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Devs Weigh In On Playing The Bad Guy
Gamecloud has an article that goes into detail about the good, bad, and fun of playing a villain in a game. The article refers to several psychological studies, and has developer commentary from across the game design board. From CliffyB's comments: "Video games are a playable fantasy and there are few things more alluring than living out the fantasy of being evil and doing bad or illegal actions without any real world repercussions. As a designer, the best thing I can do when I allow the user to indulge in that fantasy is to show that there are ramifications for those actions. In GTA the more police you attack the harder the game gets, ultimately resulting in capture or death."
I can't think of many older (NES, SNES, GB, GEN) games that allowed for you to play as the bad guy.
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Hardly... First of all, you could commit a ton of murders before you ever got a star. And when you finally did, oh no, you get taken to the jail, and you lose your guns. That was most of the fun of GTA. I honestly never felt like I had lost anything when the police busted me, in fact it was most of the fun, to see how long you could last before they took you down. Hell, if you really cared about the guns, you could just put a cheat in to ensure you had them back instantaneously. Look, I don't believe in video games causing violence any more than the next guy, but seriously, don't act like there are ramifications to violent actions in games. And for a game like GTA, that's how it should be.
In the real world, attacking even one police officer, even in a minor way, is going to do far more than making life more difficult. You're likely to end up captured or dead very shortly -- and in either case, you can't just hit reload.
Granted, GTA is a game and you play by game rules, but by adding ramifications to `bad' actions, you're not really teaching morality or anything else like that. You're just making the game more fun. (Which is a good thing, don't get me wrong.)
Ther always have been, and always will be two schools of thought on this:
1)Bad is always bad and Jesus saves!
2)Bad is only bad for you if there's "something wrong with you".
Stupid people will always be stupid. Crazy people will always be crazy. And when either one of these groups of people have children, they all spend the same amount of time with them, fostering healthy relationships and teaching them how to "get along" with everyone else in the world.
How much time is that, you ask? None.
This is no different than the "Catcher in the Rye" debates from years past.
I don't know about YOU, but I have yet to play ANY game that was as immersive as a really good book. Half-Life 2, WoW, and insert-hot-uber-game-here included. So the "yeah, but you're actually DOING the bad stuff" argument doesn't hold water to me.
We need to just REMEMBER that there have always been crazy people, and there always will be. This is not a new development folks.
In GTA the more police you attack the harder the game gets, ultimately resulting in capture or death."
Yes. It's amazing that more people can't see the simple moral should message in this: if you decide to be scum, you prey upon the weak, the disorganized and unarmed.
In other words, live and let live, after a fashion, as it were.
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Video games are a playable fantasy and there are few things more alluring than living out the fantasy of being evil and doing bad or illegal actions without any real world repercussions.
Without any real world repercussions?
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
there was a Genesis version of that game...
I don't know how closely it stuck to the PC version, but building a criminal empire through kidnapping, and setting people on fire, and listening to them scream, is fairly depraved.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
I realize I didn't RTFA, but the summary made a disturbing trend clear enough. It is indeed a fantasy. Thus, why does it have to be that the "villain" loses? That the "good guys" are stronger? Why can there not be an equally balanced game, where at the very least both "sides" of a storyline are playable, let alone a game where the entire goal is to play as the villain until you actually succeed? The same game elements are there, tactically work your way through scenarios, beating your opponents, gathering power, etc. Because it is just a game, whether you are the "hero" or the "villain" is just flavor, like whether you are the top-hat or wheelbarrow in monopoly.
If GTA had realistic repercussions you'd spend 90% of the game inside a jail cell. Games are meant to be fantasy. If you're relying on videogames to teach your kids morals you probably shouldn't have any. I was playing doom when i was 5 and i managed not to shoot all my classmates. Blaming the media for an individuals crimes is just lazy. It makes it easier for us to accept what they did if we believe computer games made them do it rather than the fact they could be mentally ill, immoral or just plain retarded. The mainstream media needs to get off the whole "Video games are evil and if you play them you're evil and so are all your friends" bandwagon and tackle some bigger/real issues.
One of my favorite games was DK2 (why no sequel guys??). In dungeon keeper you play as the "keeper" basically an evil overlord who controls a warren of imps and other nasty little creatures. You have to tunnel through to the "heroes" base and then capture various items or remove key players.
The heroes themselves seem like the pompous or inept types (like Farquad from Shrek), and overall the experience is that it's very good to be evil....
Being able to play the "bad guys" is one of the most interesting aspects of games as a medium. The article only touched on the part that makes it so interesting, though: the empathy that arises from playing the other side.
Most games these days don't really emphasize it that much, of course, but I think it's really great that players will see a conflict from, say, the side of the terrorists. Currently games don't give you a background into the reasons why these particular people turned to terrorism, but it still balances the viewpoints in a way that no other medium does.
I also think that this makes for better stories - if a player can be "the bad guy", that character had better have as compelling a story as the hero, and good character motivations for being evil. This leads to better character development, and fewer cardboard characters.
This hasn't yet been fully exploited in games, unfortunately, but I'm looking forward to the day when games can carry these complex messages better than books, movies, or plays.
I yearn for you tragically. A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.