Character: The Next Great Gaming Frontier?
4/24/2009 6:36 PM | 5 Comments | Page 1 of 3
Chris Buecheler
Status: Muthaaaaa ... tell your children not to WALK MY WAY-HUH!
If you need anything, I'll be walking around the town in a circle, taking breaks to sleep, until the end of time.
Recent releases like
Gears of War 2 and
Killzone 2 have offered gamers visual fidelity of unparalleled quality. For over a decade, improving visuals has been the focal point of development in gaming, and titles have advanced by great leaps during that time. We've also improved the audio in our games, and arguably even moved into telling deeper, more interesting stories. Text-adventure advocates may disagree with that last point, but certainly we expect a great deal more story from today's mass-market titles, such as
Gears of War, than we did of titles like
Bubble Bomb or
DOOM.
Unfortunately, the characters that populate our games seem to have been lost in the shuffle. One could easily argue that modern gaming characters are shallower and less compelling than their ancestors, some of whom had great reams of text-driven dialogue to spout. Even in a Game of the Year-quality title like
Fallout 3, we're still presented with primary story characters about whom we know virtually nothing, and with whom we have a hard time forming compelling, coherent relationships.
What makes a game character compelling? How can modern games improve in their efforts at presenting players with characters whose complexities come even close to equaling the rendering marvels of which those same games are capable? Before we proceed with answering those questions, let's define what we're talking about when we use the term "compelling" in the first place. Many people out there -- most of them men -- find big boobs in a tight shirt pretty compelling. So, too, do many people out there -- again, most of them men -- find thick-necked bad-asses with huge guns pretty compelling. Let's face it: if you paired Marcus Fenix up with a voluptuous, leather-clad female cohort and sent them off on an epic battle against the forces of evil -- broken up, perhaps, by a
Mass Effect-style sex scene or two -- a whole lot of gamers would find that highly compelling.
Like a vacation to Hawaii, only with more gunfire.
The question, though, is whether that means the characters themselves are compelling, or whether the simple archetypes they represent, in combination with the gameplay itself, are what keep gamers interested. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the latter is likely the truth. The most interesting thing about Fenix is that he's voiced by the same guy who played Bender in "Futurama," and most female characters, while often nubile
and under-clothed, are about as deep as a puddle on a hot day. These, then, are not who we're looking for in our search for compelling characters in our games.
Let us ponder instead one of the most celebrated characters in modern gaming history: Alyx Vance. In
Half-Life 2 and its subsequent episodes, we see Vance go through a range of human emotions. We see her angry, and we see her terrified. We see her elated, and we see her in the blackest depths of grief. We see her hurt and vulnerable, healed, shaken, on the attack, invulnerable (quite literally), amused, threatened, embarrassed. We see her infatuated and perhaps beginning to fall in love with the main character of the series, Gordon Freeman, better known as
you, the gamer ... a fact that has been observed before, and with a cynical eye, by other writers. Regardless of one's opinion on manipulating the player's heartstrings, it's hard to think of a videogame character that goes through more emotional and mental states than Vance does. Whatever it is that Vance may be, she is most certainly not Lara Croft. What she is instead is a rare and beautiful thing in the world of gaming: a character with some depth.
