Bring Back the Bastards

By J.D. Richardson

We need more bastards in our games. A good villain can really elevate a game above its peers. Of course, I’m mainly talking about first-person shooters, RPGs and the like: games that follow a good story. Remember characters like Jon Irenicus in Baldur’s Gate 2? Now he was a bastard: someone you developed a real hatred for as he popped up time and time again, doing very mean things to you and your friends. Father Karras in Thief II: The Metal Age was another great bastard, a man with a plot so nasty and apocalyptic I was actually taken aback by it. The man needed to be stopped, I was the one who was going to do it and I made damn sure that I did.

SHODAN, the psychotic computer AI program in the brilliant System Shock series, is yet another classic villain, one who is engraved in the collective consciousness of anyone who played PC games in the late 90s. You have to wonder whether Shock 2 would have been quite so good without her.

//Hall of fame
But, increasingly, too many game developers are putting all their resources into just the mechanics and aesthetics, and not enough into a good bastard.  Take the recent Far Cry 2, a game whose story revolves around your mission to eliminate The Jackal, an arms dealer in a fictional war-torn African country. At the start of the game The Jackal sounds like a real badass and a worthy opponent. Unfortunately, he’s utterly ruined by the fact that he saves your life on two separate occasions, leaving you confused and with no real villain to shake your fists at. It leaves you wondering just what exactly you are playing for.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of examples of brilliant villains from recent games. BioShock’s Frank Fontaine wasn’t too bad, but there was still something ultimately lacking – maybe it was the daft boss fight at the finale with Dr Manhattan that ruined him for me somewhat, forfeiting his place in my Bastards Hall of Fame.

That bloke from Fable 2 was quite nasty, but the fact that I can’t even remember his name says it all, really. Saren and the massive bastard (and I mean in size and disposition) Sovereign from Mass Effect were a step in the right direction, and it’s not often that more than one villain sharing the spotlight can work without them both being a little diluted. But they kind of pulled it off in Mass Effect – Saren being a more recognisable pantomime villain offset by the abstract mega-villain of Sovereign, whose eventual revelation pushes the story and pace of the game into overdrive and provides a genuine threat that changes the atmosphere from exciting space adventure to horror, dread and urgency. It ultimately leads to a finale packed with so much adrenaline that it’s burned itself into my memory as one of my all-time classic gaming moments.

//Getting your own back
The concept of revenge is a powerful one, and can work extremely well in games if you have the right villains. Take, for example, The Darkness. There’s a scene in The Darkness – and if you have yet to play it then I’d advise skipping this paragraph – in which you visit your girlfriend and spend time watching TV. It’s all in first person, as you sit on the couch with her cuddled up to you. It ends up being quite a touching moment, and cleverly builds up an attachment for an ultimately doomed character. Shortly afterwards, you have to witness her being shot in the head and killed by mafia don ‘Uncle’ Paulie and corrupt Police Chief Eddie Shrote, all the while being restrained by the Darkness inside, forcing you to watch. You would have to be a bit cold-hearted not to feel something as you look on helplessly while her brains are splattered all over the window of the door in front of you. This waters the seed of revenge which had already been planted when Paulie tried to have you “whacked” at the start of the game, and you become a fully-fledged nemesis. The key to all this, though, is the villains, who are two of the nastiest characters I’ve ever encountered: a corrupt cop and a mafia don – classic villain archetypes. They become, when you get right down to the bare bones of it, the reason for playing, over and above the actual gameplay. They provide the ultimate goal – which, like most games with good villains, is the promise of retribution.

Revenge has worked well in arts and culture in many different works – from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth and Melville’s Moby Dick, to more contemporary examples such as comic books The Punisher and the The Crow, and also films such as Gladiator and the new Star Trek. All these have one thing in common: a good bastard. Games are no different, and can just as easily provide the depth of emotion-driven storytelling necessary to provide a genuinely satisfying experience.

//Playing the role
But where I feel games can improve on this is that, in books and film, you are looking on from afar. You empathise with the character who has been wronged, but at the end of the day it’s not you. In gaming, you temporarily take on a different persona, and in the case of the first-person genres you are looking through the very eyes of the character and into the story itself. Imagine reading Macbeth and being able to jump into the pages and experience it as if it were real – how much more emotional impact would be gained from being there? This is what videogames can offer: an enhanced experience, one that can only become more and more effective with even better technology and as the willingness to accept games into “real” culture becomes more widespread.

Games have given us some truly great villains to rail against over the years, but there seems to have been a bit of a dry spell recently. I really hope that, in the future, we will see more exceptional enemies to pit our wits against, with good stories to go with them. Games developers have the tools and the skills to create amazing things, awe-inspiring things. And they are doing. But, at the end of the day, sometimes all I want is a proper bloody bastard.