Culture Clash

(November 2003)

We Know Drama

Better characters produce better narrative

I was trying to explain the concept and story behind Max Payne to my mother the other day, but paused in the middle of my enthusiastic, arm-waving account to assess her exasperated mein.

"It's always the wife getting killed that sets off these murderous rampages," she finally said. "What is it about movies and games that insist someone's wife be killed in order to fuel a vendetta against the mob? Come up with something new. And who would name their child Max Payne?"

Deflated, I gave up on her but got to thinking about what she said. It's true, the plot of Max Payne is relatively clichéd, even for a video game, but press on the game's story was extremely positive. It is the characters that make this bargain-basement tale into something special. Max himself could have been a stereotypical tough-guy cop, but, flying in the face of generative norms for this archetype, Remedy presented him very differently: still tough, but recall that the first time we see Max, he's giving up smoking because it's bad for his baby. The second time, he's howling his misery over the loss of his wife. He is a human being with a broken soul, and an enormously compelling and emotionally engaging character.

Characterization in dramatic narrative is critical to development. Weak characters mean a weak story, while a feeble story can easily be bolstered by fascinating characters. As human beings, we are interested in other human beings - especially those who live lives different from our own. The power of character, and the ability of players to identify with characters, is critical to furthering the narrative evolution of games. Note the success and high praise of those titles that do focus on character - games like Warcraft 3 and No One Lives Forever . In some cases, our identification with the character goes well beyond our appreciation of the story: "you must become Garrett - or die," Wagner James Au notes in his rumination on the emotional might of Thief.

How we relate to characters in games is a source of much discussion. Hayden Duvall, in a recent Game Developer article, discussed the artistic differences in player-character relationship based on perspective, noting that games in which you see your character all the time tend to encourage more emotional connection to the character. This is borne out in most cases, but not all; No One Lives Forever is a FPS game and we see Cate only in cutscenes, but most gamers found her to be a compelling and highly intriguing character with whom they could easily identify. Meanwhile Heavy Metal FAKK2 is a third person game and I highly doubt that many players found that onscreen avatar emotionally (though, perhaps, physically) compelling.

In Morrowind , an absorbingly plot-driven, character-developing game, most gamers neither identified with nor seriously considered the existence of their character. I know one player who fussed for hours over outfits and shoes, but the rest of us tended to see our character as little more than a cipher through which we experienced the game's story. In this case, we as gamers became the character with which we identified, referring to our game activities in the first person and generally thinking of ourselves as part of the world. It's the case in many first-person games, especially RPGs, and it can be an effective way to craft a powerful narrative, but it's also one that is more likely to fail if poorly executed. No one identified with the protagonist of Return to Castle Wolfenstein , despite the fact that we were supposed to based on the title's story and cutscenes.

The most compelling narratives in any media are always the ones with the most deftly crafted - or at least the most interesting - characters. Story itself is, in many ways, somewhat irrelevant to the emotional power and impact of the narrative, because it is the players within the story that capture our attention and imagination. Even Hamlet would be a reasonably dull revenge-and-madness excursion were it not for the intricacies of those who take part in the story. Regardless of whether we love, hate, or are simply curious about a character, they are the foundation of the narrative structure.

Developers interested in fashioning more compelling characters should look first to the games that do it well: Warcraft 3 and NOLF, Starcraft , Flashback , Thief , Sacrifice, Wing Commander , Summoner , and so forth. Look not only at the protagonist - who is presumably the individual the player controls - but at secondary and even peripheral characters. The chatty goons in Max Payne 2 strengthen the narrative as well, and shouldn't be overlooked. Such care in development adds depth to the overall narrative structure, weaving compelling elements into the whole. There are also several resources on creating emotional bonds with a game, including an intriguing new book from David Freeman that deals directly with the subject. Good main characters should not exist only in the context of a temporal snapshot - the amount of time they appear in the game. Writing them as if they were real is the most obvious way to develop them effectively, and this is accomplished by simply thinking about who they are. I suspect there were discussions at Remedy about what Max Payne's parents were like, interesting things that happened in his life experience to turn him into the sort of man he was before losing his family and the sort of man he is by the time we play him.

Character, like plot or theme or genre, is part of the overall process of narrative construction. There is little doubt that it is the most important part, regardless of media, because historically the best and most popular narratives are those which sport exceptionally developed personalities. Narrative construction in game development is in its infancy, yet already we have seen extraordinarily powerful narratives, capable of evoking a panoply of strong emotions, from fear to laughter. Imagine what developers will be capable of as the process evolves further.