Games like Half-Life 2 and Skyrim have shown that the best way to immerse yourself in a game world is by attaching the player to an unrestrained avatar. Gordon Freeman is you, you are Gordon Freeman, and you experience the story through him rather than the other way around. It’s the same with your character in Skyrim and to a similar degree, your Commander Shepard. That’s not to say that main characters with defined personalities aren’t effective, but there are certain problems that emerge when they are handled poorly.
The main problem is the notion that the player can make their own definition of who these people are. Take GTA IV for instance. At various points in the story, you could choose to let a man live or die, choose who to kill and who to save, and other things that directly affect the narrative at hand. This is totally fine, except GTA IV has a defined personality in its main character: Niko Bellic. You aren’t Niko Bellic, you’re just controlling him.
If there is one situation that highlights this issue best, it’s the choice between killing Playboy X or Dwayne. In the game, the narrative points out that the obvious choice is letting Dwayne live; Niko likes him, he’s sympathetic, he has doubts, issues, he’s a real person in a world inhabited by Brucies. Playboy X is none of these things. He’s selfish, callous, stupid, and unlikable. Niko would kill Playboy X and let Dwayne live and the game knows this. So why leave the choice up to you?
I killed Dwayne the first time I played it to see how the narrative would accommodate this awkward choice. Easy answer: it doesn’t. Not only does Niko abandon all sympathy for Dwayne immediately and just kill him without a second thought, the game then has Niko regret the decision later anyways. So why did he do it? Because you made him, you jerk.
He didn’t have a reason to and the narrative didn’t give you one, so why did the choice even exist? All it does is hurt the story, and with Niko’s self-reflection and regret of the situation, it hurts you, because it’s your fault. This isn’t dramatic, it’s poor writing.
Narratively, this idea has rarely been explored in videogames; exploring the metafictional idea that you, the player, are a separate entity from the character on screen, and examining the relationship between the two. Half-Life 2 touches on the idea, after all, the fact that your character is called “Freeman” implies his separation from the narrative ties that bind characters like Nathan Drake. Not only that, but it points out the sheer amount of interactivity that exists in videogames; you are the free man and Freeman is your avatar of freedom. The fact that the game is about a rebel uprising, a fight for freedom, cements this notion.
No More Heroes also explored this relationship, with Travis Touchdown being a representation of videogame bloodlust, and with his masturbation of his own sword, he basically shows himself to be the avatar for the lust of violence by videogames. You aren’t Travis Touchdown, and even he knows this, so the game continuously makes comment on Travis’s lack of morality by pointing out that he knows he is a fictional character; if there is no consequence, his violent tendencies, as sadistic and perverted as they are, are meaningless and only serve to make us feel the sting of enjoying it as much as him.
If we look at a character like Nathan Drake or John Marston though, we see very well-written, likable, but completely sociopathic characters whose personalities are only hurt by your involvement with their story. In the cutscenes, John Marston is a well-spoken tough guy with a heart and family. He wants redemption. Instead, you as a player have him kill thousands of people to satisfy the needs of dickhead NPCs. The John Marston the story presents and the one you play are completely different characters and it hurts the narrative and our ability to understand and relate to it. The same with Nathan Drake, who is a charming vagabond in the narrative but a maniac killer in the gameplay.
This cognitive dissonance is present in many games and it is solved most easily by letting the narrative allow itself to unfold naturally instead of asking what you would want as a player. A story that is well-written enough knows what you want and would play to or deny your expectations to create dramatic affect. If we are given the choice to usurp the narrative by inserting ourselves into a world that we don’t inhabit, the narrative often becomes less effective.
It all comes down to writing characters in a manner that complements gameplay. For instance, Nathan Drake would be a much more effective character if he didn’t kill so many damn people. If you’re going to make a game about killing a ton of people, make him a maniac or a soldier or something that would relate to the gameplay. Furthermore, this dissonance could be further solved by simply allowing the narrative to unfold linearly.
Linearity has become a dirty word and it really shouldn’t be. GTA IV would be much more dramatically effective if the moral choice system was eliminated. It sounds counter-intuitive given the medium’s interactive nature, but a lot of games would be improved by allowing us to “view” the story through the appropriate character instead of being able to affect its outcome.
In other words: Not all games call for the same type of story/gameplay character/player relationships. Sandbox games should let slip the control of the narrative, because the freedom of choice and emphasis on the out-of-game player begs for it (or you get that dissonance between the character and the world they live in). Story-heavy games should hold control over the main character in order to keep the personality of the character persistent and tell a tighter story.
There are good ways to make a hybrid of these ideas, though. Open-ended games with multiple endings which take into account player actions? The story doesn’t necessarily have to suffer to allow freedom.
However, I’m not sure there is a way to keep the character personality strong and emphasized while also giving the player unbridled control.
A lot of these problems come down to two things: a disconnect between gameplay and narrative and the presence of choice systems.
Moral choice systems are completely ineffective gameplay and narrative tools and I’ll be going into why next week.
The oft-used ones are so binary.. You feel ineffective or you miss out on perks if you don’t go pure good or pure evil.
If a game loses the idea of rewarding moral choices at all one way or another and just drops you into a moral-less world, that might work well with the sandbox type of game. I’m thinking Minecraft. It works even better in that case because there is no narrative or story at all. Anything and everything that happens in that game happens just because you wanted it to.
One of the best games I have played that implemented a choice system (even if accidental choice sometimes) would be Heavy Rain. I felt like everything I did in that game mattered, and really it did. (The ending I got was on account of something I didn’t even notice I didn’t do, but realized after, which was neat – I thought someone was not saveable and they were. But with this game, it was very controlled as far as game play, (mostly just reactionary button presses during actions scenes and exploring locations) and I never really thought I WAS the main character. The game has you shift through different character’s points of view. You feel like you are viewing pieces of a much larger image. You even sometimes forget that you are in control of what is happening. It felt like taking part in a movie.
I think those two examples show the extremes on this topic. I’m a little interested in how to find the balance perfectly. What game does that?
I don’t even wanna go into how much I hate Heavy Rain (I ALREADY DID), but the game has it’s moments, like the trial where Ethan has to cut his finger off. I can’t comment on the quality of the moral choices in the game because I loathe the game’s horrendous plot too much as it is.
Also, I’ll go into the perfect mix moral choice system in my column, but suffice it to say, it’ll probably piss people off no matter how true it is.
I don’t think you had a to like the game’s plot to see that the creators took control of their narrative and characters even in the type of game play that was implemented.
I never felt that I, the player, was making any big decision alone. I didn’t feel I was the character. I was allowing the character to make the decision they would make as that character – which I guess spoils the point of even having the choice.
Sometimes it was as if the dilemma was the character’s and my own, but that only happened because I tried to take on the mindset of each character.
Well put. I felt that disconnect moreso in Red Dead Redemption than in Uncharted probably because it was more open-world and thus missions where I’m completely philanthropic can be followed immediately by my complete massacre of a nearby fort, without significant consequence to the character’s development (within the story).
However, you do remind me of one particlular moment in Uncharted, when Drake was a kid and pointing that gun at the guard, seemingly tortured at the thought of pulling the trigger only to have Sully shoot the guard instead. For a moment I thought of young Drake and the traumatic effect killing someone would have had on him at that time in his life. I thought of Sully and how he saved him from a life of killing. Then I remembered Drake’s, as you put it, sociopathic nature and the impact of the scene was less…well…impactful.
It’s interesting that the games you mentioned, Red Dead, GTA 4, Uncharted, are all well-received both by critics and by consumers. However, cognitive dissonance in our society is quite commonplace so I’m not surprised. How many people out there are against abortion but for the death penalty? How many people buy low fat foods but eat twice as much of it or order their supersized double bacon chili cheeseburger combo meal with a Diet Coke?
For the most part, the cognitive dissonance you mentioned in these games while stipping some power from the narrative is well within appropriate levels of dissonance so as not to take away from the experience altogether. However, it seems greatness (e.g. Half-Life 2, Skrim) does require some congruence between player input and character/story development.
I think it boils down to smarter character development and a better relationship between story and gameplay. It wouldn’t be so bad in Uncharted, but it’s the fact that the game places so much emphasis on establishing Drake as a good guy and then having him do terrible things. The only reason we recognize him as heroic is because the story paints him as such.
We should also keep in mind that choices in video games today really aren’t choices. Whether we go good or bad, the same things happen, just by different means.
What spawned this idea: my friend is playing Skyrim, and he had just slayed his first dragon and went back to the Jarl of Windhelm. He had around three options of things to tell him, one of them asking for a reward. I realized that you get a reward no matter what. I then thought on to the idea that in Skyrim, really no matter what you say the flow of the conversation is the same. The NPC responses work for multiple answers, or they actively lead you back to the set discussion path.
ANYWAYS, nice column. Not much has made me legitimately think about video games outside of conversations and personal thought. It’s good to be in a thinking arena based around video games. They are legitimate forms of story telling and deserve the same respect or attention as movies or literature (both of those have classes devoted to them). It’s important we analyze the games we play and pick out the implications and the importance of them.