Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Where Have All The Bad Guys Gone?

Making a sympathetic antagonist for your story is tough. Making a story in general is tough. It’s all about striking a balance. Move too quickly, you’ll leave your audience behind, too slowly and you’ll bore them. Give them trust and you might omit some key detail you thought was obvious, hold their hand through every twist and turn of plot and you risk insulting them. Too much detail and there isn’t enough of a chance for your audience to insert themselves into the story, too little and only the most enthusiastic audience members will be able to conjure the investment necessary to engage your story.

Video games have a nice shorthand for the insertion of the audience into stories: they manage to do that almost effortlessly by demanding the participation of the audience in order for the story to progress. But there’s a downside here: that narrative facility afforded games by their format also means the bar for writing them is that much lower and that people who cannot engage an audience in any other format are acceptable writers for video games, occasionally even receiving praise for their work (Rockstar).

I digress. Villains are why I’m here. Villains are tough in video games. They’re either moustache twirling over the top nonsense figures (any of the villains in a Modern Warfare game), madmen driven wild with power that don’t quite make sense under close scrutiny (Fontaine from Bioshock falls into this category) or toothless fops who serve more of a comedic role than one of intimidation (Breen in Half-Life 2 has all the menace of an angry cat).

But every once in a while a villain appears who is just spot on. Just the right kind of motivation, motivation that makes sense. A sensible kind of menace backed by a reasoned, logical kind of power that fits into the game world. Bastion is a great example, where the world itself functions as a villain before, spoiler alert, Zulf of the Ura snaps and reveals himself as a new antagonist, driven mad by realizations he’s had about the cause of the apocalypse that destroyed the world and made it necessary to restore the Bastion. Zulf is a perfect villain: he has a strong motivation, dangerous but reasonable resources and goals that make sense. I never rolled my eyes at his struggle or scoffed at his choices or his speech (products of Bastion’s exceptionally strong writing – take notes aspiring designers!) and I never thought he was less of a character than anyone else in the game.

And then there’s Ulysses in Lonesome Road. Ulysses eclipsed Caesar in so many ways for me: Caesar had menace, as did his Legion. But he was never sympathetic, and part of his appeal was that I never understood why he was pursuing his aims, aside from power. I know, I just established that this was usually a knock against a villain, but there are exceptions to every rule, and an ill defined menacing villain can be just the right fit for a game if they seem like enough of a natural force in the world, something unsurpassable that cannot be fought, that threatens to flood the world if it is left unchecked. The faceless beauraucracy of the NCR has the same function, if a great deal less bite to it. But Ulysses is so much more than either of them.

He’s a personification of the Legion’s ideals and a refutation of them at the same time – a strong, independent operative who cannot be stopped, checked or controlled, purportedly of no culture but with memories running deep from his own tribe as well as the Legion as a whole and America as a historic memory. He is constantly searching for a new identity, at odds with his role as one of Caesar’s frumentari and when his search for this new identity is interrupted, even unintentionally, when his path towards a new history burned around him, he lashes out at the one he holds responsible, a villain in his eyes: you, the Courier.

These villains both have all the ingredients key to a solid antagonist. They both have menace, key if you want your villain to be taken seriously. They’ve got motivations that are outlined clearly, but not too clearly. They make sense as individuals and they forward the story of the game through their actions. They never force you to do anything, and their power, until the final conflict emerges, is always expressed through catspaws. And what’s more, you feel for both of them. Zulf’s madness is a product of his feelings of betrayal as well as the loss of the woman he loved. His ruthless survival instincts tempered by love make him into a person worth rooting for, but the damage he has endured is too much for him to handle and when he finally breaks his position as a war-leader for the Ura makes perfect sense. Even his downfall from his post as the Ura’s guide through the world after the Cataclysm makes sense, and the way you choose to resolve your fight with Zulf is a touching, engrossing choice. In that moment you define yourself as villain or savior. Do you crush the memory of the Ura to dust or do you truly defeat Zulf, destroying the ideas he perpetuated about the world by saving his life?

And Ulysses is a figure rich with history. You feel as if he was a person long before the events of Lonesome Road brought the two of you together, thanks in large part to his appearances in other New Vegas DLC. His relationship with Christine, as well as the Courier’s own relationship with Christine, informs the way we see him. And when we finally meet him we see a complicated individual with his own history, a history which led him to a very different worldview, a completely sensible one. His rejection of Caesar’s ideology seems perfectly reasonable in light of what he’s seen, as does his completely separate beef with the Courier. His love of the blossoming America that was, his self-definition through history and his acquisition of American identity both place him at odds with the Courier and make him into an appropriate villain under the circumstances.

These ingredients also make Ulysses into a sympathetic figure: a noble man who wants to see the empires that have risen from the ashes of America burn together, who wants to see America rise from those ashes in turn. His grasp of history, reaching and distant, gives him a strange kind of mysticism, one that anyone who’s studied the subject of history in depth can appreciate. And in the end you can resolve your conflict with him peaceably, which is what really counts with a villain: there’s no forced conflict. Ulysses is interested in engaging you in a conversation, in proving his point to you with the fires awoken under the Divide. If he just wanted to kill you he could’ve and would’ve tried long ago – he wanted to make you watch the world burn, to understand what he understood. That peaceful resolution, that admission of sympathy and association, is what sets these villains asides and truly makes them exceptional among video game villains. They’re more than just bogeymen – they’re characters who happen to form the antagonistic basis for a narrative.

To truly be effective a villain has to evoke some sort of sympathy, some sort of logic that holds up to close examination. A good villain should be interesting to you, just as interesting as any ally (maybe more so). A good villain should make you feel a little guilty for fighting him, although it can be just as good for a villain to make you truly sick and horrified of what he’s capable of. A villain should evoke a specific kind of feeling and have a particular function within the narrative beyond just generating conflict. If our villains cannot do so, if their actions don’t make sense, we notice. Instead of growing into characters we have relationships with they become jokes – punch-lines that we eventually dispense with, leading to a neat little cutscene that wraps up our gaming experience.

This seems to be a lesson big studios are failing to learn. Call of Duty, for example, is especially bad at providing logically consistent villains who evoke some sort of feeling, though you could critique so many elements of Call of Duty’s storytelling of late that doing so is all but pointless. Even games I love, games like Deus Ex, do a miserable job of casting villains in their stories and developing them as real characters with real worldviews (I challenge you to make the Templar viewpoint seem reasonable by game’s end). But so long as beacons, both indie like Bastion and mainstream like New Vegas, remain in public view hope remains for video game villains. Because video games are fantastic fonts of conflict, wonderfully immersive narratives that press their reader figures into service against big enemies that represent big ideas. Or at least, they do when they’re at their best, and as long as a few titles can realize that end, we’re not doing so, so bad.