A Little Heart

In the past I’ve written how eventually graphics will become so realistic that we’ll have to look for other areas of gaming to ‘improve’ to keep our interest.

In my last post on this topic, I suggested Artificial Intelligence was the way forward. Today I’ll discuss another very important element, namely story.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time, the story behind a video game isn’t really story at all. It’s more a brief paragraph-worth of back story to explain and justify what the player has to do in the game.

Doom, for example, had the makings of a good story. Scientists on Mars experiment in teleportation technology, then accidentally open a portal to hell and all manner of demons break loose.

Unfortunately, that was the start and end of it. Fair enough, this wasn’t a Role-Playing game, but all your character did was run around a series of environments and shoot at demons.

So Doom’s story is essentially “Demons are bad and they need killing. Here’s a gun and the demons are over there.”

Hardly compelling stuff. Half-Life had essentially the same story (just swap demons for aliens), but it was far more interesting.

When we look at the more popular games of the past few years, we see that a lot of them had deep, involving storylines. The name of the game is getting the player emotionally invested in the story, make them care what happens to the characters, and like a good book, keep the player playing because he can’t wait to see what happens next.

Let’s look at ‘Fable’.

I see Fable as more of a prototype than an actual game in that it features many ideas and concepts that, while original, weren’t truly realized. The idea that your character’s appearance changes based on your actions, the fact you age and the fact you can get married are all incredibly compelling.

However, if we look at marriage in Fable, it’s a very simple affair and has no real impact on gameplay. You find a female (or male depending on your sexual preferences) and depending on how famous you are and how well you treat your prospective spouse, you can propose marriage.

If you get married, you get a cut scene. That’s it.

Let’s take this a step further. Let’s say you’re playing an RPG and can not only get married, but can have children, and actually have a family.

Now wouldn’t that add an extra layer of depth to gameplay? In an RPG, you find your family’s home is too close to a dangerous area and is at risk of being attacked, so you rush home to move them somewhere safer. You hear the town where your family lives has fallen under attack and rush home to find if they’re safe. Your son or daughter grows up and asks if he can come with you on your next adventure, do you let them?

It’s personal involvement. It’s far easier to care about a story where you’re made to care about people and what happens to them…rather than the usual faceless villain attacking yet another generic group of villagers/colonists/downtrodden peoples.

Unfortunately, this is where ‘game-predjudice’ stops us in our tracks. Who wants to have a fake ‘relationship’ in a game? How can you actually care about what happens to a video-game character? That’s just sad! Turn of the computer and get a real life!

Well, to cast this in its proper light, you could say the same thing about any book you’ve ever read, or any movie you’ve ever seen. Who cares if Harry Potter escapes Voldemort? Who cares if Frodo manages to cast the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom? Who cares if Peter Parker gets Mary Jane?

Basically, we have no problems getting emotionally invested in a movie or a book, despite the fact we’re observing fictional characters.

We can quite happily stand up and cheer when a guy with a red cape and his underpants on the outside steps out of the plane he just saved, into a crowded baseball stadium filled with cheering people…but feel anything when the character who’s been your mentor for 12 hours of gameplay gets killed or betrays you? That’s just silly.

The big point here is that if we don’t care for the characters, we don’t care about the story. If we don’t care if the guy gets the girl, or if the villain is vanquished, why are we bothering taking the story in at all?

When we look at it like that, the only real difference is that videogames are interactive and allow the player to make choices on how the story goes. In fact, it could be said it’s much more easy and natural to become emotionally invested in what happens to video game characters because we have an active input in the story. When a character dies in a movie, there’s nothing we can do about it. In a game, it’s up to us to avenge their death, or wonder if they still would have died had we done something different. Of course, I’m not talking about “Space Invaders” here. I’m not saying you should feel anything when one of your favorite units in Command and Conquer gets destroyed…but a well written, well acted character? Why not?

Returning to ‘Fable’ lets me illustrate this point. [Spoiler Warning]

Near the end of the game, you defeat ‘Jack of Blades’ and your sister tells you that you have a choice. Kill her with the magical sword you’ve taken from the bad guy and absorb its almost unlimited power, or cast it into a vortex where it will be lost forever, where its evil can never threaten the world again.

Now from a pure gameplay standpoint, the choice is simple. Kill your sister and keep the sword. She’s not really your sister, she’s just a game character after all…and having the sword will make the rest of the game much easier. It’s a power-up, plain and simple.

However, like with a good movie, if you suspend disbelief and get into the character, it becomes a much more difficult choice.

I’d played the game as a ‘good’ character. I decided to make him a classic moral hero.

If you think about what the sister character had gone through (Kidnapped as a child from her home, had her eyes cut out by her kidnapper and left for dead in the woods), what would make a better ending to the story for me? Would my character throw away his morality, slay his sister and rule like a tyrant? Or give up his chance at ultimate power for the sake of what little is left of his family?

I threw the sword into the vortex, and I felt good about it. Yeah, I threw away a valuable in game item for the sake of a video game character…but it felt good.

In conclusion, there’s nothing wrong with games having a little heart.

Notice how in Star Wars : Episode 3, Emperor Palpatine seemed much more evil because you saw how he destroyed Anakin’s family? How he used people like puppets? How he took Anakin’s love for Padme and poisoned and twisted it to turn Anakin into Darth Vader? It made it personal and gave the movie some heart.

This is what games need.

The player needs to be given personal involvement. It’s much more satisfying and engaging when you’re fighting an enemy who has personally wronged you or someone you care about, rather than some faceless ‘uber-villain’ who destroyed a planet with a big laser.

In Fable, you defeat ‘Jack of Blades’, because he killed your father, kidnapped and tortured your mother and cut out your sister’s eyes and left her for dead. In Doom, you defeat the big demon at the end because, well, ya know, he’s a demon… and everyone knows demons are evil. Come on…look at his horns, and he’s breathing fire!