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No One Cares About Your Character
By Corvus | March 4, 2008
Following along with yesterday’s reaction to Katherine and Corey’s excellent survey…
Edgar: “I’ve designed this cool character!”
Wally: “Yeah, what’s he do?”
Edgar: “He’s got more muscles than Bane, but he wears this baggy zoot suit so you’re not sure if he’s really fat or really built.”
Wally: “Okay, what’s he do?”
Edgar: “He’s a total bad-ass! His hat brim actually has a HUD on it which give him, like, all this data on the environment and his enemies and stuff.”
Wally: “What. Does. He. Do?”
Edgar: “But the best part is– he’s got a rocket launcher for an arm!”
Characters on their own aren’t compelling. Never, ever, ever. Good drama, and good comedy/horror/mysteries/etc for that matter, has never come about because someone designed a really cool character. Because, honestly, a character floating in a void is not compelling in the least. Not as a storytelling device.
It’s the character’s relationships that make them compelling. I’m not merely referring to their relationships with other characters, although those are critical, but their relationship to their environments as well. Now, you may argue that no character exists in a vacuum and therefore, by their very existence, they represent relationships. This is true to an extent–particularly in lone-authorship situations. Tennessee Williams didn’t “design” Stanley as a separate entity from Stella and Blanche. C.S. Lewis didn’t “design” Tumnus the Faun outside the context of a Witch-ruled Narnia.
But in an industry driven by marketing (like, oh I don’t know… the videogame, toy and animation industries perhaps), characters are often designed somewhat independently of their environment and relationships. This often results in a shallow character integration, poor storytelling and, I’d be willing to wager, a product that doesn’t do so well in the marketplace. Certainly, the stand-out characters in every media are defined by their relationships–Mario and Peach, Batman and the Joker, Remy and Linguini, Luke and Darth Vader, Megatron and Starscream.
Furthermore, I posit that the environmental relationships are particularly important to videogames, where gameplay is ascendant above all other storytelling tools. Lara Croft did not merely vault into prominence due to her ridiculous physique and short-shorts. No, Lara Croft became a fan favorite because of her cavalier disregard for life (human and animal) and her lack of regard for the sanctity of the remains of ancient civilizations. Duke Nukem is not an icon because he’s a big dumb blond guy with guns. He’s an icon because he’s the star of a game that no one believes will ever be released a wise-cracking, irreverent poke at the traditional action hero.* Dante isn’t popular because he’s thin and wearing black, he’s popular because of how he wields his weapons to slay demons. Gordon Freeman isn’t instantly recognizable because he’s a geek turned hero, but because he refuses to speak to even his most trusted confidants.
So, you see I’ve been right all along–gameplay really is a critical narrative component!
Okay, I’ve got a lot to do today and very little time in which to actually do it. That means that I get to turn the conversation over to you now! Give me an example of a compelling character not defined by their relationships, or a videogame that suffered from poor characterization thanks to shallow relationships (including poor gameplay), or a stellar example I missed that support my view. Whatever your take, feel free to chime in!
*Do you know, it just dawned on me that the interminable delay of the next Nukem game is completely in line with the social and industry themes running through the preceding games. Awesome. I almost hope it never comes out.
Tagged:character design, gdc, relationships, storytelling. | 3 Comments »
March 4th, 2008 at 11:13 am
You and your misleading topic titles! I keep walking into these posts expecting to argue, only to realize we’re on the same side
I have no counterexamples for you, but I’ll keep thinking about it
March 4th, 2008 at 11:54 am
*eltrohc* Call it bait!
March 4th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
It’s pretty easy to come up with poor characterisations. Those happen sometimes in story-led games, and for some reason manifest often as the bad guy.
Or even worse, a monster. Monsters are cool right? But barely characterised, most are faceless, so not so cool… Doom’s monsters are better characters then 99% of other games – they infight! Shows Hell isn’t nice to it’s own
Shadow of the Collosus, although I’ve not finished it, portrays the monsters better too – character from their actions (and moans), not just their appearance. Even the limited interactions too.
Lets see, human-like characters who have utterly failed? Like I said, tons of BBEG’s tend to be so “cool looking” and “shadowy” but are clichéd and never do any character interaction beyond fighting the protagonist (with some poor dialogue to boot). Check out most JRPG’s for worst offenders, although Fable’s BBEG stands out as downright utterly awful, despite the promising premise and appearance. Darth Sion from KotOR 2 is the same – cool looking, but utterly the worst bloody BBEG ever. He’s evil, he sucks life force out of things, and even has a desolate ship *held together by his own power* – but this is all explained by other characters, and he never bloody talks or really interacts with anything, ever! Man, I hated that boss (the others were much better in the game too).
The side of good takes it on the face a bit too. Faceless “redshirts” allies, or sidekicks who are purely there to be the “second person” in arcade games usually – on the rails shooters have limited time for cutscenes, so they suffer a lot (and might have terrible dialogue to boot. *cough* House of the Dead *cough*).
So easy to do the uncompelling characters, because of lack of interaction. There are some (of course) which are uncompelling even with interaction and relationships. Quake 4 did a stellar job of making every NPC interchangeable, and almost all of them have absolutely no defining characteristics, despite lots of interaction (even meetings, briefings, lots of radio contact and the like!).
Now good ones without the interactions and relationships? Tough to nail. Sonic the Hedgehog (from his initial appearance) does little it seems to be a character – no relationships (certainly no dialogue) but do something most players don’t do – stop him moving – and he starts tapping his foot, looking at the player. Rather unique, gives him a bit of character beyond the “Manual story”. His fights with Eggman are about all the character interaction, which is a shame (with of course, one scene when Eggman forces the player down a pit when he’s behind a barrier, curse him!). Metriod is similar, but I’ve not played that much. Mainly, apart from the end (revelation it’s actually a girl!), there’s not much interaction, but a character seems to be formed by upgrades and progression and gameplay skills learnt.
Sometimes less seen or interacted characters can also be characterised by others (3rd party knowledge – my KotOR2/Fable examples are cases of it being done poorly!), but I am not sure it qualifies.
Hope I didn’t get the wrong kind of stick with any of my examples