Hey Malstrom,
Two things I wanted to e-mail you about.
First off, I want to comment on the blog post about Ultima to Diablo, specifically about feeling heroic, defeating evil, and anti-heroes. It got me thinking about how most of my favourite story-driven games involved travelling from town to town, defeating whatever evil was menacing the land. You’d mentioned Final Fantasy IV, my first and still one of my favourite RPGs, and a game that basically boils down to fighting evil itself. Link to the Past has a dark world and some of the most heroic music ever. Chrono Trigger, a game about trying to change the timestream to save the future from a parasitic evil, not because they’ll ever live to see that future, but because as heroes, they can’t bear to see the future of their world end up a hopeless wasteland. Ocarina of Time, a game where you can see the evil creeping into the world as a child, become the one to fix it as an adult, and then when you finally do, (SPOILER ALERT) Link is still enough of a hero that when Zelda sends him back to being a child, he warns her about the impending evil anyways.
Which brings me to a few story-drive games that I have some issue with. Grand Theft Auto IV. I really like the main character of the game, a guy who isn’t proud of where he comes from and what he can do, but at the same time, I find it hard to play through the game’s story knowing that I’m gonna end up committing more and more despicable crimes. Mass Effect is a game that touts choice, and I felt like a true hero afterwards playing through as a pure Paragon, using my charisma to defuse dangerous situations, making strong moral choices and ultimately saving the day. Afterwards, I started up the game again playing as a Renegade, and felt like such a despicable asshole that I barely got into the story, and because most of the point of Mass Effect is playing through multiple times to see how your choices affect the game, I felt like I’d missed out on half the content of not only ME, but potentially the future Mass Effect games. Oblivion had a ton of choice, but in the end it felt more like a mish-mash of activities (one minute, you can do something completely heroic, the next you can be evil, with neither affecting eachother) rather than an heroic adventure. I know choice in RPGs is supposed to be a good thing and edginess is supposedly something that sells (or at least has enough of a market and enough developer interest to sustain it), but I almost think we’re losing some of the heroism of video games, or downsizing it and halving the content so you can be full on evil along with it. Then again I could be wrong, I loved playing as the villains of Starcraft’s story as much as I did the heroes, and I can’t really explain why.
Secondly, Nintendo UK posted sales rankings (not actual numbers) of Club Nintendo Members from the UK.http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/systems/charts_44503.html
Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Bubble Bobble and Zelda 2 in the top 10 of the NES are probably the ones that tell me the most. I’ve never had a feel for if Pac-Man, DK and BB had any staying power because those games were before my time, but it’s kind of shocking to see the names they’re ahead of and what kind of staying power they really have when available on a modern console. Zelda 2 gets painted as the black sheep, yet it’s ahead of Metroid, Mega Man II, Punch Out etc, or at least hanging with them because we don’t have actual numbers. Interesting stuff.
Who was the star of Pac-Man? It was actually the ghosts. Whenever you see a hero appear, like Pac-Man, you’ll see well-fleshed out villains. And Pac-Man’s ghosts were ‘fleshed out’ in comparison to that time period. It’s like all those space shooter games where the space ship always looks the same in every game but the villains are so fleshed out! In Space Invaders, it was the aliens who stole the show!
Characters are interesting because they are flawed or they are responsible for stopping evil. Either way, the story revolves around evil. Stories start with a conflict (i.e. evil did something). Sherlock Holmes is not interesting unless the murders were interesting.
Star Trek’s ratings always went up (or remained reasonably stable) when they had good villains. The Next Generation’s ratings skyrocketed with the Borg. DS9 went from Cardassians to Klignons to ultimately the Dominion. Voyager was on the verge of cancellation until they went back to the Borg and introduced a villain that even the Borg were scared about. Enterprise was hurting in ratings so in the third season they introduced a multi-species villain of the Xindi which didn’t exactly work out. The series got cancelled.
With Babylon 5, people complain about the first and fifth season. There were no villains during those seasons. It was the Shadows and Clarke Government that made things interesting.
Just because a character is evil doesn’t mean he automatically becomes interesting. It must be properly fleshed out. No villains sees a villain in a mirror.
Here is something I found really interesting. The actor who played Khan in Star Trek II didn’t play Khan as a villain. He played Khan as the hero! Which is why he became so interesting. The actor who played Gul’Dukat in DS9 picked up on that and played him like the hero resulting in stealing every scene in which he appeared.
Good storytelling is built around perspectives and contexts, not around good and evil. The reason why you enjoyed playing as the Zerg in Starcraft was not because they were evil. The Zerg do not see themselves as evil. The Zerg see themselves as Zerg, and they see the other races as evil.
The audience may know who is good and evil, but the characters don’t think in those terms. That is the entire point of theater. The audience get promoted to gods who look down at the characters and judge them accordingly.
Many of the anti-heroes the game industry tries to create are not fun because of bad story telling, not because people don’t like being the bad guy. The thing is that the bad guy never thinks he’s the bad guy. They all think they are heroes. And just like in Nature, the cat thinks eating the mouse is a heroic act. The mouse’s perspective is that the cat is evil.
Perspective is part of the craft of every storyteller. The reason why games like Starcraft were able to create good ‘villains’ like the Zerg is because they weren’t written as ‘evil beings’. You got to be the Zerg in a couple of campaigns and be a hero to them for a while. It is why I really enjoy the race-by-race perspective of the RTS games. It really gives us a different perspective. In Warcraft 3, you got to be the Undead and got to be Arthas. They became compelling because they saw themselves as heroes in their own way.
One of the reasons why Starcraft 2’s storyline had such a negative reception was because there is only one perspective: Jim Raynor’s. In previous RTS games, we’d get the perspective of every power.
Starcraft 2’s expansion story quality entirely depends on the perspective it tells. If it is a continuing of Raynor’s perspective but just using Zerg units, the story will have a negative reception. If the story is that of the Zerg’s perspective, which is unique to Terran and Protoss, it will be better received.
Splitting Starcraft 2 into three expansions was a terrible decision in hindsight. It gave the ‘stories’ of each expansion locked into one perspective. And one perspective means a bad story. Imagine if you could play as Emperor Arcturus. You would feel like a hero for him. And he would flesh out as a villain because of that. It would have made Wings of Liberty more interesting.
Chrono Trigger is all about Lavos.
Is this interesting because Lavos is evil? Lavos doesn’t think it is evil. Lavos thinks it is being heroic in this scene.
And before I get emails that say, “Are you now saying that evil is relative?”, perspective is about the characters. An effective villain doesn’t think he is a villain. Kefka was great because he thought he was heroic in ‘building a monument to non-existence’.