The Evolution of a Hero – Part I

Duke Nukem is another character who, quite frankly, is just shit. I spent obscene amounts of time playing Duke Nukem 3D back in the mid 90s, but he too has fallen in my opinions – not because of his complete and utter no-show for the last eleven frigging years, but because he’s just so outdated. He looks like a 80s action movie reject that no-one even liked in the 80s, or – worse still – like a cheap rate action figure you’d find in a pound shop. It was always the game for me, not the Duke. On the other hand, there are those who expect the game-playing public to accept whatever rubbish is thrown at them, just because it has a classic hero in it.

But oh no, not any more. I’m tired of body-hopping between different annoying twats like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap; I want some input into the character that I’ll be spending so much time controlling. I feel jaded by the massive amounts of sarcastic, badly voiced dickheads that I’ve had to put up with on my computer screen; I feel like my soul has been soiled by a kaleidoscope of electronic meatheads with nothing better to say than an Arnie-style one liner.

“You’re fired!” Ha ha! No, fuck off. Give me a choice of lines and I’ll bloody say them myself if I have to.

//Karma chameleons
The three games that I keep using as examples of the evolving hero – Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Mass Effect – also get another aspect spot on in terms of our own creations, and that’s morality. Each game lets you behave in the way you want, in terms of right and wrong. Fallout 3 presents you with a bewildering amount of moral choices and, along with the karma system, they actually shape your gaming experience due to the choices you make for your hero; and characters in the world react to you differently, depending on the personality you have given your hero at the creation stage, and then shaped even further upon entry into the game world. You can be good, bad, neutral and anywhere between. Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade system also works well, dishing out morality points for choices made throughout the story. All these things combined with the appearance factors are given to you the player to shape a character or your specifications.

Remember BioShock – a linear game with no character creation (except for plasmids) – and its concepts of the player having, ultimately, no choice over their actions? These new contenders defy that. In shaping the hero, you can ultimately shape the world in which he or she exists by your own hand. Massively multiplayer online games have to employ elaborate character creation, to ensure people stand out from the crowd and don’t feel like a faceless drone. One pair of such games, City of Heroes and City of Villains, takes this to extreme levels merely with costumes, allowing you to create any hero your wildest imagination can think of. It’s fantastic, with regular costume contests where people can show off their creations to other players. It seems to be a new trend catching on, with so many games allowing the player to be creative. Surely it’s a positive thing, and can only do good for the slightly tarnished image of gaming in many people’s eyes.

Gaming is a rapidly evolving medium, but there are still a few things that keep holding it back. Developers need to give more free reign in their worlds, and stop telling us what to do and where to go, and one of the most important aspects of that is the avatar we use to project ourselves into that world. We are the heroes – not Duke, not Mario, not Sonic. They do nothing without us telling them to. Mario didn’t save the princess; we did.

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