[Writer Richard Clark examines the portrayal of evil in games -- given that combat is central to so many titles, how could games improve the way they present enemies, and could that create an overall higher-quality experience?]
You've got to fight someone. That's been the de facto mantra of console-dominant video game scene since the early days of Mario, and it speaks volumes about the nature of games and their focus. They are just as much about their enemies as they are about their heroes, and they give us opportunities to think through one profound question: what would a person have to do to become my enemy? In other words, what makes me need to kill, hurt, maim, or attack a person or thing? What makes them evil, and is it enough?
The uncomfortable undercurrent of that line of questioning is the assumption that fighting something inevitably solves the problem. It's a claim that few of us would be comfortable with when made explicit, though our culture makes it implicitly on a constant, unrelenting basis. Political campaign speeches, action film climaxes, television season finales, and video game combat systems all exist primarily because of this assertion.
We know better. We know that violence often begets violence, that revenge is often empty, that killing a human being should be a last resort rather than one option among many. And yet, these things resonate with us because we want to believe that solving our problems could be that simple.
We want to convince ourselves that some binary solution, however unpleasant and destructive, might solve our problems, the problems of our loved ones, and even the problems of the entire world. It's a foolish desire, but it's the reason these games resonate so much with us. When we are presented with people to kill or dispatch in some way, we frolic in a playground of combat possibilities.
Combat Needs an Enemy
This all sounds perfectly horrid, and anyone with an axe to grind can (and does) use the above case as an argument against the medium. Video games thrive on conflict and violence is simply a mechanic to make a game fun. Still, Mario demonstrated that this doesn't have to be an inherently bad thing: we are seeing now that the kids who grew up shooting fireballs at turtles were not mentally affected in any real way by inundating themselves with constant violent images and mechanics.
A more interesting question, though, once we accept the inevitability of violent gameplay, is the question of who our struggle should be against. While jumping on the heads of turtles seems harmless enough, the stakes seem to rise significantly when games become more realistic and as they seek to make themselves more and more relevant to modern day concerns such as war, poverty, and abuse of power. We've heard the claim over and over again, but it is both true and germane to this discussion: video games are growing up. As games and their players mature, so must our enemies and our concept of video game evil.
Many games are content to remain merely games, a goal which may not be particularly ambitious in its' own right, but does result in some marvelous results. Play in and of itself can be an honorable and noble end, and games like Super Mario Galaxy and Little Big Planet demonstrate the necessity of keeping them around. In these games, the opposing figures are purposely otherworldly and impossible to relate to our own lives.
This world and its enemies bear no resemblance to our own world. They are merely pawns in a chess game, meant to represent obstacles rather than sentient beings that wish us actual harm. They are in on the game as much as anyone else. They play by the rules. Bowser is merely a jovial bully. He steals the princess because he knows he's supposed to, and when Mario and friends are playing baseball, he lets his kids go play as well.
The benefit to all of this is pure, unadulterated fun. They present us with no real moral qualms, because they avoid loaded images and controversial hot topics. We would be rightly criticized for reading too much into a Mario game if we claimed that it was actually meant to be a case for some political or cultural perspective (though it could be a fun thought experiment, and it's certainly worth looking at the cultural assumptions within the game).
First and foremost, Mario is a video game character. Plumbing is very much a secondary part of his life. Peach is primarily a goal to reach and secondarily a love interest for Mario. Bowser doesn't really try too hard to accomplish his goal of taking over Mario's world, and he and his minions do not even consider themselves to be much more than worthy obstacles for Mario's journey.
Realistic Enemies Lacking Realism
Recently though, as games have given more leeway to realism as a factor, they have sought to include more realistic and, as a result, more recognizable and culturally loaded enemies in games. As first-person war games led the charge, we began to fight against enemies who we were told were simply evil humans. Like a summer blockbuster, games gave us permission to root for their demise because it told us they were bad.
This suspicion was confirmed when they shot at us. Modern Warfare 2 drew attention to the importance of this form of confirmation when it refused to offer it to us. In the now infamous airport scene, the people we were meant to shoot at didn't shoot back. They ran away, begged for their lives, and helped one another. It was clear: these were not enemies. And yet, at the very moment armed forces arrived to take us out, we felt infinitely more comfortable killing them: they had signed up for this.
What became clear was that games like Modern Warfare and its ilk had trained us to take out everyone who stood in our way, no matter if our purpose was noble. Just as was often the case in the popular action film, the ends justified the means. Anyone who didn't understand that was merely a coward who would very quickly find themselves staring at a "Game Over" screen.
The concern isn't that video games will make us worse people as a result of this dynamic. After all, we understand that for the most part it's a result of the perceived necessity to keep a game fun and simple at all costs. Most gamers are at least smart enough to recognize that this is how the game world works, but that the actual world differs greatly. Nonetheless, the onslaught of games with this perspective seemed constant, and until recently it didn't seem like games would ever move beyond the simple black and white posturing of the summer action film.
A More Thoughtful Treatment of Evil
A far more interesting and helpful alternative is a more involved consideration of the nature of evil: games can provide us with obstacles, enemies and goals while also confronting us with the complexities of evil. The games that have done this already are all the more memorable because of it. Far Cry 2 starts off like a standard first-person shooter with open world elements, until you progress through the story and realize that the guys you are shooting only differ from you in strength and power, not ethical viability. You are, and are becoming, just as bad as the guys you are meant to kill.
Alan Wake pulls off a frightening and personally arresting atmosphere in which we relate to and fear for Alan (despite his supremely unlikable characteristics) because of the enemies, which are actually projections of his own self-doubts and limitations. In Limbo, the boy comes across people who appear to be just like him, and they are. They fear the unknown and use one another to accomplish their objectives.
A thoughtful approach to the opposing forces in a game doesn't dilute the experience, as some may argue. It merely enriches it, providing the player with food for thought and an opportunity to become even more immersed within a world that seems more like our own. It creates opportunities for players to discuss the questions that are implicit within the game world. In short, it gives games staying power, on the store shelf, on the shelf at home, and within the minds and hearts of the player.
[Richard Clark is the editor-in-chief of Christ and Pop Culture, where he often writes about video games. He and his wife live in Louisville, KY. He can be reached at deadyetliving at gmail dot com or followed on twitter (@christandpc).]
I think that spending time developing the narrative depth of your villain, as opposed to your hero, is worthwhile, because player identification (immersion, etc) is broken more easily by the portrayal of the hero's interior states than by complex or irrational motivations in the enemy...at least that's what the original BioShock seemed to demonstrate.
That's also were MW2's single player narrative fails - the enemies aren't given ANY real motivation (going back to MW); it's all just cliches built to make the player feel empowered about killing all these baddies. Which is unfortunate: the bravo machismo is fine for multiplayer with its competitive atmosphere, but the game's attempt to convey the nebulous web of guilt in modern combat falls flat. "No Russian", while initially shocking and uncomfortable, fails to explore the depths of terror and its consequences with any serious moral sophistication. The Splinter Cell games - specifically Double Agent - do a much better job of giving the player choices which confront them with moral dilemmas.
In nearly all the games I can think of, the choice seems to come down to "Stupid Evil" versus "Misunderstood Evil." When Stupid Evil is personified, there's simply some generic bad guy who has no need of explanations; he's just eeeeeeevil. This is an offhanded justification for the existence of enemies for the player's character to cut down.
Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, which focused on action over story, took this approach. In a Stupid Evil game, the enemies are intended to be disposable challenges with no moral/ethical component; the point is fun through action.
Some games do try to set the action within a story. But when they do, the opposition is almost never driven by Smart Evil -- it's most often painted as Misunderstood Evil, as someone who only does horrible things out of nearly-plausible reasons. The darkspawn in Dragon Age: Origins were driven by Stupid Evil, but in Dragon Age: Awakening we are offered a Misunderstood Evil explanation for the waves of enemy beings we're asked to kill.
Sometimes the Misunderstood Evil is even deliberately painted as just being an alternative lifestyle, a moral equivalency that really says everyone is equally bad. This was the direction Blizzard went when it adapted the Stupid Evil Horde of the Warcraft RTS games to the MMORPG format -- the Horde of WoW are depicted as ethically no more good or evil than the Alliance. To some extent, the Imperial faction was given the same Misunderstood Evil treatment in Star Wars Galaxies, rather than letting them be consciously evil as in the films.
Every now and then, though, there's a "Smart Evil" -- a villain (such as GLaDOS) who really does hate you and who actively, intelligently and unapologetically wants to do you harm. These are the truly memorable baddies because they don't make any excuses for choosing to knowingly commit acts of evil. Like Lucifer in _Paradise Lost_, Smart Evil enemies are more interesting than Stupid Evil or Misunderstood Evil (and possibly even more interesting than Good) because they present a clear alternative to the Good that seems like the choice any rational being would make. We want to know *why* they choose to oppose us... and that search for understanding is the beating heart of a great story.
This is a fascinating subject, and one I'm interested in thinking and writing more about. I recently had a piece in The Escapist about games without big bad guys, focusing on the now 20-year-old Ultima VI. I got some good comments, but a pretty significant portion of them were from gamers who couldn't understand what a game without a final boss fight would be like. The whole point of gaming, to them, was to build their characters' physical prowess in the games so that it could be tested at the end, and then succeed through the more effective application of violence than their foes.
It really, really doesn't have to be that way. Yet it has been for so long that it seems like people can't see another way.
About what Bart Stewart said regarding Stupid, Misunderstood, and Smart Evils...
I think it would be interesting to have a game where you had to face a plethora of villains where each person fell into one of those categories. The Stupid Evil villains are thoughtless, irrational, comic-book villains who, through their own foolishness, are easily pushed aside, not even worth killing. The Misunderstood Evil villains are difficult to deal with, because they are intelligent, and either must be changed to allies or must be killed out of self-preservation. The Smart Evil villain (or villains, though it would be difficult to deal with more than one) follows some if not all of the 48 Laws of Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power) and hides in the crowd, relentlessly pursuing your destruction for some story reason. Through the game, you have to wade through the villains, dealing with them, trying to find the Smart Evil ones to ensure your survival. Such a game could have a combat system, but it would emphasize the exploration of the world and the personalities and mentalities of the villains. This would encourage the sort of exploration for which the article seems to endeavor.
Whether that is true, though, depends upon this. Does the author, Richard Clark, endorse exploring evil in this manner simply for making the stories more immersive, or for giving the players room to explore and consider the range and meaning of evil? This concept could be used either way. For the former path, the result would be a broader range of stories and villainy in games. For the latter, players would be given room to reach their own conclusions; maybe that final boss wants to do what you want to do, and you should join with him in exterminating the universe. Personally, the latter path seems to have more future, but it runs the risk of being preachy.
I think that spending time developing the narrative depth of your villain, as opposed to your hero, is worthwhile, because player identification (immersion, etc) is broken more easily by the portrayal of the hero's interior states than by complex or irrational motivations in the enemy...at least that's what the original BioShock seemed to demonstrate.
That's also were MW2's single player narrative fails - the enemies aren't given ANY real motivation (going back to MW); it's all just cliches built to make the player feel empowered about killing all these baddies. Which is unfortunate: the bravo machismo is fine for multiplayer with its competitive atmosphere, but the game's attempt to convey the nebulous web of guilt in modern combat falls flat. "No Russian", while initially shocking and uncomfortable, fails to explore the depths of terror and its consequences with any serious moral sophistication. The Splinter Cell games - specifically Double Agent - do a much better job of giving the player choices which confront them with moral dilemmas.
In nearly all the games I can think of, the choice seems to come down to "Stupid Evil" versus "Misunderstood Evil." When Stupid Evil is personified, there's simply some generic bad guy who has no need of explanations; he's just eeeeeeevil. This is an offhanded justification for the existence of enemies for the player's character to cut down.
Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, which focused on action over story, took this approach. In a Stupid Evil game, the enemies are intended to be disposable challenges with no moral/ethical component; the point is fun through action.
Some games do try to set the action within a story. But when they do, the opposition is almost never driven by Smart Evil -- it's most often painted as Misunderstood Evil, as someone who only does horrible things out of nearly-plausible reasons. The darkspawn in Dragon Age: Origins were driven by Stupid Evil, but in Dragon Age: Awakening we are offered a Misunderstood Evil explanation for the waves of enemy beings we're asked to kill.
Sometimes the Misunderstood Evil is even deliberately painted as just being an alternative lifestyle, a moral equivalency that really says everyone is equally bad. This was the direction Blizzard went when it adapted the Stupid Evil Horde of the Warcraft RTS games to the MMORPG format -- the Horde of WoW are depicted as ethically no more good or evil than the Alliance. To some extent, the Imperial faction was given the same Misunderstood Evil treatment in Star Wars Galaxies, rather than letting them be consciously evil as in the films.
Every now and then, though, there's a "Smart Evil" -- a villain (such as GLaDOS) who really does hate you and who actively, intelligently and unapologetically wants to do you harm. These are the truly memorable baddies because they don't make any excuses for choosing to knowingly commit acts of evil. Like Lucifer in _Paradise Lost_, Smart Evil enemies are more interesting than Stupid Evil or Misunderstood Evil (and possibly even more interesting than Good) because they present a clear alternative to the Good that seems like the choice any rational being would make. We want to know *why* they choose to oppose us... and that search for understanding is the beating heart of a great story.
It really, really doesn't have to be that way. Yet it has been for so long that it seems like people can't see another way.
I think it would be interesting to have a game where you had to face a plethora of villains where each person fell into one of those categories. The Stupid Evil villains are thoughtless, irrational, comic-book villains who, through their own foolishness, are easily pushed aside, not even worth killing. The Misunderstood Evil villains are difficult to deal with, because they are intelligent, and either must be changed to allies or must be killed out of self-preservation. The Smart Evil villain (or villains, though it would be difficult to deal with more than one) follows some if not all of the 48 Laws of Power (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_48_Laws_of_Power) and hides in the crowd, relentlessly pursuing your destruction for some story reason. Through the game, you have to wade through the villains, dealing with them, trying to find the Smart Evil ones to ensure your survival. Such a game could have a combat system, but it would emphasize the exploration of the world and the personalities and mentalities of the villains. This would encourage the sort of exploration for which the article seems to endeavor.
Whether that is true, though, depends upon this. Does the author, Richard Clark, endorse exploring evil in this manner simply for making the stories more immersive, or for giving the players room to explore and consider the range and meaning of evil? This concept could be used either way. For the former path, the result would be a broader range of stories and villainy in games. For the latter, players would be given room to reach their own conclusions; maybe that final boss wants to do what you want to do, and you should join with him in exterminating the universe. Personally, the latter path seems to have more future, but it runs the risk of being preachy.