The Evolution of a Hero – Part II
Is this not a more significant, credible and sensible way to build a hero than simply throwing some digital paint around and demanding he looks and behaves like that?
//Plumbing away
It seems like a reasonable thing to suggest that professional character designers are probably better at designing characters than we are.
Granted, a poor writer will develop a character with little depth, no history and a bland image. A better one will inject some personality, reason out the ways he or she behaves, and tie all this into the story. But the truly great writers can go one step further: they can do away with archetypes and create iconic, idolised beings out of seemingly mundane folk.
That’s Freeman. That’s Link. That’s Mario. Indeed – and this is directly aimed at Mr. Richardson and his comments yesterday – Mario strikes me as one of the most masterful character designs across the entire medium. Strip away all the power-ups and stars and side-scrolling baddies, and you’re left with an ordinary man, stuck in a manual labour position, desperately searching for love. Braid apes it well, and perhaps more potently at times, but there’s no denying the reason why Mario has become so ingrained into everyday consciousness. He’s someone with whom pretty much everyone can identify.
It’s certainly true that, in the vast majority of games, the developer-crafted protagonists aren’t as strong as these examples. To pick a recent example, Velvet Assassin’s Violette Summer was an insipidly bland and unnecessarily sexual character, particularly considering the real-world counterpart they had as grounding for her. And while Master Chief’s head-to-toe green armour may help him stand out from the crowd, the reams of copycat sci-fi nonsense-men that have followed – I’m looking at you, Epic and Marcus Fenix – are about as repulsive as they get.
But that’s a problem with the writing and design, not with the concept. Videogame writing has always suffered, for the simple reason that very little of it is done by actual writers. It’s done by your game designers, your artists, your whoever’s-in-the-room-at-the-time. We don’t need to throw away predefined characters entirely, by any stretch of the imagination. But we do need to get better at conjuring them up.
//Culture vultures
At the most, we need a compromise. I’d settle for more J.C. Dentons, for example. Denton’s a predefined character, but that predefinition states that the player has a certain amount of control over his appearance and behaviour. It’s actually written into his story: he’s a nano-augmented cyber-cop with, essentially, a hell of a lot of plug-ins and bolt-ons at his disposal. It’s part of his image. And the rest of that image – the trenchcoat and shades, no matter how else you alter his appearance, for example – is what really drives him.
Of course, I wouldn’t advocate the removal of all player-generated characters in videogames. Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, whatever – they’re all incredibly involving games, and there’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the extensive character creation utilities contribute heavily to that. Games in which you can let your imagination run wild are a fabulous thing, and it’s something undeniably unique to this medium.
But they’ll never be the games to make any real mainstream impact. Cross-cultural pollination requires an immediate reference point, and though each one of these games has its own specific identity, there’s nothing concrete enough to provide an entrance point to the masses. For that, you need an icon: a central character that becomes synonymous with the game itself. These are the games that will define our hobby. So let’s make them. And let’s make sure they’re damn good.
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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.