No More Heroes
Posted by
Nechrol
on
Not the game, but it ties in here somewhere as I’m looking at ‘heroes’ in games, mainly protagonists. Games take a few cues from movies when they create their ‘hero’. Pretty much every silent war machine from the 80’s-90’s had some form of Schwarzenegger built into their coding. In particular, his character ‘John Matrix’ from Commando. In fact Commando seems more apt for a game looking back at it. I mean the guy is practically a one-man army who is 80% muscle and 20% one-liner quips after he’s just painted the walls with some guys head.
The Commando analogy has all the traits of game, simple story, meat-head protagonist and lots of guns. The character has as much substance as processed cheesed but he does what is required, which is to entertain…through mass carnage. The same can be said from the leads in games like Doom, Wolfenstein and others on sale at that time. They act as a medium to kill aliens, Nazi’s and the Dog from Paperboy. Thanks to the latter my natural instinct when seeing any small dog is to wail on it with a rolled up newspaper. They only need to connect with us through killing things, we don’t really care if your daughter’s been kidnapped or aliens are coming to mind-rape us. Just point me to the BFG.
However, if you look at protagonists from other games in the 80’s there weren’t many pushing the boundaries in character development. Even in the first Final Fantasy the leads were silent pixelated people called Warrior and Blue Mage. Things slowly started to change but it was still very much kept in the RPG genre. Protagonists in other genres where guns or fighting were concerned still leaned towards the silent, burly psychopath whose mind focused only on guns, ammo and medical packs.
I think when we moved into the realms of 3d the idea of the game hero started to change. As graphics became three-dimensional companies attempted to create characters that had more substance.
The notion of a hero in any medium, especially games is someone without flaw and almost invincible. The latter not obviously in the physical sense but they are portrayed as beyond human in most cases. Much like movie heroes can go into a situation and not sustain any injuries until the last few minutes. They inevitably get shot but it must, and I repeat MUST be in the leg or someplace that won’t retard their heroics too much.
The same with games, although this is a given, it’s part and parcel of the game world that we buy into. So, while physically they are mostly invulnerable writers can try to make them seem more human and less super-human in other ways.
In most games nowadays the hero can be sometimes be portrayed as a flawed character, elements that remind us that they are after all, human. Look at Max Payne with his family killed by crack-heads and his obvious addiction to painkillers and slowed down time. This can allow the player to empathise with the character and in some parts be hilarious. The part in Max Payne where you follow the babies’ screams seriously freaked me out and I felt I had to be on some kind of hallucinogen to fully appreciate it.
Our perception of a hero is a unique perspective for each player. Like most things people connect with we see a shadow of ourselves in it, or alternatively, what we want to be like. As a kid I used to play dress up as Spiderman, unfortunately when I leapt from the window of my house I didn’t stick to the wall.
When we play games that we get to make decisions a shadow of ourselves is projected onto our avatar but this is also combined with who we want to be perceived as. I usually err on the side of a lawfully good guy with a bad ass streak. Like a loose cannon detective. Basically I’m John Mclane in the middle ages. This especially came to light when playing Mass Effect 2 and I had the chance to pull off some renegade moves. My favourite involved punching a female reporter; even I didn’t see it coming and stood shouting “THAT’S WHAT YOU GET!!” at the TV.
I enjoy having choice in some games but I personally find it more enjoyable to engage with someone company designed because I like to follow their decisions and their choices that make them who they are. If I’m controlling a protagonist that has his own back-story and personality, but find I’m the one making choices for him I feel like a backseat driver. Suffice to say the whole situation jars me.
When choice is mostly taken out of the matter and we examine our hero they can still be silent, vigilant individuals like Freeman from Half-life. Without saying barely a word I found myself able to empathise with the character and this was due to other characters in the game and the fantastically imagined environment. With these things in mind I liked Freeman and wanted him to succeed.
There have been occasions when the protagonist has made me want to dive through the monitor and slap them for being whiney and annoying. One shining example was in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. The preposterously named Edge Maverick (who sounds like an 80’s B-movie action star) ends up obliterating a colony of people. Obviously this would put a dampener on your mood and a real man would shed a solitary tear then go back to slaughtering monsters. Instead this affected him so deeply that he nearly had a nervous breakdown in-game and began questioning whether he was a worthy leader. Obviously it was a good device to make him question himself but his constant whining about made want to slap him into manhood.
Enough about how it’s been done badly, I’ll mention a game that turned our expectations of a hero on its head. Metal Gear Solid 4 gave us Snake as we had never seen him before. The mullet and rough beard of the middle aged soldier was replaced with grey hair and a moustache. Snake, unlike Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell was portrayed as a fallible character that age had effected. We are told that Snake will die and watch his alienation as the game progresses. Notably from characters like Meryl and eventually from the world he is involved in. Snake’s business is war and this is his last battle.
This form of portrayal is risky as we think of our game heroes as figuratively and to an extent physically immortal but Kojima created a more fallible hero. Obviously this can be difficult due to the genre of the game and if the game requires that kind of character development. However I believe it does create a more enjoyable and rewarding experience. But then I’m a great advocate for character development and some people may just want to simply go mental with a chainsaw. It’d be nice if we can all meet somewhere in the middle. SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!