Super Nerd Sundays Presents: This Slop Is Where I Live, Bitch!

When we play a game we all form our own relationship with the protagonist. That’s one of the cool, powerful things about games as an art form: they simultaneously force you into a character and give you input in the interpretation, development and growth of said character. It’s an odd sort of duality, like subs and doms, where the relationship is a kind of consensual bondage wherein power needs to be given up and exerted in concert for it to work at all. Developers can throw ideas at us all we like but we, as players, need to actually accept these rules in order for them to have any sort of effect.

The nature of this relationship is something difficult to hammer down, and it’s something that games need to put more effort into grounding and controlling if they want to grow as a medium. It’s fair to say that books have been doing this pretty expertly since they became a mainstream means of entertainment. Some of the earliest novels were obsessed with how readers would consider their protagonists and their stories. Consider Gulliver’s Travels to see what I mean: an unsympathetic character who you, over time, gradually come to like and relate to but who, in the end, it’s still tough to get behind. By the end of the book you might find yourself clucking your tongue as much as at Gulliver, though, which is exactly what Swift was going for: pointing out the lunacy of Britain’s sense of innate superiority over all other cultures. Of course, even these efforts weren’t entirely successful. Many people, even today, still read Gulliver’s Travels and come away with the idea that the Houyhnhnms had this whole society thing down pat, but the book still does its best to make us see Gulliver as a man who doesn’t quite get the joke that is his life.

Games, on the other hand, seem to be largely unconcerned with this concept. Consider the Prince of Persia reboot, where you’re immediately thrown into the body of a context-less animalistic warrior-dude and the plot is dribbled out through forced banter between scenes of plot. There’s no grounding for the character here, no context. There’s no control whatsoever over how you can interpret this character. You’re press ganged into helping Ubisoft tell this story and odds are you couldn’t care less about it. It’s not too far from the days of 8 bit storytelling, where the flimsiest backstory was issued and you were left to derive your own plot from the context. Darkness has taken over the land. Are you a bad enough dude to banish the darkness?

On the other side of the spectrum you have games like Metal Gear Solid IV which do their all to force Snake’s personality on to you. Guiding you to his story through interminable cutscenes and, if you want to get really technical about it, a bevy of previous titles, there’s very little room to interpret Snake and his story in any way aside from the one that Hideo Kojima wants you to (incredibly homosocial relationship between Otacon and Snake aside). Traditional RPGs have the same on-the-rails methodology, the one traditionally pressed on readers by dime store novels. It’s cathartic and mindless to interact with, but it’s almost always insubstantial. The best moments in these games emerge from relationship where characters are left open to be interpreted by the players. Aeris’ famed death scene in Final Fantasy VII is frequently hailed as one of the most impactful moments in contemporary gaming history, but people rarely seem to discuss that it came about after a lengthy period where the player was given much of the power in deciding just what their relationship with Aeris was. Final Fantasy VII was actually possessed of many of these moments, with its ambiguous depiction of Cloud and largely optional character development. It was undone to some extent by having a “correct” interpretation of Cloud's and every other character, but the attempted ambiguity and the level to which it was taken was very impressive.

Of course there are also some games that try to give you sufficient context off the bat and let you interpret your character. For example Fallout 3 literally begins with your birth and holds your hand as you grow up. It’s an impressive attempt at storytelling and one that expertly weaves you into the context of the world. The original Fallout games also managed this interpretive power deftly, giving you an ideal lens from which to interact with the world they’d constructed. They offered you enough information to let you know just where you’d been placed but gave you enough freedom with your character to develop them in almost any direction you desired.

But Fallout is a strange example in its desire to separate itself from linearity. While that’s a great way to let players inhabit and develop a character it isn’t the only way to let them do so and it is, arguably, the easiest way to give them the space to tap into the interpretive power of gaming as a medium. There are far fewer games that allow you to interpret your character in this fashion while tying you to a linear storyline. And that’s where Half-Life enters the gaming pantheon.

Half-Life is a game which, if played casually, can easily be dismissed as a same-old-same-old first person shooter. You pick up guns and shoot monsters. It’s not very complex. But when you consider Gordon Freeman, the background he’s given and the tasks he finds himself involved in, the player’s power over how he is developed and interpreted as a character grows to an almost overwhelming level. He’s an MIT educated physicist who spends his days doing the job of a lab assistant. He’s in amazing physical condition and he’s really, really good at killing things. He fights his way through invading aliens and black ops soldiers without breaking a sweat. Who the fuck is this guy?

It doesn’t matter to the game terribly. No matter who he is he’s forced through the same tiresome events. Sunrise, gunfight, sunset, he must move through the same enemies regardless of who we see him as, carving a bloody swath through the denizens of Zen to save his world, himself, or whoever you want to think he’s saving. Half-Life 2 continues this tradition of making Gordon Freeman something of a walking question mark. They go so far as to make it a running joke – Breen’s broadcast criticizes the professional super-soldiers of the Combine for not being able to take down a lone physicist armed only with a crowbar.

We, as players, are free to interpret Freeman in any number of ways: as a psychotic, dissatisfied young man frustrated by his job who simply wants to kill, an avid anarchist freed from the bonds of society at large, the unwilling figurehead of a worldwide revolution started entirely by accident or a guy who just wants to get the girl and live what’s left of his life quietly. There are few other games which embrace the interpretative freedom provided by the First-Person Shooter genre on a comparable level. Bioshock comes to mind, but most others actively fight against permitting players to interpret their character, forcing them through the same interactions time and time again with the same inane cutscenes informing them of who they really are and how they see the world around them.

Even games which purport to give you a choice usually fail at this. In Jedi Knight, for example, you’re given little choice in who you are. You can choose to be a Jedi or a Sith, but whichever path you choose your interpretation of Kyle Katarn is undone by the cutscenes which illustrate his journey through the galaxy. You’re always going to be a bit of a mournful Sith and you’re always going to be a taciturn, noble Jedi. There’s no middle ground, no chance to see Kyle as a self-deceiving do-gooder who really just wants to kill or as a noble Fallen hero who defeats Jared and abandons power. No matter what we do we’ll see him weeping in front of his father’s holocron or making a statue. Doom’s space marine will always be the same reticent badass who isn’t really that reticent. The Master Chief is always the Master Chief. These games undo their own interpretive power through the framing techniques – they don’t consider the stories that players are trying to tell, and instead force them through a set of narrative loops.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn’t really utilize all the power that games have as a medium. It tries to put them into the same narrative framework which works for non-interactive visual media. It smacks of the people telling these stories not having read many books. And while I don’t think linear stories which limit the interpretative power of players need to be done away with, I think they need to be balanced out by efforts to tell stories in an appropriate fashion for the medium. The seconds between stories are where games find their power, where we as players can establish ourselves. Sometimes games have to script these moments, the way Final Fantasy VII does, but the best ones, the Half-Lives and the Bioshocks, just let the player sit with a loose backstory and fit a game world around their actions. Alyx is there, and while you can’t kill her you can see her however you like. You don’t have to fulfill your romance with her. In fact, you’re never given the chance. You never get a chance to embrace or kill Tennenbaum. You’re left to sit and simmer with your feelings for her, alone. And this unfulfilled narrative is what games do best – we don’t need thousands of scripted endings telling us how our actions panned out. Sometimes we just need abandoned plotlines. We need games that progress and end the way that Oryx and Crake did instead of the way that Aliens did. We need games that tell us a story and end with the protagonist staring at his watch, waiting for what comes next.