The Evolution of a Hero – Part II
Yesterday, a venomous J.D. Richardson spewed a couple of pages of hatred towards predefined protagonist types in videogames. It was a thorough and convincing article that I’m sure a hell of a lot of people are going to agree with.
I’m not one of them. I won’t let him go unanswered. Not on my home soil.
Let’s be realistic here. Videogames, though their popularity and respect continues to rapidly rise, are still the geeky cultural outsiders. They’re still the pillars of modern society that the mainstream knows relatively little about. They’re still desparately trying to clamber through into the consciousness of the population, still clinging on to the hope that, one day, they’ll be as huge as film or music or literature. And, though the videogame industry is one of the most prosperous in the world, they’re still some way off achieving this.
The only way forward is to accept the bigger picture. If we demand more player-generated protagonists, more role-playing and stat-juggling and facial manipulation, we’ll struggle to get anywhere. Videogames need iconic, recognisable, respectable characters – and the only way to approach this is with predefined, professional character designs.
//Connections
PacMan, Mario, Sonic, even Lara Croft – they’re all gaming icons with whom people of all ages and all interests can identify. They’re responsible for giving the medium a good name within the general population. Conversely, the hyper-detailed character generations of modern role-playing titles are responsible for the exact opposite.
They’re what make people assume we’re snotty-nosed, greasy-skinned, shaggy, lonely teenagers, with only the knowledge that we can live out our fantasies through a videogame to keep us sane. They’re what make people snigger and suggest we created a female character because it’s the closest we’ll ever get to having a real girlfriend. They are, often, a fantastic way of delving into our own psyches and deciphering what makes us tick in virtual worlds – but that’s a selfish perspective to approach this from. We need to think bigger, wider.
It’s not impossible to have created for us a videogame protagonist with whom we can entirely connect. We don’t need to have the reigns here. Half-Life’s Gordon Freeman is the most immediate example. There is nothing about Freeman that demands any user-tinkering whatsoever. He’s a blank slate; a character ready for us to inject with our own personality, without adjusting a single slider. He’s a face on the box, an enigma throughout the franchise.
He’s also somebody that becomes a hero throughout the series. This is the truly evolutionary stuff. At the start of Half-Life, he’s merely a very clever bloke with a prestigious research job. He’s unassuming, bespectacled, bearded. It’s only through our guidance of this man through a terrible scenario that he becomes a revered figure; and, arguably, it won’t be until the end of the Half-Life 2 saga that he could be considered a classic, timeless hero.
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I have to admit that I fall on the other side of the fence on this debate, but I really think that the idea that games need iconic characters to achieve mainstream success is absolute rubbish. There are some great characters in videogames, ones that are utterly necessary to the games they feature in (Legacy of Kain without Kain and Raziel, anyone?) but they’re a rarity. Don’t even get me started about people identifying with Mario.
Ignoring the fact the games are stupendously popular and successful anyway, does anyone really think that developers should be going out of their way to reach some mythical mainstream audience? Nintendo have done that and look at the response from the existing gamer community.
I read the last paragraph of the article and I just think “Who gives a crap?”
Lewis cant be serious with the Mario thing can he?
Gordon Freeman is a joke, where’s the character? An iconic image he may well be, but that’s all he is, an image. If its just going to be an image then I’d rather create my own thanks.
Also, Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and Oblivion, games that will never make any real main stream impact? What?
Yeah only three of the best selling games of recent years there.
The only character that I can think of that I want back in a game is Garrett from the Thief Series.
Also there’s no such thing as a ‘professional character designer’ and even if there was, they could never create a character better than your own personal hero!
Also just to add, JC Denton is the biggest dullard I’ve ever had the misfortune to play, with his monotone voice and his shameless Matrix rip-off dress code. Seriously, he’s one of the reasons I cant actually go back and re-play Deus-Ex, the thought of having to sit through another cut scene of him droning on with his equally dull brother is just too painful to bear.
Argument love :D
Its on, Lewis!
You cant expect to post a counter article like that and that to be the end of it! Hoo noo…
Man, this is great, lots to think about. I’ll post some thoughts when I have more time.
Merely on the terms of the respective articles, I’m with Lewis on this one. But, I think the crucial thing is that surely Lewis and J.D. would agree that each approach is inherently more suited to its own types of games? Open-ended RPGs do earn a significant chunk of their appeal from being able to create a character, but what would be the point in being able to intimately engineer the chap you play as in an FPS? By contrast, HL2 in particular does a masterful job of making us inhabit a specific character’s shoes. We all realise by now that Valve want Freeman to be us, and not the other way round – that’s why Freeman being a messianic character was such a brilliant plot device for those who’d long since completed HL1; after all those years away, it was *me* that was recognised as the great hero, and yet Freeman was the template, the bespectacled iron man *I* had not only guided but inhabited in the games.
I’m not suggesting that all pre-defined characters (most of which are far more fleshed-out than Freeman of course, Lara Croft and all the rest for example) are so gripping, but then as Lewis says, that’s down to the writing. But just because sometimes they’re bland or don’t work doesn’t mean the game would be any better if developers put tons of time into making some elaborate character creation system which would in many cases be redundant simply because you wouldn’t see the character, or because the narrative is linear rather than open-ended.
Both ways of doing things can be great, each has their pros and cons – but the way to square it all is to keep things as they are, whereby we use each way of doing things to suit the games they are appropriate for. But if things go a little J.D.’s way, and we get more open-ended FPS games with relevant, impactful character creation, for example – then we’ll be even better off.
Sure – and this sort of head-to-head thing (which I hope we’ll be doing more of) is all about getting to extreme points of view. It’s total point/counterpoint stuff, and the reasonable answer is always that both arguments have their place and value.
(Still, I totally win the comments-thread battle.)
If J.D. confesses that he’s being as deliberately antagonistic as you, and that he agrees that only some games benefit from character creation, I think I’ll have won the comments thread ¬_¬
I don’t think you do ‘win the comments thread battle’ do you really?
Its one all as far as I see it so don’t get all cocky yet.
I agree with Andy by the way so he wins… FOR NOW!
Im not really sure there was enough scope here in terms of your character selection. There are some terrific characters out there that you can just enjoy playing the role of. Nathan Drake, Sora, Cloud Strife, ICO, Cole, Kratos, Nico Bellic, Samus Aran, Solid Snake, Squall, George Stobbart.
I believe first person shooters have an advantage when it comes to a lead character…you don’t have to have them speak, you have other characters put words in there mouth. You never see there face, so much like reading a book you create their likeness in your own mind. Gordon Freeman’s personality has been crafted by the people who play him…and its interesting that we all percieve him as going out of his way to help people. What if the act is more selfish? Perhaps he just wants to get back to his wife and kids…maybe he wants revenge against the G-Man for everything he has put him through…perhaps he just wants to bang Alyx. We don’t really know or understand his motives, but most of us believe he just fighting for the greater good and go along with it.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that we can’t make choices when our hero is already pre-defined and pre-designed. Perhaps the problem is just that hitting the mark on creating an ‘everyman’ character is so, so incredibly difficult. Either we are dictated to and given a fully designed character and told to follow the story out exactly as the creators planned or we are given a masked version of the game in which we get to make ‘choices’ that inevitably end up with the same result.
I can’t think of one movie I have seen recently where the lead character hasn’t annoyed the shit out of me for one reason or another. But ask me about a game character that I have really liked and I can tell you hundreds…interestingly though, most of them don’t speak and I get to fill in the gaps with my own voice. So maybe the character I like most in my video games is just another version of me.
I’m gonna have to go with J.D on this one. I think that it’s the natural progression for the player to have more input on the gaming experience. Mario and Sonic were necessary at the time and are well recognised and well marketed characters, but maybe it’s time to move on.
Hey anyone ever hear of this game called ‘World of Warcraft’? Apparently its got about 12 million players around the world all furiously addicted to it. It also brings people together, makes babies, aligns the planets and has an advert for it with William Shatner in it pretending to be a shaman. I hear the first thing you do is create your own character and then spend the rest of your life improving it.
I rest my case. Actually no I’m not going to rest my case, I’m going to keep going. I cant be bargained or reasoned with and I absolutley will not stop. Ever.