Sometimes Comic Blog

I can’t get enough of Red Dead Redemption. It’s like Grand Theft Auto, but with likable characters. There is one thing, well aside from the Wild West setting, that greatly distinguishes this game from the company’s flagship series. And that would be the Bandana.

For the record, I think the Bandana is the best thing ever for role playing your character. Now, instead of good or evil, we also have good people who do evil things, and evil people who do good things.

“Mommy, who’s that black hatted man helping grandma across the street?”
“I don’t know, son, but his eyes chill me to the bone.”

As previously stated, I almost always play good guys in morality games. But I often wonder what would happen if I did the bad thing. In Fable 2, there was a Contraption of Death that you could sacrifice people to, I believe there was an achievement for it if you killed your spouse by it (or at least I’ll tell myself in hindsight), so I took my first husband in the game, the one I’d grown tired of hearing, and killed him using it. The animation was kind of a let down, but the worst thing was that my path to haloness was immediately halted and I instantly sprouted mini-horns. Lame!

If I’d had the Bandana, though, I could have sat around sacrificing the world and still keep my holiness in tact.

What the Bandana does is bring gray to the whole black and white morality scale system. Sometimes good people do bad things. They don’t instantly become villains because of it, and often times they’re for heroic reasons, or accidental button presses if you’ve played any Black Isle games. But with video game morality, it’s often pure black or pure white. You’re either the lover of angels or the killer of children. Now you can do both… to both.

Early on there’s a mission where you have to steal a horse from a deputy to create a diversion so a crazy gravedigger can speak to his ex-partner. I was forced to do the mission so that the story could continue, but at the same time, I was building a relationship to a certain law-abiding marshal that I didn’t want to taint with bad honor. So what do I do? Pull out the trusty Bandana and *poof*. Nobody knows that my duster wearing hero is actually doing something illegal. Although I still had to pay the bounty on my head, which is weird. How would they know who it was when I came to pay it off? Should I wear the Bandana to prove my identity?

Eh, who cares, my honor is still on its way up the scale. And since I didn’t hurt anyone on the mission, I got a fifty point bonus.

All thanks to my trusty Bandana *ting*.

An aside: My horse got ate by a pack of cougars. It made me sad. What’s worse, after I killed those filthy monsters, I went to skin them and accidentally skinned my poor dead horse.

Marston almost puked. I agreed.

Now I can’t bring myself to sell the horse meat. It just sits in my pack on the new horse. I feel it’s a suitable warning for the new mount.

Don’t get fucking eaten by the mountain lions!

God I love this game.

So I’m playing Red Dead Redemption, much like everyone else, and I asked multiplayer friends if they’re a Good Guy or a Bad Buy in the single player campaign. There’s a stunned silence before I get back, “Why the hell would you play a good guy in the Old West?” To which I half heartedly mumble, “… I think you get discounts in stores …”

I’m not going to go into a long diatribe about the problems with moral systems in video games. That’s been done to death. But what I do want highlight is a few good times I’ve had with moral systems.

Take Red Dead. When you’re “honorable”, you generally have to try not to kill anyone if you can help it. In my game, this means a lot of prostitutes die while I switch to the lasso and try to hog tie a guy with a gun. Whoops, guess they shouldn’t have short changed them, or whatever they’re yelling about before they start beating the crap out of the girls. Although I have to admit that an equal number of bad guys get thrown from my horse over a cliff while I attempt to bring them back to jail, which I think is kind of worth all the effort.

Fallout 3 is one of the few games where I felt the balance between good and evil perks worked well. You could either kill a bunch of vampires and steal all their stuff, or you could help them and end up with an ability to get bonus health off of all the blood packs laying about. Bad = money, good = presents. Pretty decent trade off in my book.

Not really a moral system, but I loved being a “good guy” in Prototype. I went out of my way not to eat civilians, and only take out guys who were attacking me. I’d avoid bumping into pedestrians, and the one time I ate one was when I found a character model that I found more interesting to look at than Mercer’s Emo/Goth hoody (what can I say, I’m vain).

Speaking of bumping into people, is everyone in Red Dead a basketball player? Give someone the slightest nudge and they flail their arms wildly before doing a prat fall. I swear these people must be top heavy.

Fable 2 was an interesting one. Good and evil were kind of blah, but I thought it was hilarious that depending on what kind of foods you eat pretty much determined your level of corruption. Apparently the beef and pork in that world was tainted *ba dum tish*. Although I was a little annoyed that I had to be corrupt to be fat, I just wanted to play a good aligned bear, the craggly skin really threw off appreciation for my character… although that may have been enhanced by my, “husband in every port” mentality. What, no open relationships in the world of Albion?

There are two reasons why I play good in video games. For one, you tend to get more dialogue out of characters if you don’t shoot them dead. And two, it’s the same reason I play gay (if it’s an option), I’m generally a nice guy, and forcing myself to play evil doesn’t come naturally. I feel bad for the imaginary characters that I hurt. On the other hand, I have no problem playing an established evil character, so long as the story and the game tells me to. I can fail the Milgram test if the plot dictates it so. But when you give me the choice between good and evil, well then I’m good baby.

Last week in my article on Romantic Comedy Video Games, I made mention that another difficult genre to recreate in video game format would be Documentaries. So guess what I’m talking about this week. First things first, a definition of Documentary:

Documentary – “Presenting facts objectively without editorializing or inserting fictional matter, as in a book or film.
n. pl. doc·u·men·ta·ries – A work, such as a film or television program, presenting political, social, or historical subject matter in a factual and informative manner and often consisting of actual news films or interviews accompanied by narration.” (thefreedictionary.com)

From my own previous experience, it’s easy to say that video games could make a great virtual museum. I remember as a kid, playing edutainment games that were essentially a Wolfenstein clone, but instead of Nazis running around in corridors, you’d have paintings on the walls with little plaques containing information on the artwork, usually just a name and date. I also used to play with the Encyclopedia Britannica cd, looking through all the timelines and video files included on the disk. But these are not Documentaries.

To a certain extent, Eternal Sonata is a documentary of sort. Well, parts of it are at least. In between chapters, the game would offer short little stories about Chopin’s life. Included were pictures of various real world locals that may or may not be a part of the biography that they were telling. Although once these chapter breaks ended it went right back to the fictional drama of the game. These’s breaks were documentary style, but not at all interactive.

A note should be made about the difference between Documentaries and Historical Fiction. Many many shooters are doing an excellent job at Historical Fiction, or fiction that tends to be historically accurate. Much like sports games, World War II FPSs are often about accuracy. With sports the idea that the more accurate the simulation the better the gameplay. The same can be said for WWII shooters. And while historically accurate, it’s hard to say that the average shooter is a Documentary. You almost always play as a fictitious military personnel fighting along side real historical figures, but often in non-historical missions. Very close to the idea of a Documentary, but not quite.

All of this back story is nice, so say me, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. Are Documentaries possible in an interactive medium? Adding historical (contemporary and before) film clips to games is an easy task, one that has been done in a number of times, but that’s all they are, film clips. Does player control create an atmosphere that is at odds with the Documentary style?

One possible form of documentary interactive media is the surveillance camera. A person watches actual events taking place, in real time, and at their control is the angle and zoom of the camera. The player decides what they watch and for how long. Taking it one step further, what if we mount the camera onto a movable stand? Now the player can move around the environment and view the work from many different perspectives, receiving a more “true” experience. The final step in this scenario would be to attach an arm to this jaunting camera. Now the player can interact with objects in the environment outside accidentally bumping into them with our mount.

But here we run into a problem, one that has been debated for decades within the genre. The player now has the ability to affect the outcome of the documentary. Are we okay with the non-partial observer in this genre? Sociologists are of two minds on this topic. One side thinks that observation without interaction is the truest form of documenting a situation, while another group calls that bollocks and says that the only way to truly document something is to interact with it, and that even by putting up a camera to record with no physical contact at all is still a form of interaction.

For the purposes of interactive media, even a documentary would require interaction, it’s in the name. But the question is at what level of interaction are we actually playing a game? Is a camera with only angle control enough?

There is a movement, in the broader realm of animation, to use professional modelers when recreating archeological dig sites for presenting to the general populous. Currently, an archeologist will take a summer course in 3D modeling if they want to display their work as a 3D model. Studies, such as Digital Archaeology (http://www.digital-archaeology.com/), are trying to change this.

Taking it to the next level, which Digital Archaeology is starting to do, it is possible to create factual representations of real world space that a character could then walk around in. The “goal” of these games would be to explore every nook and cranny of the local. It wouldn’t take much to add voiceovers to these games, so that as the player walked around they’d get information about real events that took place in history. It could even be possible to recreate events with characters, rather than showing film footage. So long as the player always stayed in control, and the information was correct (to the best of our knowledge), would these then be interactive documentaries? Or would they just be dynamic dvd menus? Perhaps those Wolfenstein clones from my childhood were early representations of documentary video games after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot about love lately. I know, I know, wrong month, but still, I’ve also been thinking about different genres in other mediums and wondering how they translate to video games. There are some that work extremely well; Action, Horror, Westerns. But I’m not so sure about others; Documentary, Musicals, Romantic Comedy. So combining those two topics, today I’m going to speak about Romance in video games, and whether or not is it possible to make a Romantic Comedy in the video game medium.

Video games actually have a leg up on most mediums when it comes to telling a love story. Video games, much like novels, have a lot more time to develop relationships. In movies we’re often given montages of people falling in love, detailing twenty dates in two minutes. But with the expanded time in games, anywhere from eight to eighty hours for the characters to fall in love, we could see every single date the characters go on; follow their love story from start to finish without fast forwards.

Take Final Fantasy VIII for example. This one is my favorites in the series because of the love story. Ignore the broken battle system for a minute if you will (tents into curaga into the HP slot for the win), the love story in this one is ridiculously complex thanks in part to the fifty plus hours it is told. A brief summery, the two main characters, Squall and Rinoa, fall in love over the course of a rebellion/moon monster invasion, which would be ho hum in and of itself if not for the kicker of this story, that they are actually living out the love story started off by there parents, which we are privy to in bizarre waking flashbacks. This brings up questions of whether or not Squall/Rinoa are actually in love, or are they being manipulated through the DNA of their parents? Are these two love stories, one that failed and one that flourished? Or is this actually a single love story told through two generations.

So romances are possible in video game format, but what about romantic comedies? How would the game play work? Would there be a simple misunderstanding mini game, a common scene in the movie version of a Romantic Comedy? Could you have an FPS comedy? One scene that translates well into video games is the last minute dash to the train/plane/bus that one of the lovers is leaving on. You could probably get an entire game out of one/many couples racing to meet each other at the last minute. Although where does the comedy aspect come in?

I’ve seen several top tens on the subject of couples in video games. Weirdly, the two highest ranking couples in most of these lists are Mario/Peach and Mr./Mrs. Pacman. Two couples whom I’m not sure have ever shared an onscreen kiss in a video game are considered the most romantic couples of all time in video games? If we had games that actually focused on love as the main aspect of the game play, and not rescuing the damsel, would there be better examples of video game love?

A quick list of things that are integral for any Romantic Comedy:

1. Both love interests would have to be in seventy percent of the game.

2. More often than not, they’d be meeting each other for the first time at the beginning of the game.

3. A more mundane setting. Exotic love story locations work, but the time for falling in love would need to be condensed and generally precipitated by action to increase the tension leading to love.

4. Witty banter is a must.

5. The characters must have fallacies that form the bond that leads to love, I know, this is a tough one for video games.

So how would that translate into a game? Let’s take a crack at it:

I imagine a co-op game, online only since a large part of romantic comedy would be ruined if the players could consult each other in-between rounds. The best match up would be randomized servers, to give it an authentic meeting-for-the-first-time feel. It takes place in a big city, there has to be a chance for missed encounters and varied locals for dates. There’s chat between the players, but there probably should be some prompts which are written by professionals, people in romantic comedies are almost always more clever than their real life counterparts. And maybe a Wheel of Romantic Handicaps, such as one character is poor and has a limited selection of dating locals. Money and time management would be key elements of the game play. And every game would end with a mad dash to catch the other player before they leave the city for good.

So there you go, my Romantic Comedy is a futuristic co-op dating Sim. I feel like I cheated a bit because I don’t think my game could have a single player component. Much like dating, it works better with more than one player… although that gives me an idea for an expansion, group dates… What do ya’ll think? How would you make a Romantic Comedy Game?

Looks like I forgot to post this a few weeks back when I completed it.

Yay post-modernism!