What We Need Are More Jokers

Video games serve as entertainment and provide escapism.  That is the conventional wisdom. Thanks to the wonders of gaming, players can take on the role of a seven-foot Spartan, a British adventurer, or an invincible COG soldier.  These brave warriors face death constantly but in the end always prevail.  However I find that as I grow older that all this excitement is not enough for me.  Oh sure, I still love to gun down waves of enemies and solve puzzles, but I find that I long to care about the characters involved.  Not just the non-playable characters (NPCs) but my own as well.  I just read Jeffrey Ollendorf’s “The Benefits of Banter” over at Gamasutra and I agree that in role-playing games it helps if party members talk, tease, and joke more.  My own take is that writers should consider adding two other elements in addition to banter: physical challenge and fear.

Get Joker off the ship and let him crack some heads.

I don’t mean physical challenge as in defeating waves of enemies or jumping from ledge to ledge, but rather as a term that replaces “disability” or “handicap.” A character who is physically challenged might struggle with injury, disease, or illness.  Nearly all the characters in games are in peak physical condition.  In fact many have superhuman abilities and technologically advanced weapons.  What if game character development took the opposite approach?  What if we could control more characters like Mass Effects’ Joker?  Now here is a character, Jeff Moreau, who suffers from what is commonly called brittle bone disease.  Near the end of Mass Effect 2 the player briefly takes control of Joker as he fearlessly moves through the Normandy trying to rescue the besieged crew. I honestly cannot remember if there was another time I had control over a character that wasn’t super fast, overly strong, heavily armed, or unbelievably agile.  Joker is a regular person with a regular person’s issues.

What if Joker became a party member in Mass Effect 3? Suppose there were missions where Shepard needed to commandeer a vessel and only Joker could fly it?  I would love to see Joker pick up a rifle again and blast those evil alien Geth to bits!  Not a superhuman Joker.  Not a frail Joker who takes one bullet and dies.  No.  I want a Joker who uses his wits to stay alive where other members use bullets and biotics.  And like that one scene in ME2, Moreau cracks jokes as he cracks heads.

However that one scene in ME2 could have been more powerful if he had actually displayed fear.  The idea of the protagonist, party members, or friendly AI displaying fear seems to run contrary to the notion of being a hero. Perhaps the enemy may be afraid but never the hero. It’s okay for the little grunts in Halo 3 to run off when Master Chief runs in guns blazing but you will never see Marines do that.  Okay that may be a little extreme.  But what if the heroes were anxious before battle? What if my character actually got the shakes?  Now there’s a thought.

Showing a little fear wouldn't kill him.

Let’s take Dead Space as an example.  There were plenty of times I jumped while playing and I spent most of my time turning around to make sure something didn’t grab me from behind (in the game that is, though I usually played at night with the lights off).  Yet all the time I moved through those dark corridors my character, Isaac Clarke was a silent efficient killer.  I never identified with him. Never connected to him.  A lot of that came from the fact that he didn’t speak.  That’s a shame.  But more than that he never showed the slightest bit of emotion.  None of the characters did.  Isaac seemed be friends with Kendra Daniels.  Imagine if Daniels and Clarke actually showed the strain of their situation.  Having Daniels show fear and Clarke being apprehensive would have served as a vehicle to connect gamer and character.  Small additions like a loud heartbeat, shaking hands, and unsteady aim when afraid would amp up and already tense shooter.

I watched a short clip on the upcoming Dead Space 2 yesterday.  It seems that Mr. Clarke will be in charge this time around.  No more getting direction from somebody else all the time. While that sounds well and good I hope we get to see a more human hero travelling through dark corridors blasting aliens.

Perhaps what we need are ordinary people who at times rise above their meager means and origins in order to save the rest of us.  I don’t mean the classic hero-myth saga where boy/girl meets mentor, rejects mentor’s appeal, is forced to into being a hero, loses mentor, goes to the underworld, realizes he/she is truly a hero and saves the world.  No I mean we need playable characters like you or me.  People who, while they realize they must fight, have trouble shooting because they are near-sighted.  I’m talking about folk who hate killing.  I mean ordinary people who want nothing more than to get away from their situation and go home in peace.

I realize my opinions go against that whole concept of escapism I mentioned at the beginning but I am always a proponent of adding greater character depth in the ever elusive hope of moving video games into that mystical state of culturally respected media. Perhaps I ask too much of game writers, but I don’t think so.  Take a chance.

Since When Did Playing Games Become Work?

Dragon Age Origins: I bought it not so much for the fun as for studying the morality system.

I ordered Dragon Age Origins from Amazon last week.  Now I am not a real big role-playing fan but I do play them from time to time.  In fact I usually buy one role-playing game (RPG) per year.  I played Oblivion in 2006 and Mass Effect in 07.  I never finished Fallout 3, so I stayed away from the genre until Mass Effect 2 came out earlier this year.  I guess Dragon Age could be my RPG for 09. Whatever.

Somewhere in the midst of checking the US Postal Service website for the status of my package, I began to wonder why I was so intent on playing this game.  I then realized that while the game only mildly appeals to me (I prefer sci-fi RPGs), I am fascinated by the morality system and the choices presented in the game.  I know if I can get my hands on it I can probably use the content as the basis for a study, a paper, or at the very least some good blogging. That’s when it dawned on me: I play games for research and not for fun.

So then I started debating with myself, thinking “surely I play other games just for fun.” What about NCAA Football 11? I play that game every day, but it is also research.  I’ve already blogged about dynasty wire and social media.  I sent some tweets about the power of the press in that game. In fact I started tweeting about the social aspect of the game before I even picked it up from Gamestop. And while eating breakfast this morning I tossed about an idea about getting users to create more stories to increase the hype and tension before big games and therefore make online dynasties more realistic. That would make for a fascinating study.

Well then perhaps I play Mass Effect 2 just for fun. That’s no better.  After all that adventure provided inspiration about death in games, cultural hegemony and racism.  I even thought about blogging on how the game treats the disabled in the “Overlord” DLC.  So much for that.

Worse still, I bought Red Dead Redemption to see how Rockstar went about developing the narrative.  Fable II was only an exercise in studying the morality system and how NPCs would react to my in-game decisions.  I got great information, but never finished either game.

I think something is wrong with me.

I see more than Tomb Raider's Lara Croft. I see body image and media effects.

It finally dawned on me that my gaming only serves as a platform for my research.  Even when I think I am just having fun or relaxing, I suspect that somewhere in the back of my mind I am taking mental notes for my next project.  I would not be surprised if the gaming I’ve been doing these past few years (Mass Effect 1& 2, NCAA Football, Dragon Age, Tomb Raider Underworld, Gears of War, GTA, Modern Warfare 2) will provide a wealth of potential projects to work on after my dissertation.   And so here I sit with research ideas about male body image and the use of drama in video games floating around in my head.  Even now I have a blog draft about the perseverance of hyper-masculine heroes in games such as Gears of War. In an age where Lara Croft looks more like a women and less like an adolescent fantasy we still have Marcus Fenix who exemplifies the typical ultra-macho, super-aggressive male role model.

And so my brief self-reflection has led me to the conclusion that my days of gaming just for fun are gone and they aren’t coming back.  That pastime has been replaced with the need to explore game content for hegemonic messages, changing player identity in the face of moral choices, and genre-blending trends in the industry.  I used to joke that studying games gave me an excuse to play them.  Now I think studying games is my sole reason for playing. How my (gaming) world has changed.

Bridging the Gap Between Games and User Content

A friend came over to my house the other day. He wanted to play a game of NCAA Football 11 online against another member of my online dynasty and so he came over after work.  After he “recovered” his Xbox Live gamertag, he hopped online and played his dynasty game while I watched.  It was a great game and in the end my buddy lost in a close match.  Well the next morning I log onto dynasty anywhere to read what the guy on the other end of the Internet wrote. It was a good retelling of the game, but from a completely different perspective. It reminded me of the blog I posted last week or so about how framing theory and user-generated content makes for interesting research.

This story I read told the game narrative from a completely different perspective.  Though the writer did take the time to include both sides of the story, I was amazed at how his perspective differed from my own.  That started me thinking about a content or textual analysis of dynasty wire might produce some interesting results.  From there I expanded into other area that might be ripe for study.

Internet discussion boards were one of the earliest places for gamers to express their opinions about their love for gaming and write about game-related topics. I spent time exploring gamer forums in my dissertation but that was limited to the rather modest subset of Christian gamers.  There are many types of gamers who post their thoughts, ideas, and reactions on a variety of sites.  A more expansive look into gamer discussions could easily become a longitudinal study spanning weeks, months, or longer. It seems that gamers spend a fair amount of time writing about their games.  From the forums on Xbox.com to those of major publishers such as EA and Ubisoft there is no shortage of material.

Of course gamers also have discussions on a variety of topics as they play and so a researcher who explores the transcripts of cooperative and competitive play is sure to find rich texts. Now I know Xbox Live is the notorious playground of racists, sexists, and homophobes, but, surprisingly, there are also intelligent conversations taking place. With millions of users logging in and gaming every day, the amount of content produced is truly staggering, but what an addition it is to all the “social media” buzz going around these days.

Web Extensions

Some game publishers take the extra step and allow users to generate content on official game websites. Bungie does a wonderful job in giving users a place to store game content as well as create new images and movies from gameplay. No doubt they will only expand on what users can do for the upcoming game Halo: Reach, which due out this September.  Whereas websites used to be all about forums, now users can manipulate and upload game content for all to enjoy.  Aside from the obvious application of Uses & Gratification Theory, we might also find new areas of application for the Gatekeeping, Framing, and Priming Theories.

Dynasty Anywhere (and similar applications)

There are some online dynasties in NCAA 11 where all users are required to write stories for their games.  An online dynasty can run 60 seasons.  There are 12 games per season (plus bowl games).  With a full dynasty of 12 players, there could be at least 144 stories per season and possibly 8640 stories over the life of the dynasty.  Imagine how rich the content would be from such diligent publishing.

Indeed user content really does add another dimension to the video game experience. Yes, I do think the term “social media” is now overused almost the point of cliché, but I also believe this is a rich and virtually untapped area of study. Our use of entertainment media in general and video games in particular continues to evolve and academic researchers must strive to keep pace.