In the belly of a ship-turned-squat, he tells me about how
he learned he was a psychopath. He talks
about a battery of tests, about how his mother wept when she found out. He talks about how the doctor confided in him
that he could not be cured, but that he could hide his symptoms if he learned
how to observe normal people. He
discussed, in heartbreakingly blunt terms, the manner in which he perceived the
world, and how his twin desires for his own personal posthuman future and the
maintenance of his family's good standing, or at least what little remains,
given their history of psychopathic behavior.
In the end, I do not sympathize with him. I do not think he is a victim, or a martyr,
or a monster. He is just a person, part
of my team, my mismatched family. I do
not trust him with my life, but I trust him with his own, and by staying with
me, he remains safe. In that, there's a
certain humanity: he sees me as his best chance at survival and success. And within his psychopathic mind there is a
certain sense of honor guiding all these thoughts: he owes me for helping him
move a little closer to the posthuman future he dreams of. Because I've helped him, he is loyal to me. I have proven useful, and like any useful tool
I am worthy of preserving.
The twisted inner logic of Rachter is somewhat monstrous,
but not as monstrous as the reasoning that other characters in Shadowrun: Hong Kong present. To call it shocking is inaccurate. Rather, Rachter is immersing and, in a very
real sense, I come to care about him, even if I don't like him or his weird
little droid overmuch. And that's an achievement
for a developer. Getting me to care at
all is an achievement. As a gamer, I'm a
jaded son of a bitch, given to looking at the various moving narrative parts of
any experience I'm engaged with as tools as much as characters. The art of making a player feel connection to
the characters they're inhabiting a world with is a difficult one.
There are games that try desperately to get players to
relate to characters, games built around desperately elaborate social schema,
that utterly fail to convince me to care even one whit about the rogues
galleries that they present me with. Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 2 are two such titles, games with what might be
politely called "obligatory social components" that fail more often
than they succeed. I spent hours in each
of these games forwarding "friendships" that were little more than
mechanical devices that I chased to get more experience and gear. By the end of each, I didn't care one whit if
most of the characters I'd spent nearly eighty hours fighting with lived or
died.
That's in part because they never really felt human for
me. In each of the titles I just
mentioned, and in many other titles besides, the world entire revolves around
the player. That can be nice, because it
lets developers compartmentalize and control the action of a game world and
avoid potential confusion in storylines, but it's absolute garbage when it
comes to getting me to care about characters, because it entirely prevents them
from feeling like actual people. In Mass Effect 2 the characteristics and
history of each character (aside from perhaps two or three side characters)
were inevitably somehow relevant to the plot of the game itself. That kind of storytelling, emblematic of historical
epics and mainstream contemporary films, presents a sort of neatness that is
abhorrent to the creation of the illusion of reality. If you're attempting to build real
characters, those characters won't necessarily have life experiences that are
uniformly or universally relevant to your story. Those characters won't always like you, or
want to share everything about themselves with you. The details they do share with you shouldn't
always be pertinent to the plot of the story that the game itself is trying to
tell.
In most games, there's a temptation to draw everything
together and tie it off with a bow. Plot
devices, character details, and dialogue are all hard to write, and if you're
pushing them all towards the same goal, you're wasting time. But the moments where things aren't relevant,
the moments where characters present us with red herrings, are just as
important, if not more important, than the moments that we're dealing with
crucial plot devices. These details
flesh out the characters and the world, and make the environments we inhabit
feel like genuine spaces where anything can happen, instead of limiting frames
of reference that we're doomed to sleepwalk through.
This is phenomena is especially clear in many of Bioware's
titles, where even passing details often become relevant, even if they seem
like they should be red herrings. Dragon Age: Inquisition represents a
step back from this tradition, with characters like Krem simultaneously
fleshing out the world and serving little or no purpose in the plot (with the
details of their lives being further irrelevant to that larger story), but it
remains the exception to the rule.
Consider Mass Effect 3, where
a child you see in an opening sequence becomes the mouthpiece for one of the game's
most important characters (plot wise, at least). That kind of storytelling smacks of its own
self-importance, and has the end result of making players feel like they're in
a carefully constructed world, a world absolutely bereft of the kind of organic
interactions that color our own daily lives.
But in Shadowrun: Hong
Kong, there's a wealth of world around me that I don't get to fully
experience. There's a suite of ambiguous
details that I can delve into, decisions that I can make, or not make, the
impact of which is never entirely clear.
As I stumble through the world, meeting people like Reliable Matthew and
Ten-Armed Ambrose, I learn more and more about what makes them tick, without
necessarily learning anything about Raymond Black or the Tseng Corporation or
the fearsome menace chewing its way through worlds.
And that's tough to do.
It's risky, and Shadowrun: Hong
Kong does it from the get go. It
introduces you to two characters at the start of the game and gives them both
equal screen time. Each character
reveals things about themselves to you, and the characters have a long standing
relationship that feels lived in and real, even though it's barely on screen
for more than a few minutes. And you
only get to see it for that long because one of those characters dies almost
immediately after meeting you. Bullet to
the head, bereft of heroics, along with another character who seems to be both
relevant, interesting, and important. To
say that his sidekicks go on to become two of the most important characters in
your storyline isn't a spoiler: it's a statement on just how skillfully Shadowrun: Hong Kong takes minor
characters and makes them feel real.
Because it didn't take me any time to feel like Gobbet and IsObel were
real people. And it also didn't take me
any time to believe that either of them could die at any moment and leave the
game. I felt it from the get-go, and
I've felt it for many, many other characters in the world of Shadowrun: Hong Kong.
The game is, in many ways, a love letter to helping players
develop connections with characters that are, for the most part, irrelevant to
the main story. I've spent more of my
time in-game talking to various characters in Heoi, getting to know them and
helping them when I can, than I have in combat, or forwarding the main plot,
and I haven't been this immersed in a game in some time. Shadowrun:
Hong Kong builds a world by filling it with interesting people, and letting
you see snippets of the private lives of those people as you stumble about
their homes, desperately trying to survive your own personal crisis with global
implications.
That's a hell of an achievement, mostly because it takes a
heroic amount of restraint on the part of developers to not make every
interaction important, to let them risk letting players feel like they've
wasted their time by making sure Maximum Law was good and set up with a nice
gun that he knew how to shoot when he needed to defend himself, or by making
them care that Reliable Matthew was a miserable, lonely man who was doing okay
sometimes. There's a moment that stands
out in particular, where you meet a team of rival Shadowrunners on a mission to
rob a major corp of a sweet-ass laser.
While escaping, you get to know them a little, and you quickly discover
that they've got just as much of a history as you and your friends do, maybe
even a little more. Then, at the end of
the mission, you never talk to them again.
You hear about them a little off screen, but that's it. No further conversations. No detail.
No involvement in any sort of climactic battle. Just ships passing in the night, meeting
during a job, exchanging professional courtesies, never to meet again.
That's really something.
No comments:
Post a Comment