path.
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a good example of bad guys who really weren't all that bad, save one is almost every character in Knight's of the Old Republic. A game that can be played in under 40 hours by me and takes the time to set up believable villians, most of which have very human sides to them. Another good example IMHO is Max from Max Payne. He could be considered a villian through the eyes of some but his motivations for what he does are so understandable that he's the hero in the games. This is a question of where do you draw the line between good and evil?
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
I think it's fine to have wholly evil and wholly good characters. The weakness is that these are usually portrayed unsubtly.
Games that indicate a character is evil by simply making them have some dastardly scheme to nuke the world, or by showing them killing innocent people and laughing, are just being lazy. The same goes for hereos and good characters.
So, in a game like Baldur's Gate II, I think it's fair to say that Minsk is basically a 100% good guy - but he has an interesting character so it works well.
Likewise, in a book like Brighton Rock, the character Pinky is 100% evil. He's evil for no reason ("just born that way"), and yet he's a good character because the nature of his evil is so well explored.
So, I think it's fine to have a world of Good vs Evil (see LoTR, for the most part), but there are many ways for people to be 100% good or 100% bad, not just the usual 'Lone crusader for Justice' 'Evil Genius with Plot' types that we see too often.
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Knights of the Old Republic did a decent job of portraying the NPC's in a mixed light. Of the *bad* guys, Canderous was the only one who came across as hyperactively violent, and that translated to an interpretation of his actions as *evil*. HK-47, while definitively evil, was a droid, so he was programmed as such, and his dialogue was mostly used as comic relief. The interesting thing about KotOR, though, is how the arrogance of the Jedi is portrayed. Bastila is so bossy and uptight when you finally meet her that, even though she's *good*, she almost seems like she should be evil. (I suppose that could be called foreshadowing of a sort.) I do agree with the article, though, that KotOR's method for *role-playing* as the PC is lacking. Having played through as light and dark, I found myself taking the over-the-top EVIL approach too often, to ensure my dark side status, as opposed to a more natural *evil* reaction. The problem is, as described with the kitten situation, there was always the blatant good option, the mercenary good option, and the KILL KILL KILL evil option, and I would have liked a more subtle method of being mean. I suppose I don't care would have been good, but picking that means not completing whatever task is at hand. I guess the ultimate problem is that in the choice between role-playing and completing a task in the game (be it attempting to do all the quests or maintain dark side mastery), I chose the tasks. Ultimately, that should not be such a visible choice.
The only thing I hate more than hypocrites are people who hate hypocrites.
The idea of a flawed hero reminds me of something Kevin Spacey said:
"'So in this film you play a flawed character,' and I go, 'as opposed to every human being in the rest of the world?'"
Gray characters are more interesting not only because they're more believable, but because they cause the player or viewer to reflect more on life itself. A movie or game which serves as a ringing endorsement for the status quo is really quite boring.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
(spoiler alert:) The Nameless One faces three "end bosses", a purely good one (an angel), a purely evil one (a hag) and a purely neutral one (a previous incarnation of the Nameless One himself IIRC). Just like the alignment system of 2nd ed AD&D. However, every one of them behaves in a manner atypical of "their" alignment. The hag played around with Nameless because she loves him and the angel has been corrupted into imprisoning an entire plane of existence.
Other incarnations of the Nameless One were either very good or very evil (one of them taught Ignus to burn haha).
Of course, finding out about the Nameless One's history was the point behins the whole game, and it is still the single best game I've ever played.
Geek runner, motorcyclist and professional know-it-all
Tolkien seemed to do just fine with caricaturized good and evil. I believe Sauron and Saruman were well aware that they were unquestionably evil.
It's bad story that gamers don't like. Characterization is part of that, but really, how characterized was a disembodied eye?
"lidless, wreathed in flame," was about it.
But the story (for most people) was captivating, despite its apparent 'simplicity'. 'Believable' villians are only a requirement if you're trying to craft a 'believeable' story.
and even then, self-delusion is not a set-in-stone requirement (Hannibal Lector).
As with any storytelling, there are no set rules, there are no silver bullets - there is only what works and what does not work. And no-one can tell you which is which by description alone. You must read the work to know where it lays on your subjective scale.
Trying to adhere to structure or processes that were defined via hindsight, doesn't guarantee future success - so why bother?
(You may argue with 3 act play, 9 part story, joseph campbell, et al. - but the overbundance of crap stories that adhere to those structures and the instances of good stories that don't use them already prove my point)
A storyteller should get inside every character's head, to make sure they're well-written. But self-justified evil is not a prerequisite of a well characterized Bad Guy.
it's also important to note the distinction between the disillusioned bad guy who thinks he's doing good, and the Bad Guy who realizes that his actions will be seen as evil, and perhaps are evil, but he still feels a compulsion to execute them anyway (the Borg, any Mob Boss, etc).
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Evil like good is not uniform.
Why else would I be shooting them? This isn't just about Good and Evil, but decent characterisation generally. Well crafted characters make a plot-based game better, without a shadow of a doubt.
But when your job is to shoot everything that moves, there's a lot to be said for "because they're evil" as a motivating factor. Mind you, I'm normally prepared to settle for "because you'll get a high score". Its why so many classic shmups involve Aliens; there isn't as much need to question why they need shooting, as they are just "the baddies". Intense moral dilemmas have their place, but vertical scrollers aren't it.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Sadly, like many gameplay innovations, realistic characters are ultimately going to be limited by sales. Why? Because most people don't want the kind of well developed characters you can see in some games. The biggest consumers of story driven games are those who play Japanese RPGs, which are in general characterised by shallow, art driven character development, "badass" ambiguously gendered villians with execrable dialogue, angsty prettyboy heroes, and enormous polygon breasts. Ultimately, a designer's job is to create a product that sells, and while games continue to be played by socially maldeveloped acne ridden bullied 15 year olds, Sephiroth and Cloud will always be more popular than The Nameless One and Irenicus
I've been saying for years that in the next Final Fantasy, you should play the antagonist. You know, you go the whole game trying to save the world, but in the end you realize you're the bad guy....
Then again, I think when they reach FFXX, the would should blow up after you save it.
But this discussion brings to mind what most game discussions do - the most important factor of a game is that it's fun. If it's got terrible graphics, no plot or development, or any other lesser quality, who cares? If you enjoy the game, it's a good game, that that's ultimately what sells.
It's really shocking to see something like that on slashdot.
Actually, in many Asian countries, like Japan and especially Korea (oddly enough, big "story" video game producers), they do not have the simple black and white notion of "good" and "evil" that we have. Instead, it all just comes down to a difference of opinion, or rather, that difference creates evil This thought process actually is a theme in some games, one off the top of my head being Final Fantasy VIII. For information about the Korean mindset on evil, read "Think No Evil" by C. Fred Alford.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
(disclaimer: opinion, of course)
Characters, no matter whether good, evil, corrupt, silly, stupid, super-intelligent or whatnot, need to be believable and contextually relevant. Contrary to popular belief, characters need not be complicated, nor should they resemble human characters. That's because most of the people you meet and interact with are known on a very superficial level, like characters. The rare few, those you are close to, have many facets, and none of those are easily classifiable.
In a book, like in a game, the characters you have most contact with should be more than superficial, and the rest can be extremely superficial. The goal is the ease the reader's/player's acceptance of the fantasy you're spinning. The only problem is that really human-like characters seem a bit neurotic and wishy-washy. I believe that's why the main character's are always so driven in the plot. They're still polarized towards a goal no matter how deeply the character is described.
...but if the gaming industry wants the ones who played their games through childhood to keep playing their games, they need to improve their titles storylines A LOT. In many, many games it shines through that they probably were written by anti social nerds, barely capable of having conversations themselves, not to speak of implementing it in their games.
"The white hat/black hat dichotomy of heroes and villains (PC and NPC) in most games is no longer sufficiently believable to the player, but is still theoretically acceptable given the earlier limitations of the medium", and goes on to argue: "Audiences respond poorly to blatant noseleading, and increasingly demand escalating shades of gray."
Of course it depends on the story you are trying to tell, but if you watch most movies you will see "pure good and evil" in the characters. Why? That makes them more compelling. Take for instance, Darth Vader. Ultimate badguy, down to the outfit. If he were a "shade of gray" through the movies then his turn at the end of Return of the Jedi wouldn't have been as piviotal as it was. (It turns out now, with the prequals they are showing his "grayness").
Ultimate "Bad Guys" and "Good Guys" are more compelling because you don't see them in the real world. Even Ultimate good guys have their flaws, and ultimate "Bad Guys" usually don't believe they are bad in real life.
In the end, as a gamer I don't care what NPC's are like, they should be whatever the storyline dictates they should be. The "Ultimate bad guy" is a bit cliched, but it's still fun. I'm more worried about what I can do. If I start acting evil, I'd like to see NPC's react differently because of that behavior.
After following down the evil path to the final planet and reclaiming your identity... you can order Bacca (the wookie) kill his best friend Mission!
nt
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
It would be best, as they are doing with Star Wars, to show the bad guy's progression from gray to evil. That would be very compelling and help you to feel as though you actually were a part of the story.
A lot of the Zelda games have had your typical "muwah ha ha" type of bad guy, completely removed from any real humanity. I thought that the Windwaker had a nice touch in the confessional speech by Ganon near the end. "I suppose...I suppose I coveted that wind." Didn't stop him from trying to kill you or from being a nasty bastard, but for a moment you could see things from his perspective and it was a lot more interesting than the end boss in most games as a result.
To tell the truth, I've never considered the topic of good versus evil in my favorite games. Of course, my favorite game is Galaga, and there's really no ambiguity about who my enemies are: they're anything that moves. It's entirely possible that, instead of the implicit assumption that I'm defending my homeworld from hordes of invading bugs, that I'm actually invading bug-space with the intention of dropping a gigantic bomb on their homeworld, but as the levels appear to repeat endlessly with increasing difficulty, there is, as of at least level 17, an unresolved moral ambiguity. In fact, it's entirely possible that Galaga is an unlicensed derivative of Starship Troopers, but with the story boiled down to 16x16 sprites, it's hard to say for sure.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
To make a good story, you have to usually cut into the time you're actually playing the game (cut scenes, etc). At its forefront, the game is still the most important part.
I think there is a key distinction that needs to be made... Character development does not necessarily equal cut scenes. Lunar had an awesome bit of character development at the end of the game where the player came across (the evil nemesis) Ghaleon's fairy garden. These fairies all thought their caretaker was the kindest man they had ever met, and was blissfully unaware of his dark ambition to rule the world. That didn't happen as a cut scene, that happened at a much needed heal-and-save rest stop. In the following game, Ghaleon joins your party for a short time, sacrificing his temporary reprieve from death to save the world he wanted to rule.
There are other examples, of course. When a key figure either defends / attacks a boss enemy, lurks in the trees following your character, etc. Hockey Mask guy (Rick) from Splatterhouse killed his own girlfriend, then went insane and jumped into the house's womb.
Most characters are tacked onto a game design... praying by ye-gods scroll boss then doing something original in the cut scenes. But they work much better when it is integrated into the gameplay. You could have Kain go into a lengthy diatribe against God and Able, and kill his brother in a cut scene, but you and your players would be better served if they were allowed to play a level as Kain fighting through an insane heaven / earth mishmash in his quixotic quest to dethrone an evil god. Perhaps the evil female love interest in the game takes good care of her mentally disabled brother (who helps her out in the fight), or the evil overlord's last words are to implore you to take care of his children (whom you kill in the next room). These things build original characters in a timely fashion that can be integrated into gameplay better than a 5 minute diatribe about their childhood. Want to show someone was abused? Give them a limp. Want to humanize the giant monster destroying Tokyo? Give them a Pukka charm bangle.
And if you want to flesh out a character's backstory in a cut scene... Don't. Think about your idea again and redo it in-game.
The ______ Agenda
In games where your goal is simply to oblitherate a bunch of pixelated enemies, most people would rather they be a flat evil character so it doesn't interfere with their enjoyment of the game.
What if before you played Wolf3D you had to watch all those guards you kill at home with their wives and children?
My deity tells me good from evil:
Actually, now that I think about it, my deity is more interested in what is wrong then what is right...
[0] I don't care what the spoilers say -- chaotic characters summoning demon lords is a VERY BAD THING, and is a sign that the chaotic gods still think its evil, but want to give you just enough rope to punish yourself.
It depends on the game really. The only game where characterization should matter, is really a RPG, which should have a deeper story.
Most RPG baddies are motivated by a search for power. Now what they would do with this power is up in the air. Would they be evil? Yeah, most of the time. However, they might not see it that way. They may see themselves on some sort of divine quest, or that they're preserving society. And yes, there are the true crazies.
Off-hand...
FFX, Seymour was after power, he wanted to become Sin. All his supporters were more interested in maintaining the status quo and preventing Auron from tearing down their religion.
FFVI, Kefka is a loony. Obviously picked on FAR too much as a little kid.
The Dragon Warrior games were always very simplistic in the character designs. It was always just eeeviiiil. Rather boring.
For my money, FFX had the most interesting villins. Mainly because there were critical social implications to what was going on, and that was the focus on the story.
It's only recently that stories in games started to get a little deeper. As a side note, my favorite action story by far is the one in Viewtiful Joe. A great B-movie director is sucked into the movies he makes, and kidnapps his own daughter to force her to help him create his materpiece.
I think it's more execution of a story than anything...
Remember what TV series frequently do with multiple episode story arcs? They have a quick introduction to where the story left off when they resume. It'd be pretty easy to include an option to "brief me on the story". When you combine that with a Neverwinter Nights-style journal for more complex games and the ability to "look" or "get info" on something or someone and see a description and things that you've learned about it, you can pretty much stop and go whenever you want.
Remember that lots of people read, say, a chapter of a book a night and still enjoy it, and a book can't do the kind of "quick recaps" that TV episodes do and video games *could* do.
May we never see th
I think that if I had to summarize the reason Marathon's story made such a huge impression on everyone (and spawned the massive Marathon Story) site and many thousands of posts of sophisticated discussion in two words, I'd use "subtle" and "deep".
Marathon made a number of very subtle, minor allusions, clues to figuring out the full story. It did not come out and simply say "Durandal is a bad computer who is insane. You need to work with him." or something like that. It let you discover the plot as you went through tidbits dropped. You couldn't just read the story by going through the terminals and appending one to another -- each is a non-chronologically sequential piece of information that generally fits into the story somehow. It's quite Myth-like, though with a far more complex story.
Marathon's plot is very deep for such a subtle one -- there are a *phenomenal* number of references to literature, history, mythology, contemporary weapons technology, psychology, etc, that you need to look up to understand fine points of what the authors were getting at. You might find yourself reading a news article on the sociology of a Martian political group that gives some insight into the background of what happend and the reason things occurred. Because it took such expertise to figure the story out, it spawned a vast number of (sometimes occasional) players who wrote interesting analyses from their own area of expertise to help the community figure out what Bungie had written.
Even better, you didn't *have* to pay attention to the story if you didn't want to. You weren't forced to rely on the story much to figure out what to do in the game. You could play Marathon as a straight action game if you wanted to, and weren't interested in the story, but if you wanted to get into the story, it was appealing and there. This made the game appealing to a broad audience.
If I could choose two more elements, probably less important, that made Marathon good, it would be darkness and plausibility.
The Marathon comments were frequently very dark (a trend that progressed as the series continued). They referred to deaths and killings quite seriously. They referenced massacres and insanity, and not in a offhandish way in the least. They also did not generally say "someone is insane" -- they let you figure it out for yourself, by reading their thoughts or what happened. One of the darkest is the infamous Gheritt White terminal. This is one of the darkest and most disturbing texts that I think I've ever read in a video game -- much more intimidating than the short and violence-glorifying snippits in Postal. That single terminal alone spawned *vast* amounts of discussion and analysis. When elements in Marathon II and Infinity (like the pocketknife/broadsword terminal) start their own story threads that start out reasonable and get darker, you can really feel a kind of shocked surprise. If you're playing by yourself, late at night and in the dark, (and have just survived creeping through dark hallways with silent things drifting down them and around corners and out of the darkness) your words are probably much like mine -- "Oh, *man*". The only games that I think have competed with Marathon in terms of slowly, horrifyingly uncovering what happened are adventure games -- like Myth -- and I've yet to see an adventure game with the subtlety of Marathon.
Marathon is also plausible. There were, to be fair, errors. However, Marathon's story underwent the most extensive analysis I've ever seen a story undergo. I doubt that books undergo such work, especially given the size of the crowd looking for errors. Like Snow Crash, much of the computer technology in the series is at least acceptably plausible. Real terms are used, references to current technologies are used. It means that programmers don't have to constantly wince when playing the game, which is truly wonderful and unusual for a st
May we never see th
See also What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of NPCs?", an article by Ernest Adams discussing the behaviour of programmed characters, and how they can be modelled in terms of emotional state.
I do not pretend to believe that my view on this subject is at all representative of the gaming populace in general but my favorite hero has always been that of the ordinary hero. Phillip K. Dick was the master at creating these characters, these ordinary-to-sub-ordinary heros are what made Dick's stories so wonderful. It wasn't superman, it wasn't "the one", it was just an ordinary individual placed in an extraordinary situation. Dick did this so incredibly well, look at books like "Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep", the book Total Recall was based off of (I forgot it's name, but he was not supposed to be good ole Arnie, if my memory serves me he was a hair stylist ... just an ordinary man), "The Three Stigmata's of Palmer Eldrich" and a variety of Dick's other stories. These heroes were often amoral, they did not have some cause of moral righteousness to fight for, rather they were besieged with the existential question of how do I make life authentic and to survive.
To me these are the fascinating stories that compel me to continue reading/watching, unfortantely I can think of no games that transfer this notion over and quite possibly it's not indicative of the medium but mono-shade characters are boring. They do not force me to contemplate the nature of the character and understand who they are and why they do what they do. I've always been fascinated by what makes us human, and what constitutes humanity. Are we merely the sum of our parts or is there a greater unseen entity that influences who and what we are. These characters offer an opportunity to explore the intricacies of human nature and I believe to come to a better understanding of who we are.
That being said, the unfortante truth is I do not believe the majority of video game players agree with me, a game of this nature would be slow to develop and focused on story and not flashy effects. There's nothing wrong with this, I often play games such as FFX-2 just to see the cut scenes and where the story goes even if the characters do not interest me. But I would love a game that delved into the plight of an average individual struggling to survive, something that stimulated me intellectually and forced me to take a look at what makes us all human. If any one can think of a game like this, please respond with the title.
Actually. I think that the whole issue of villains being good AND bad goes back to Marvel comics. Before their leap to the forefront in the sixties, most comic characters were either very good or very evil. With FF, Hulk, and especially Spider-Man, you saw heros that didn't always win, and villains who weren't totally evil. That is part of the reason that they were so successful and have been, is that drawing such a Black/White distinction isn't totally believeable to most people who mimic the characters by being good and bad.
-Minister of Disinformation
KenixKil
I think you need at least one main bad guy in a story. The main bad guy might not be the one you encounter at the end and you may never encounter him, but he is the one bad guy that causes your goal. Inspector gadget for example.. There is an uncountable number of henchmen. Are the henchmen bad? Who is to say, maybe they just want to earn a wage. It is Dr. Claw who is the one "for certain" bad guy, he is the cause. In addition to a 1 main bad guy it is important to have grey characters for depth. In LOTR, for example, was Gollum evil? In several ways, on purpose or not, he helped them destroy the ring and he never really caused any destruction. In the end it was his own greed that destroyed him; do you feel bad for him? how could you feel bad for someone who is truely evil. Was Darth Vader truely evil? If he was then why did he kill the Emporer(The one true evil) to save his sons life?
Really.
There is a very thin line between Batman and many of the villains he faces.
Castlevania? The premise is simple: whip the hell out of everything that moves, because it's ALL EVIL!