Culture Clash

(February 2004)

Bad Santa

Creating realistic moral disjunction

Increasing nonlinearity and freedom of choice have made games more engaging, but the characters within them tend to remain two-dimensional. As narrative titles delve deeper into the world of complex character development and motivations, writers are expected to produce increasingly complex and multifaceted characters. This is a challenge for game development, as it was a challenge in the early stages of all narrative media, because it forces designers to abandon much of what has worked for them in the past. Characters with the potential to be genuinely villainous must now be couched within a believable motivational context.

The white hat/black hat dichotomy of heroes and villains (PC and NPC) in most games is no longer sufficiently believable to the player, but is still theoretically acceptable given the earlier limitations of the medium. This issue is not unique to the evolution of game narrative. In silent film, the differentiators were even more obvious, because both the technology and audience awareness were insufficient to portray more depth. Paper-thin heroes and villains continued to exist for some time into the talking period, because audiences still weren't ready to make their own assessment of character without aid from the film itself. We're at a similar point in game development, and as was once the case in film, the current state is a middle ground where audiences are ready, but we're not yet seeing any subtlety of character or motivation in most games.

How many CRPGs contain a variant of this exchange:

ADORABLE CHILD
"Please, mister, my kitten is stuck up in that tree!"

SELECT A RESPONSE.
(a) Child, I shall rescue your kitten, for I am good.
(b) If I help you, what's in it for me?
(c) Buzz off, kid.
(d) <Seize the kitten by its tail and beat the child to death with it>.

Audiences respond poorly to blatant noseleading, and increasingly demand escalating shades of gray. It is possible, and certainly more realistic, to be evil without being Snidely Whiplash. Cartoon-level villainy can blemish otherwise transcendent roleplaying experiences. A player who wishes to be evil in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic must do and say such ridiculously mean things that the Dark Side seems more inane than plausible. Complex, well-conceived motivations are far better than obtuse archetypes; this is especially true in gaming, when a player is expected to direct and identify with their onscreen avatar.

Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design includes a section about developing characters, good and evil, and makes a point to insist that character motivation be predicated by a realistic set of contributing factors. Black & White demonstrated compellingly that people's true nature is Gray & Grey . And it is absolutely vital that the avenues and dialogue made available to a player shy away from sheer boilerplate wickedness. It's just not realistic, and that lack of realism jars the player out of the experience.

The paradox of playing a villain is that it makes narrative-driven games both easier and more difficult. A cutthroat home invasion specialist will find Morrowind easier, especially at the outset where money is desperately short and your character is utterly alone. But in many cases, including Morrowind , it's usually more difficult to finish the game if the player goes for pure evil. At some point, the game AI takes over and necessary NPCs will refuse to speak to the player, or law enforcement will attack on sight, or the peasantry will head for the hills at the monster's approach. This could be a conscious design decision or the result of misdirected nonlinearity. But such consequences are partly a symptom of the paint-by-numbers evil found in most games; if players could be a little more morally ambiguous and a little less Evil Sheila, the problem might solve itself.

Some developers would argue that despite the evolution of increasingly advanced theories of nonlinear game design, it has not yet, and may never want, to reach the point where a player can be "anyone". "Anyone" is not necessarily appropriate to experience the story of a game. Though more than one Morrowind player amused themselves for hours gathering mushrooms, only one interested in devaluing Fallout would insist that the game is "bad" because they can't play through as a circus clown or quadruple amputee. Nonlinearity should never grant a player sufficient freedom to ruin the game for themselves, but should always grant them the ability to approach challenges however they wish. Recall that the nonlinearity debate stems largely from the greater freedom found in tabletop gaming, where a GM would certainly never allow players to actively mess with a campaign in the interest of "freedom".

Being bad makes some players feel good. Playing a villain isn't necessarily the ambition of every player, and those players who gravitate toward evil characters are not necessarily any different from those who tend toward irritatingly benevolent alter egos. Players who play evil shouldn't be judged for it. There are just about as many motivations for playing a morally inconsistent character as there ought to be morally inconsistent approaches to a game challenge. For some, playing with evil in the game world exorcises any desire to be evil in the real one. Others just find it amusing. Many more employ iniquity as a way to get ahead early in the game, since it is much easier to take something than work for it. But it seems likely that the vast majority are simply looking to challenge themselves, to flex their roleplaying muscles, by acting in a manner that would be out of character for their real world persona.