Oh, sweet, luscious freedom! The doors of Gearboxity have swung open upon the hinges of unabashed, adjective-laden, Blog- blog… Blogoxity? Blognocity?
Blogectemy?
Crap. We shall return to spin the wheels of product branding at a later occasion (or when I find two better words to ram into each other like Lindsay Lohan running over a paparazzi. Too soon?) For now, I just want to exercise my ability to sit down and share my thoughts on any given topic that saunters through my head (my thoughts have a swagger, by the way.) That’s the instilled beauty of a site like Gearecte- whoops, Gearboxity. We are encouraged to share our ideas and opinions on topics we have experience in, within a public forum. Pretty swank, right? What’s even swankier is that you, consumer types of all shapes and sizes, get to then share your opinions right back to us friendly developer types of all chutes and ladders on the forum, and more than likely open a dialogue with a developer about the issue. Which ever so obtusely brings me to my topic of conversation: How much personality should the main character of a video game actually have? The answer is not as clear as one would think.
With any form of interactive entertainment, it should be expected that any given member of the audience at large has freedom in the choices that they make in the created world. Within that created world are created people. Traditionally, the player will pick up a controller and control one of these people to fulfill his fantasy of being an elf, firefighter, fish-wrangler, telepathic eagle, etc. So, then, how much personality do you give one of these characters and how much freedom do you leave up to the player to make his own opinions about the world around him?
I suppose a better way to exemplify the issue would be to offer a familiar illustration the problem. Okay, theoretically, you just plunked (I hate that word) down 59.99m$rp for that awesome new medieval dragon fighting game, Expunging the Scourge in the Lands of Nomaditicka. An awesome title for sure, and bonus- there’s a really interesting looking armor clad character on the front. So you disobey all logical traffic restrictions as you make haste for that shiny Xbox360/Playstation3/NeoGeo hooked up to your massive HDTV. After a few moments of getting acquainted with the controls, you jog along in your shiny armor towards your inevitable first run-in with a dragon. He is small for sure, but a healthy foe nonetheless. You exclaim loudly, “Avast ye brethren of the fallen demon-“, but you get cut off by the character in the game…
“Oh snap! His little wingz look like a butt!” What? Did he just try a foolish anatomical comparison that was completely out of character and time period? Before you have a chance to breathe, the knight follows up with an, “Eat metal! Dragon butt eater!” each and every time your character swings his sword. You become frustrated, and possibly a bit enamored with the creators’ strange obsession with the word “butt”. You bought the game to believe in the fantasy of a knight fighting a dragon, and feel that the fourth wall is being shattered. The actions of the main character differ strongly from your own and create a larger problem.
So what is the solution? Should the main character simply never speak? Some franchises believe so, and have certainly garnered success for doing so. Obviously, Half-Life is a palpable silent man frontrunner, and with good reason. But this is not due to the fact that Gordon Freeman never spoke, not by a long shot. By point of fact, the franchise has always told a good story without Gordon ever speaking. Rewind back to when you first played Half-Life. You were treated to an awesome tram ride introduction and then dropped off at work, on any normal day. People reacted to you, talked down to you, and even spoke about you as if you weren’t there. You, of course, being Gordon. It was immersive, it was compelling, and all it took was being late for work. I remember something Marc Laidlaw said at the Writer’s Conference in Austin last year; he said that Gordon was a “vessel” for the story they wanted to tell- that he should contain whatever emotion they, as developers, wanted to fill him with. Which is why he never speaks. Then again, his very name contains the only emotional response they need to extract from the player, freedom. You, as Freeman, must live up to your name and brave every last defiant obstacle to get to the surface and live. There are people to save along the way, but you do not necessarily have to. I made this long-winded point to illustrate why the countless other games that just kept the main character silent failed to tell a story people would remember. It isn’t about silence at all; it’s about not betraying the world the player wants to explore.
Master Chief. Solid Snake. Leon from Resident Evil. They all speak volumes during the course of a game, but they do it in a way that enhances the emotions the player is feeling, or in some truly brilliant flourishes, subtly manipulates them into feeling a certain way at a certain time (like if Chief feels sadness when Cortana is missing it reminds the player that he should as well.) They became game industry icons, the face of the new generation… the anti-Mario if you will. Their individual stories are so compelling to the audience that by simply putting them on a package, that game will sell- if only for the player to see what they’re going through this time around.
So which to choose, the vessel or the icon?
When we set out to make the Brothers in Arms franchise, we knew that the men had to be the driving force behind the story. We needed a central figure that we could challenge, that we could take away from, and this in turn would mirror back onto the player and his experience. Therein emerged Matthew Baker, the soft-spoken Missouri kid with a penchant for internal monologue. In the first game, Road to Hill 30, Baker spoke only in black screen voiceover (to drive the plot) and also in player-initiated command shouts (to drive the gameplay, by button press). In Earned in Blood, because he wasn’t the main character in that go around, we let him breathe a little bit and included him in many cut scenes, talking to his men and filling in the blanks about what his personality was like. With Hell’s Highway, he’s back in the driver’s seat, and we had to think of a good way to evolve what we know about him while still maintaining a good relationship with the player so he always feels like he’s part of the world and not fighting it. In earnest, it was a combination of vessel and icon. We attempted to take the advantages of both and then run with them, filling the player with emotions to experience when we can, and then really challenge who Matthew Baker was as a person. This is a super light spoiler alert here, but a fair warning all the same. If Baker started out his journey as someone who pushed emotion to the player by internalizing it into those little voiceovers… what’s the thing we need to take away to start fracturing that safety? How do we sneak other voices into that safety bubble and start an internal struggle? Most importantly, how is all of this accomplished without breaking the fourth wall with the player and breaking his reality? These are all questions we had to ask ourselves and find creative solutions to during the development process. Seeing the story where it is now, it was certainly worth it.
And, by starting my concluding paragraph off with a conjunction, I can cement the end of my first ever-so-rambly Gearblogsity posting. I look forward to being able to share random anecdotal evidence about storytelling in games with you in the future.
(Possibly even about that Aliens game we got a-cookin’)
-mikey
