Bamboo Cyberdream

There’s a potentially intriguing story in a recent article written by Darion White for Edge Online. I’ll link to it, let you read it, and then come back.

Why are Black Game Characters Failing the Audience?

While I agree with his premise (that black characters are under-represented in games, and heavily stereotyped where they do appear), I think the piece doesn’t really build up much of an argument, and mostly serves as a “look, see?” kind of writing. He also extols the virtues of Will Smith as a popular black media star while ignoring the usual criticisms that Smith has honed his image to be as non-black (and thus non-threatening to white audiences) as possible. I know not all game writing has to be of critical literary value, but Edge usually does better than this.

While the article got me thinking, my point is a different one. And there’s a small tangent coming here, so please indulge me.

In Their Shoes

Before I found myself in games, I was a theatre person through-and-through. I mostly focused on directing with the occasional splash of playwriting or lighting design, but like all theatricals, I acted from time to time¹. I remember doing exercises about trying to think, move, and behave like another person. “How would Creon brush his teeth?” “Would Macbeth eat all his food at once, or one item at a time?” And so on.

While going through this process, it dawned on me why artists were traditionally viewed as “liberal.” When those around me decried Hollywood as a place of deviants, what they were really referring to is the overwhelming sense of tolerance they express².

And that’s the crux of it — actors are trained to place themselves in someone else’s shoes. To think how they would react to something. A straight actor can think through: “OK, I’m not gay, but if I was, how would I act towards this person? How would I feel?” Any actor who sticks around long enough also tries to make their portrayal real instead of a caricature, and so they’re forced to find the truth, the humanity, in someone who is potentially very different from themselves.

They Used to Call Them “Players”

So what does this have to do with games? We frequently cite the participatory nature of games as their defining one. But we nearly always plop the player into some character that’s already been vastly over-represented in media: nearly always white, nearly always male, nearly always 18-35³.

Games have such a power to make players identify with a protagonist, and it feels like they’re squandering it by going with the easy path for this fundamental design choice. Why not have a game that really gives me the experience of being a young black boy in South Central LA? Or a woman in Afghanistan under the Taliban? Or a young mother in China who desperately wants to save the baby girl her husband abandons? A gay man in the American South? Or in Africa?

These games don’t even have to be about the Serious Issues™ that I described — you could still make a decent adventure or shooter out of most of those with some effort. But why not use the great identifying force of avatar representation and use it to make the player think “OK, I’m not this person, but how would I react if I were?”

¹ By the end of my theatrical career, the acting roles were solely based on my knowledge of stage combat. I would get in costume, take a punch, throw a punch, then not even have stick around for the curtain call. It was great fun. :-)

² I don’t in any way mean to over-simplify or mock the conservative viewpoint — I grew up in a very conservative household and tend to think most issues are far more complex than either side is willing to admit.

³ I used up my “nearly always” quota on that sentence.

Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2 are illuminating comparison cases. They are AAA games, came out within a week of each other, and are large open-world games where the player has a high degree of ownership. They have very different play styles (one a run-then-gun shooter, the other an action-RPG with the needle pointing towards RPG), and, most interesting from my perspective, very different authoring styles.

Bethesda is one of the few companies left that creates a wholly authored game world. Every item is placed; every NPC has a script; every quest has been thought out in advance. There are definite upsides to this approach — predictability in testing, being able to create complex interlocking quest systems, and imbuing the world with a level of intricate detail that players don’t see anywhere else. The downsides of this approach are (a) because the systems can get so intricate, they sometimes break in weird ways (oh, wait, because I killed that guy before I started the quest, now I can never finish it), and (b) the authoring effort scales linearly (if you want twice as much content, you need twice as much time or twice as many designers).

The Far Cry 2 team at Ubisoft, though, took a more systemic approach. They created a set of simple, robust systems and let the low-level story emerge from there. They place a thin veneer of high-level narrative to give the player some direction, and then let the game systems play themselves out. This takes a different breed of designer (thinking systemically rather than strictly experientially), and makes testing difficult since you’re almost never able to totally reproduce a given set of circumstances. Logging and metrics become crucial. The upsides are that the player often feels a stronger sense of ownership in the moment — the feeling of “I thought of something, and it worked” or “I made that happen.” Systemic gameplay also makes it a bit easier to author new content, once you have those robust systems in place.

As a game designer and narrative systems dork, I’m much more interested in the approach of FC2. But at the end of the day, I have a lot more fun (and am more likely to want to play) Fallout 3. I’m not entirely sure what I think about that. It’s probably because FC2 doesn’t really get all the way there, but is an interesting step in the right direction, whereas Fallout 3 is a very polished experience from the older school.

As I play through Far Cry 2 (not as much as I would like — need to find more time to explore its systems and environment), I’m struck by the problems of communication to the player and how best to flag a game’s affordances in a way that is understandable but not immersion-breaking.

Far Cry 2 has gotten a mixed reception so far¹, but “mixed” isn’t really the right way to put it. Nobody seems sure what to make of this game, and I think I’ve stumbled on what makes it so disjointed (for me anyway): the low-level experience is immensely rewarding, but the high-level one feels a bit empty.

The game does an incredibly good job of getting the player into a mindset. In a lot of shooters you find the gun or set of guns that you like and try to stick to it. In GTA players become very protective of certain cars that they take a liking to. But in FC2, the player quickly learns that their attitude needs to be, “fuck it.” Your guns jam, the car breaks down, you get randomly attacked, you steal their car, drive away, walk right into a checkpoint you had forgotten about, et cetera. You live moment to moment, and once you let go of that gamer need to collect and build, you really start to lose yourself in this war-ravaged nation. The experience becomes a brutal, savage, intense, and memorable one.

But it sadly doesn’t end up amounting to much. (Disclaimer: I have not finished the game and am open to the possibility that things get better.) You’ve got these two factions you’re working for, but the game forces you to work for both of them, mitigating the idea of taking sides. It doesn’t really matter anyway, since members of both sides will shoot you if they see you on the road. I can understand the gameplay implications of wanting to never have the player feel “safe” in an area and thus wanting to keep both factions dangerous, but if I have to work for both and they both hate me, why not just have one faction that I deal with and have the rest be an impenetrable or unseen governmental group?

And then there’s the opening, which struck me as particularly weak. The player is given their overall main goal (“Find and kill the Jackal”) as a bit of text on a loading screen. I’m not sure about you, but I’ve been pretty well-trained as a player to assume that loading screen text is for flavor or gameplay tips and can be safely ignored. It’s definitely not where I expect to find major plot points. Then they plop you into a non-interactive jeep ride while they show off Dunia for what seems like 10 minutes. That would have been good time to give the player background on their mission, the region. It would have decreased the “stranger in a strange land” feeling a bit, but would have given the player a lot more identification with their character and motivation.

Contrast this with the opening of Bioshock (another good but flawed game). It immediately sets up the mystery of who the character is, which is fundamental to the game. You are, quite literally, immersed in this strange new world, and are given a thorough, if biased, account of its history while surveying the landscape you are about to inhabit. By the time you take full control², you are completely drawn in to the game experience in Rapture.

Now even given all my whinging, I think FC2 is a brilliant game. It’s trying to do things with narrative and player mindset that very few games do, and I applaud the team for working in this space. I’m still playing it. I like the buddy system. I love the emergent gameplay and storytelling. But I keep thinking that it could have been so much better with just a bit more attention paid to the player’s initial and high-level experiences.

¹ To be fair, an 85 is a very good Metacritic score, but FC2 reviews have a relatively high standard deviation.

² If, in fact, you ever do.