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Opinion: Characters, The Building Blocks Of Your Reality
by Christian Nutt [PC, Console/PC, Columns, Exclusive]
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May 13, 2010
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[In this opinion piece, Gamasutra's Christian Nutt analyzes why so few games have characters "you can even imagine having... a meaningful inner life", and highlights what gives game worlds emotional realism.]
Recently, I had a brief Twitter conversation -- is there any other kind? -- with @33mhz, another gay guy and gamer. He'd been playing through Rockstar's The Ballad of Gay Tony and live-tweeting his reactions to, essentially, the game's portrayal of the reality of being gay.
What makes this interesting is that he's not being a watchdog for political correctness; he's critiquing what the GTA series, in its continued quest for gritty realism, gets right, and what it gets wrong. When he pointed out a badly written bit of dialogue from a gay character, I replied, "Is it a bit sad that this is the only mainstream game we could have this conversation about?"
His response: "I know, right? Partly because so few games are set in a recognizable present." I don't think that's the problem, precisely, though it certainly doesn't help.
My response was, "So few have characters that you can even imagine having any sort of meaningful inner life."
That's it. While it would be nice to have more believable gay characters in games, it would be even nicer to have more believable characters in games -- period.
But I think there's an important, rarely-considered reason for this. Believable characters make what they inhabit believable. In fact, I'd argue that having believable characters would strengthen games on every front: it would not just make their stories more enjoyable, which is obvious; it would make games more engaging to play, and make their worlds more meaningful and more exciting to explore.
I Smolder With Generic Rage
The line above comes from Penny Arcade, of course. It was written about the frequently-derided second entry in Ubisoft's reboot of the Prince of Persia series: Warrior Within.
The game quickly became the butt of jokes not because it was bad; it became a punchline because it took the appealing characters from Sands of Time and put them through the Hot Topic wringer, turning them into tedious caricatures designed to appeal to unhappy teenagers, accompanied by music from nu-metal band Godsmack, which apparently was added to the same effect. But I don't have much interest in discussing Warrior Within. The Prince of Persia series seems to have outgrown its awkward adolescence -- or at least moved into a new stage of it, anyway.
No, the guy I want to talk about is Kratos, from God of War. Maybe it's moot since he's dead now, but what I'm struck by is how he's frequently been held up as not just an appealing character, but as an example of effective characterization. I'm struck by this because, frankly, I find him to be one of the biggest ciphers in gaming.
In the original game, it's revealed that his generic rage smolders for a good reason: he killed his family. This reveal doesn't come until near the end of the game, though, and having finally played it recently, thanks to the PlayStation 3 port, I found him to be a blank; the calm eye at the center of a vortex of blades. Nothing happened to Kratos -- just around him.
He has a motivation, of course, and it's well-established in the game's narrative. What he doesn't have is a personality. He growls and gnashes his teeth.
It doesn't bother me so much because his behavior is provocative; it bothers me because he's so boring. I've never been so perplexed by the popularity of a character as I have with Kratos. Sure, sure, it's subjective, and his badassery is not in question. But he's just so... vacant.
The Blades of Chaos Are The Problem
I'm hardly the first to point out that one of the biggest obstacles to more meaningful storytelling in games is that this is not what games are designed to do. But let's chew on that a bit.
Certainly, God of War does exploration tolerably well, does puzzles okay, and does combat very effectively. It's difficult to characterize someone who spends the majority of his time dashing around swinging blades on chains as anything other than violence made flesh.
That's one of the successes of Heavy Rain which I haven't seen really discussed much. For all that some people were eager to dismiss the game as "just Dragon's Lair", the modular way in which its characters interact with the game world allows for a tremendous range of behavior beyond combat. And the consistency of its button input system makes all interactions instantly accessible to its audience no matter how late into the game they're introduced.
The much talked about scene early on in the game in which Ethan Mars has to take care of his son Shaun -- feed him dinner, make him do his homework, tuck him in to bed -- is not just remarkable because it's a deft example of characterization, nor because, counter to expectation, it's not dull. It is also because you can do varied things in Heavy Rain, like bake a pizza or tuck in a child, with the interface Quantic Dream developed.
Typically, interactions like this in games, when attempted, are jury-rigged, and you can tell.
No, Heavy Rain can't deliver combat or driving in a way that is satisfying like God of War or Gran Turismo -- though it does do both, in its own way . Its strength is that it can deliver anything. It's more versatile precisely because it's more limited. And thus the story can more tightly intertwine with the gameplay, and the characterizations invite nuance.
In contrast, I was struck, at Activision's E3 2008 presentation, by the demonstration of its first James Bond game, the Treyarch-developed Quantum of Solace. Though it's named for the latest Bond film, it takes in the story of Casino Royale as well, because they're essentially inextricable.
I've never actually played the game, despite loving the film because I suspect, for me, it's not additive. During the presentation, the developers showed off some of the Casino Royale content: a lengthy gunfight in a corridor in the Hotel Splendide that had nothing to do with anything that actually happened in the film. At the time I simply rolled my eyes at this departure from the movie, but it's worth pulling apart.
This is not because I want to dwell on what I see as a mismatch with the source material. No, I just want to point out that it's instructive: when you make your only interaction with the world violence, you have no choice but to fill your game with violence. It's just so much more noticeable in a film adaptation. Casino Royale is a film about a lot of things. And yes, Bond does drop some fools in the Hotel Splendide.
But Casino Royale is also a story of his relationship with Vesper Lynd -- a complicated, fascinating, believable one.
It's a film with a lot of texture, tonal shifts, and different settings -- highs and lows aplenty. I can't say for sure how much of that Treyarch was able to get into the game, since I have never played it, and I certainly don't want to disparage the team's work without doing so. But when your only meaningful interaction with the world is down the barrel of a gun... It's limiting. Quantum of Solace puts that in perspective.
A World I Can Believe
A character like Kratos implies a world that makes little sense. To believe in him, we have to make allowances and accept vague conceptions as truths. The Ancient Greek setting gives him cover: there were warriors in the past, we know vaguely, and yet they had societies. But those exceptions, once made, don't do anything to enrich the believability of the game as anything more than an arena to experience combat in.
To my mind, the concepts of a believable world and believable characters are inextricably intertwined. This is why skeptics should be paying attention to whether or not their characters are more than empty shells with strong arms and good aim.
Regardless what type of game you're making -- linear action or open world; action or RPG -- you're trying to build a world that players must believe in. Whether you call it a world, or you call it zones, or you call it levels, this is your goal: because one thing we do well, as a medium, is build worlds. But we must recognize that this not just down to the talent of the art team and the quality of their research and imagination.
The enduring popularity of Final Fantasy VII owes a great debt to both the character building and world creation that the team engaged in for that 1997 release. It's able to endure as a property -- and be spun off into films and more games without up-front plans to do so -- because of the believability of its world.
Recall exploring Midgar. There was a sense of a way of life there: shit ran downhill from Shinra to the characters in the slums, who mostly had ordinary lives. Barrett had his daughter Marlene, Tifa ran the bar, Aerith grew flowers in the abandoned church and lived with her mom. Even Cloud, the amnesiac soldier, joined the Shinra Company for personal reasons.
The 2008 PSP release Crisis Core was able to show the Shinra corporation from the inside -- from the perspective of Zack Fair, that game's lead -- specifically because it was an organization that made sense. It slotted into its world well.
And Zack and Aerith and Cloud and even Sephiroth all fit into the world, too: all had logical, if fantastic, back stories. The game explored these with a deftness and believability that eluded the more carefully planned Final Fantasy XIII, which ironically had been devised as part of a scheme to span multiple games in the first place.
A Recognizable Present?
As I said before, it's not so much about setting games in the real world -- you don't have to make GTA to make a game with believable characters, though it probably helps, if for no other reason than to keep you grounded.
One of my favorite authors, and one I feel is perpetually underrated -- or at least overlooked -- is Diana Wynne Jones. Jones rarely writes books set in the real-world present, though she has. Usually, she writes fantasy, building worlds and situations that aren't real.
Many might be fleetingly familiar with her work thanks to the Studio Ghibli film adaptation of her book Howl's Moving Castle. While it's a flawed translation to the screen, if you know it, it'll give you an idea of the currency she usually works in, in terms of both setting and character.
I'm pointing this out because one thing that the film retains is the idiosyncratic characters and complicated relationships between them that the book had. This is what makes her fantasy worlds believable -- why we don't question that the wizard Howl has a castle that journeys haphazardly across the countryside. It's an expression of his personality as a character, and only from there becomes indicative of the kind of world we're dealing with.
Jones is frequently asked where she gets her characters from, and in this essay, she writes, "They come partly from life... Those that I do draw from life, I use sparingly, one per book usually, to ensure that the other people, who come from my head, will behave as real people would."
She later writes that one of her most meaningfully formative exercises as a young writer was to write about characters and explore their group dynamics -- to tease out the way they'd really act. These groups "surprised and fascinated me by developing a group dynamic I had not expected. The one I expected to make the decisions did not always do so." Build realistic characters, you get realistic groups. Build groups, get a society. Build societies, and you get a world.
When author R.A. Salvatore was asked to devise the Drow Elf society for Forgotten Realms, he realized that their role as silent antagonists in role-playing scenarios wouldn't fly. Said Salvatore in his GDC 2010 talk, "You can't have a society that's just a bunch of vicious, maniacal killers. It wouldn't survive. So I had to come up with a structure... This is the most important thing in world building. You have to understand that you are asking the player or the reader to suspend disbelief. You are asking them to take a bunch of things for granted. The less that you're asking them to pretend this happens, the more you're making it make sense, the more immersed they will be in your world."
"Great games are rarely about graphics"
The interaction of character and believability brings us to an interesting case: Nier. Recently released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 by Square Enix, it was developed by an outfit called Cavia -- one that's notorious, inasmuch as anybody has actually heard of it, for making mediocre games, to be blunt.
I've played it for a little over an hour. Initial impressions are that it's far behind the curve graphically -- I can easily name a PlayStation 2 game (Valkyrie Profile 2, for the record) that does some of what it attempts and looks better doing it.
And if I based my criticism of the game on my initial impressions of the gameplay, I wouldn't have anything nice to say, either. So far, it's bog-standard fetch quests, behind-the-times static storytelling, and a world with limited interaction. Yet somehow the game has generated a lot of buzz, and it's not just because of the Square Enix logo on the case. Most shockingly, the game got a review in the print edition of the New York Times, which is also published on its website, which is where the above quote comes from.
Critic Seth Schiesel spends a great deal of time talking about the game's story, and the emotional truth of it -- tying it even to the U.S. Supreme Court's forthcoming decision on how games can be treated under the constitution: whether they're deserving of the protections afforded to film, literature, and other art. While that may be a reach -- though I can't say for sure -- it's clear to me that Nier is able to draw in players, despite its last-generation visuals and a protagonist who, based on looks, could comfortably stand alongside Marcus Fenix or Kratos.
What sets Nier, the eponymous protagonist, apart? As Schiesel points out, he's a father. There it is: that small, poignant, and profoundly meaningful detail. It's a launchpad, Schiesel writes: "From the simple, elemental motivation of helping [Nier's daughter] unfolds a tale that reveals the fate of the world and which throws into question the nature of humanity itself."
That's the crucial difference. That link is what elevates a game which is otherwise undistinguished. After all, Schiesel himself says the graphics "fall short", the combat mechanics are "basic", and its world is "small". Somehow, though, he finds it worth writing about, and writing about passionately.
Though he admits its faults, he also writes that "Nier succeeds at fostering an emotional investment in its characters and in its world that gives all of its hacking and slashing and jumping and exploring and puzzle-solving and even its virtual fishing and farming a sense of value and meaning."
If Nier is behind the times at creating a "believable" game world, at least in the sense the term is usually applied, the relationships it creates serve in place of a budget increase or more talented art and design staff. Though it may not always work out, this drive towards emotionally resonant characters may be the one place Japanese game development is consistently ahead of the West.
Gamers are getting older. Their lives are getting more complicated. One thing you must confront when your life gets complicated is the nature of interpersonal interaction -- whether you want to or not. If there's something we need to do -- and Gears of War 2 attempted it, as well, with its treatment of Dom Santiago's wife -- it is to lend these worlds the emotional heft of meaningful characterization.
How we do that can be approached via cutscenes, via text dialogue, via mise-en-scene, as in Heavy Rain and BioShock. There are doubtless other narrative tools that I didn't list -- even ones that haven't yet been invented.
The point I am making is that imbuing a game's cast with meaningful characterization does not relate solely to the quality of a game's story; it relates directly to the quality of the game's world. In terms of storytelling, Schiesel clearly belives Nier does a fantastic job; I personally believe that Gears of War 2 missed the mark. But in either case, these details help make the world more a world and less a string of environments. Relationships imply context; relationships imply a world.
Final Fantasy XIII, to take a recent example, jumps on and off of this track schizophrenically. This is what makes it a particularly frustrating case. At times the game's story works beautifully to create and support its world, and at times things make no sense and meaningful context is elusive.
Though all are flawed attempts, each game I've discussed throughout this editorial proves in its own way that visuals are only a fraction of what it takes to make a world come to life.
A lot of critics and developers think we should be pushing narrative in games because narrative helps bring us closer to a vaguely defined goal -- of making games art. Schiesel argues that this is, in fact, the outcome with Nier. But my argument is simpler: pursuing meaningful characterization will simply help bring us closer to the goal of making our worlds -- our games. And if it happens that we accidentally make art in the process, well, it's serendipity.
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Conflict can be internal or external. Most games focus ENTIRELY on external conflict because it's the easiest and most obvious to portray: physical conflict/battle is almost a necessity in gameplay. ("Someone took my daughter. I will kill them and anyone that stands in my way.") This generally works, for better or worse. In backing up your points, though, external conflict with no inner depth leaves something to be desired. I think Anton Chekhov was the writer who most notably pointed out that internal conflict in addition to external conflict will bring about the most compelling characters. If you look at almost any example of good inner life in game characters, especially the ones you describe, we can break down how there is an inner conflict springing out of that inner life that creates obstacles the character overcomes (or fails to overcome) during the course of the game. The result is character change and growth during the course of the gameplay/story, usually via relationships. This doesn't negate anything you wrote at all. I agree with almost everything you say. This just adds to the formula.
Also, I think you're right about Kratos. It's perplexing because any subject matter that brings gods and fate (which flirts with lack of character choice) into the discussion complicates the notion of inner life, conflict and motivation. Perhaps the popularity springs from a projected sense of inner conflict? Maybe people relate to the experience of "railing against fate" much like they do when reading Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye or watching Jim Stark of Rebel Without A Cause? Not that Kratos is written at all like those characters, who have a depth that Kratos does not. But it may be that the gameplay and story together provide an immersive experience of being in the shoes of the ultimate "tragic-rebel". Not sure, but it would explain the popularity.
I haven't played Nier yet (I wrote it off as what I figured would be an easier, less engaging Demon's Souls), but I'll definitely see if I can now, around all of the other great releases coming out.
Pure action can be fun, and there’s room for such games. The problem is that they’re crowding out games that, as Christian notes, could offer us a more thoughtful or gripping play experience.
Why do people still talk about System Shock and Deus Ex? Because of the action loop? No -- it’s because the worlds of these games were detailed and plausible enough that our interactions with the characters and places in those worlds made sense and felt right.
Even with all the mutant-shooting action, we remember SHODAN because the world of System Shock was designed to include features that allowed her to behave toward you in character-appropriate ways. In other words, the gameworld was deep enough to enable the main antagonist to express a distinctive set of goal-seeking actions... and that’s the beating heart of characterization.
Without enough such affordances, without a world whose palette of possible interactions is rich enough for character to be expressed, a game character is just one more forgettable impediment to the action. Well-written and well-acted dialogue can help, but ultimately character is what you do when it counts.
And it’s the world of the game that determines what characters can do. Worldiness matters. Well said, Christian.
Characters drive conflict. Conflict drives drama (audiovisual storytelling). Combine that with compelling gameplay and world, and you've gone a long way toward creating a quality game.
I think most world-building in games tends to mirror (for example) Tolkien or Niven, especially in RPGs, and I think that's usually to the detriment of games. The worlds become mired in minutia, and the attempt to make everything feel realistic ends up making everything feel the same. As soon as things get game-y, all that realism gets thrown out anyway. Nier's world follows the "world-building" of The Little Prince or Kino no Tabi (or Super Mario Bros. 3), with a lot of interesting *what* and not much *why*, and it's a more interesting game world because of it.
On the other hand, this is necessarily subjective. For example, many of the examples you mention are not ones that appeal to me or that I play (or read, watch, etc), although the reason(s) for the lack of personal appeal are often the very points you mention. Meanwhile, there are people who find these works and others to be preferable to works I find far more appealing and moving. In fact, some people will say that certain products are cliched and do not like them for that reason, yet they enjoy other works that are just as cliched (albeit in different specific ways). I think there is a failure by some people to appreciate why archetypes are important and that archetypes can vary between cultures due to different histories and mythologies that are the foundation for the archetype definitions.
I think that this is precisely where the Japanese visual novels, adventures, and simulations are overlooked by Western audiences, and it's where their strength lies, as well as works in other genres, as you mention. This is why certain franchises like Princess Maker and Tokimeki Memorial continue to be popular after so many years have passed. In fact, when a rare Western product engages me emotionally, it seems that it winds up falling by the wayside even if it has some initial popularity, or is not embraced by the mainstream market at all. Heck, it's interesting that you mention people bringing up Dragon's Lair. After all, that was an enormously popular and successful game (and expensive to play, too).
It's interesting to me that some people playing Record of Agarest War have stated that they find it far more enjoyable than Final Fantasy XIII. Of course, I never found FF interesting or appealing, but I am speaking of people who are enamored of the franchise but found Agarest War to be more engaging despite the much simpler quality of technical work in the game. One interesting point about this game is that it is an homage and spoof of Record of Lodoss War and Lord of the Rings (the former being an homage to the latter, after all). In this regard, perhaps Joe's observation about mirroring Tolkien or Niven or certain other popular world builders might work when the mirroring is done in such a way that the product does not attempt to present itself as "original."
Maybe Christian's points also relate to the success of various free to play East Asian products and certain social networking games, virtual worlds such as Second Life, or even mainstream boxed products such as The Sims. Specifically, perhaps it is the appeal that such products manage to generate amongst so many people regardless of any lack of technical quality in presentation. This might even be said for competitive games, including eveything from RTS and FPS to electronic versions of traditional board games such as chess. Maybe people who prefer such games are engaged by the worlds due to the interaction with other people regardless of the other aspects of the world or any lack thereof.
For me, at least, it is the emotional empathy with characters that makes an entertainment product most memorable. I also find that such a connection makes the educational and learning element memorable (as opposed to ignoring or forgetting whatever is being taught once the experience is over). This is true even for Western works that I love such as Disney's adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Is the setting in such a work "realistic"? No, not really, but the emotional connection with and believability of the characters transcends such concerns and makes them irrelevant.
Ignoring the recent Heavy Rain, the only game I can think of that was set in a recognizable present while also not being about the military or crime was EarthBound for the SNES. And even then, that game had a LOT of supernatural elements, and it wasn't even set in the Earth that we know. But despite that, it was set in a place that is akin to our modern day, with cities, department stores, ATM machines, museums, night clubs, etc.
As great as fantasy or sci-fi is, we are sorely lacking as an industry in the realm of non-military/criminal modern day. I'm not saying that a game set in modern day can't have fantastical elements, though.
I suppose I just want more experiences like EarthBound. And I don't think that's a bad thing to desire.
I appreciate it when someone not only approaches a relevant topic but expresses the truth about the core issue - and so eloquently too I might add.
Rolling my eyes at hollow characters has become an unforced hobby of mine recently. I remember my games design lecturer talking about Kratos and asking us why he had so much emotion - this was after watching the intro cutscene in the game. I hadn't played the game at the time because at the time I hadn't developed much affinity with any character in any non-present or fantasy game, plus I didn't like the combat mechanics of GoW. Putting that aside, I correctly guessed that Kratos had probably lost everything based on his condition, learning that he had lost his family, and this was the cliche but fairly-established reason for his anger, actions and death.
A couple of years later, I found myself at the lunch table with the guys from the studio talking about the new gore in GoW3 and additionally the sexual content found in secret non-critical side 'missions' throughout the series. I laughed sarcastically, because for me the fornication mixed with the loss of Kratos' family totally destroys the continuity of Kratos altogether. The story is all there, along with the Greek mythology, and as a foreigner to all that jazz I still accept it for what it is. That aside, how is it that Kratos is supposed to retain any core integrity when the player is allowed sexual experiences unrelated to the plot *cough* Michael Bay *cough-cough*?
My question to the guys was, "Weren't three whole games fueled off of the vengeful anger of Kratos? Isn't that why he's notorious? Where's the honor in pornography on the path to avenging one's own wife?" That just doesn't make sense to me as a human being also understanding the protective nature and loyalty to my own loved ones.
The emotions have been simply built around the mechanics, not the heart of the character, and that's the problem. A hardcore game designer says, "Let's allow the player to tear heads off and unleash fury like no other game! It will be the hardest hardcore game on the market!" Then they say, "Let's create a central character that has a damn good reason to want to do that. Let's do what they did in Max Payne and kill off his family, that'll do it." Nope. Sorry, that doesn't cut it. It's not that it's not a good reason for a godlike character to be wrathful, but more because the character doesn't actually make it a good enough reason. When the player is pushing the sticks in to gouge out Poseidon's eyes, I can bet they're not thinking, "And this is for my wife's beautiful eyes you bastard!!!" It's more, "Ho ho ho, yes that gets the gore award from me!" And it's true, that's exactly what owners of the game have told me. They giggle and ask their friends if they want to replay that scene for the mechanics and not for the diffusion of the character's true motive.
If I can truly sympathize with a character, I'll be moved enough to get involved in their life. If I were to meet a character in reality, as you do, who has delusional emotions, I won't be able to empathize with that character. So why should I in a virtual setting?