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.

The Incomplete Language of Gaming

Much of the basis for my thinking about the language of gaming from this article by Matthew Sakey.  There is, in particular, one portion of that text I want to focus on.  He writes:

As [Steven] Poole noted, much of film’s critical language can be transplanted without alteration into the world of gaming. Concepts of narrative style, perspective, shot construction, and mechanics should be able to switch parties without too much confusion. But just as film couldn’t use theatre’s language as its own, the inherently more complicated medium that is gaming will need to find its own language for a significant portion – say, more than fifty percent – of its own academic vocabulary. The process will be an evolutionary one.

Sakey does a good job at filling in the history of film theory and how its history matches and diverges from the history of game theory.  I want to look at a different aspect of game theory however.

Perhaps we could best do that by examining two games: Half Life 2 and Mass Effect 2.  HL2, and its sequels episodes 1 and 2, allows the gamer to fill the shoes of scientist turned freedom fighter Gordon Freeman.  HL2 has been hailed as one of the best shooters in recent years.  I played it.  I loved it.  I finished it.  However HL2 is linear in nature. The player moves from one point to the next, overcoming enemy soldiers, aliens, and aircraft all the while.  To developer Valve’s credit, HL2 features some memorable characters, not the least of which is Freeeman’s companion Alyx Vance.

The NPC Vance, based on actress Jamil Mullen’s face, is voice phenomenally by Merle Dandridge. Vance comes across as quite believable and the player finds himself/herself concerned when she is injured.  HL2 contains several other quality NPCs and one could say that the beauty of this game is that as you move though blasting enemies, you also find that you have become immersed in the world of Half Life thanks to the memorable characters you meet.

Many games are structured just like that.  You move from place to place in order to find someone or blow up something or some other goal.  Sometimes there are large set-piece battles and other times there are cut scenes where you receive your next assignment.  Find problem.  Solve problem.  Find new problem.  Now if all games were like that, then it would certainly make more sense to use the language of film to describe video games, at least for content, since the beginning, the middle, and end are always the same.  However games have that one feature that will forever separate them from film: interactivity.

To use the term “interactive” is to use a word that is dynamic in nature.  The meaning differs from game to game.  In HL2 is means changing the environment slightly by moving objects, opening doors, or killing enemies.  As long as you overcome and progress, you will eventually reach the end.  That end never changes.  If the programmers decided that an NPC is going to die, you cannot change that.

As we have seen, Mass Effect 2 is different in that by the end of the game you have decided, by your actions, which NPCs live at the end of the game. You can even lose Commander Shepard and will not be able to import him/her into Mass Effect 3 if you make enough bad choices.  Likewise the ending will change somewhat in response to your actions. Yes, the bad guys will still lose, but there are several choices you must make that will play a significant role in ME3. Also, characters that die are sill dead for the final game in the trilogy.  It is this different that truly separates games from film. The language must accurately express how the player can now alter his/her experience every time he/she plays.  If you look at gaming in that light, then yes, the language of gaming is, as Sakey expresses, incomplete.

So how do academic researchers begin to create this language?  The first thing we have to do recognize where gaming does and does not intersect with other media.  One of my first papers as a doctoral student was to apply cultivation theory to video games.  This theory, first made popular by George Gerbner, was one of the first we learned in communication theory; I used it because most of video game theory has its roots in other media, especially television and film. (If I were to write it today, I might very well ask if playing video games helps to combat the mean world syndrome instead..oh well.)  The quote I pulled from Sakey reminds us that some conventions of gaming and film are the same and that’s okay.  But we think of video games as little interactive movies, we do both media a disservice.

The second thing we must do is play more games.  Or at least make sure our studies involve participants playing more games.  How many studies have you read where participants only played for a few minutes? This may work if the researcher seeks information of aggression levels after a session.  However if we want to know how players feel after completing tough objectives or how difficult it was to make a moral choice or even how they feel about the outcome of a game after playing for 20+ hours then we must be willing to play or watch other plays for extended periods and use our instruments accordingly. I believe these extended sessions will help us see how player input changes not only the outcome of the game and the virtual environment, but also the player himself/herself.  And that will allow us to add to the language of gaming.

The Great “Games Are Art” Debate

Film critic Roger Ebert recently set the video game world in its collective head with his “games can never be art” post.  I have read quite a few web pages and blogs blasting him and asking gamers what they think.  It amazes me that this debate has gone on for as long as it has.

Read the first two words of this blog post again: film critic. Ebert has no business making professional comments on games.  His problem is that he, and so many others, think that video games and film should be compared.  If it were the case that game developers wanted their products to be the new film, then Ebert would be the right person to comment.  However video game are not movies any more than movies are books.  Yes, some games strive for photorealism and immersion, but never forget that games are interactive media.  The game experience is different from the film experience. For far too long critics, researchers, and gamers alike have been applying the language of cinema to video games.  Let’s be clear: video games are not, nor should they ever be, movies.

As a gamer and a video game scholar, I would think my opinion counts as much, if not more, than Mr. Ebert.  So let me jump into the debate by stating that as of 2010, video games are not art.  However I believe that games are on the cusp of becoming art.  Ebert writes that games will not become art in our lifetimes.  Not true.  What games need to do is to tell good stories.  In order to do that, games need to make us care about the characters and what happens to them.  To date games are action driven.  And while that makes for a good time, playing a game is not as memorable as the greatest television shows or movies.

Simply put, we don’t care about the characters like we should.  When I become Marcus Fenix or the Master Chief, do I want to see what happens to them or is it simply that I want to play a great game with constant action?  Do I even remember the names of the characters from Modern Warfare?

Now there are some games that have come close.  The Mass Effect and Uncharted series have done a lot of the little things right that make me care about the characters.  But not enough.

Next time I will dive in Mass Effect 2 and write how developer BioWare can move the franchise from great gaming to art.