“The short story has never had a
hero…. Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures
wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic
figures whom they caricature and echo…. There is in the short story at its most
characteristic something we do not often find in the novel -- an intense
awareness of human loneliness.” -- Frank
O’Connor
O’Connor was talking about the short stories of Joyce, Hemingway and
others, but his words, written in 1962, eerily conjure up an image of one of the most
familiar types of character you get to play in videogames.
Like Skyrim. I played Skyrim for a while when it first came out, and
something I discovered that I hadn’t expected was how lonely I felt doing it.
How long it took to get from one inhabited place to another, at least in the
early stages of the game. How rare it was to meet with another person (well,
another NPC), and how distant and unfulfilling the conversation was (I couldn’t
express how I was feeling, and anyhow no one seemed to care). There were long stretches
of not much happening, and the game often asked me to do things I had absolutely
no interest in doing. But at least the scenery was nice to look at. And sometimes being alone on a path somewhere was kind of enjoyable. A bit like really hiking in the mountains and getting away from it all.
I abandoned the game eventually. Partly because I began to realize
how huge it was, and how many hours of what life is left to me on this earth I
would have to spend to get anywhere in it. But also because the characters
bored me.
What do you
think of when you think about your favourite stories? For me, the characters
are almost always the most memorable. I believe that video games are only at
the beginnings of the possibilities of the form, and that they will expand and
evolve in ways I can’t even imagine, but it does seem that for many games, the
trend is towards becoming more and more like engrossing stories. Eventually
these story-like games may branch away from game-like
games and become a new genre, a new art form, of their own -- something more
like interactive cinema than games. In order to tell really good stories, these
sorts of games will have to work on pacing, and on developing rich, surprising
and engaging characters.
To
do this, games will have to expand the kinds of characters that inhabit them,
and the kinds of stories that can happen to those characters. One good start is
for games to acknowledge the heterogenous, multicultural world we live in. To
get beyond racial and gender typecasting. To imagine characters and tell stories
other than those designed to appeal to emotionally-stunted man-boys.
E.M.
Forster’s distinction between round and flat characters seems apt here. Flat
characters are the stock characters we’re all familiar with. Bad girl. Action
hero. Hardboiled detective. Killbot. They’re useful to storytellers because
they’re immediately recognizable. The audience knows them from a thousand other
stories, and knows what to expect of them. Most videogame stories run on an engine
made of the easy, familiar scripts that come attached to flat characters. O’Connor’s outlawed
figure on the fringes of society has, in videogames (and action movies) become
another of these stock characters, and possibly the most popular of them all.
The essence
of the round character is that you can’t anticipate how she’s going to behave.
You have to learn about this kind of character as you go along. Round
characters have depth and complexity. They surprise
us (and often themselves). With the greatest round characters in fiction,
you have a sense of someone existing moment by moment, as we do in life, responding
to changing circumstances with wit, imagination and will.
This is the territory
that games as stories will have to explore, and if they do, it will take them, and us, to places we've never seen before in a game, and to people we've never imagined meeting there. People like us.
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