April '09 BoRT: Characters with History

This post is part of Corvus Elrod's monthly cross-blog event, The Blogs of the Round Table. This month's topic is about social problems that disturb us, and how games handle them. As per request, I would rate this post "T" according to the ESRB ratings guide.

For this month's BoRT, Corvus asked us to imagine a game that would tackle a social issue that disturbs us. As usual, I will prod the boundaries of the topic guidelines and suggest something more nebulous than explicit violence or harmful sexism. Of the many disturbing social ills in existence, I am most troubled by societal tendency to embrace historical amnesia.

What has happened to our beloved video game heroes over the years? The answer depends on the frame of analysis: They have become prettier, have branched out into a various genres, and some have learned to speak. But as characters, as psychological and historical actors, they have remained stagnant. Examine some of the legends of the gaming pantheon like Mario, Link, Samus, Sonic, or Lara Croft, and one will find characters that defy history as readily as they do gravity. I would like to try to envision a game in which the characters do not live in a universe devoid of time and consequences. I yearn for a game that makes its characters, and by extension, the player, responsible for their actions.

As Jorge eloquently described, Gears of War 2 awkwardly attempts to humanize the brutish super soldiers introduced in the first game. While the success of marrying emotions to characters that generally amount to one-liner-spouting tanks is debatable, I found some of the scenes unexpectedly engaging. When Tai, a stout soldier in both mind and body, is taken prisoner by the enemy and brutally tortured, he ultimately kills himself. His suicide scene briefly exposes the psychological cost of total unrestricted combat. However, it is only a glimmer, and is quickly snuffed out after the cut scene ends.

Metal Gear Solid 4 contains similar sparks of character development and the exploration of trauma's effects. Snake's aging body conveys the passage of time and the exhausting life he was born into. The brilliant flashback sequence also hints at the mental toll his adventures have exacted. However, instead of using his flashback to explore his psyche, the game quickly brushes it off as a dream.

While short, scenes like these game me the impression that not only was I witnessing the effects of trauma, but as the player, I was complicit in them. After seeing Tai's death, I could not help but comtemplate what Marcus Fenix must see when he closes his eyes. Going back to setting of Metal Gear Solid 1 with Snake made me re-live the decades of missions I led him through. Every time I saw him groan and rub his back, I mused on the origins of that pain: did the recklessly thrown grenade on Shadow Moses or the the senseless fistfights I started on the Tanker contribute to that?

The gameplay wheel need not be re-invented in order for a game to create a character subject to history. Imagine a game where in some scenes, the player controls a character at the height of their physical and mental prowess. They could go "Rambo" at every opportunity and still survive, but they would face the consequences in the next scene, in which they would control the same character some forty years later. Is it not somewhat perverse that, in most games, fighting makes characters stronger? What if experience points were not absolutely positive?

Perhaps all the gunfire damaged their ears, and the sound would be muffled? Maybe all of the flips and physical stress has lead to chronic pain, thus severely limiting the player's movement. Post-traumatic stress disorder could come in to play: the years of battles might make the older version of the character prone to flashbacks or hallucinations similar to those in Eternal Darkness. It could that be in winning the wars of yesterday, the player paved the way for the character's journey into obscurity. Envisioning Duke Nukem, rid of any alien foes, whiling away the hours as an employee in a run down hardware store is both hilarious and melancholic.

Video games excel in reflecting the way humans often conceptualize the world: in discrete moments. While it is essential for survival, viewing events as snapshots, disconnected from a timeline of events, is both limiting and damaging over the long term. I fervently hope that Six Days in Fallujah will show us the broader ramifications of war and its effect on people, but I fear we will learn very little about how the combatants actually dealt with the process of being sent, surviving in, and coming back from conflict.

There will always be a place for characters that exist within their contextual vacuums, but this need not apply to all games. Link is known as the "Hero of Time," but I think the medium would be equally enriched by heroes that simply existed in time.

The Sensationalist: The Aging of Old Snake

This post is part of "The Sensationalist," a continuing series here at Experience Points in which we examine games' abilities to evoke emotions and sensations in video game players. Please have a look at the series' introduction as well its previous entries. As always, we welcome your thoughts on all the matters we discuss, and look forward to analyzing one of gaming's most powerful, yet intangible, abilities.

I have written about maturity in games before, but mostly in terms of a game's thematic or marketing approach. It was not until Metal Gear Solid 4 that I found myself examining maturity in games in a much more literal sense. MGS 4 presents an image rarely seen in the video game medium: the aging and decline of an iconic hero. Snake's transition from "Solid" to "Old" imbues the game with a strong sense of what it means to age. MGS 4 vividly conveys the feeling of mortality that aging elicits, and it does so largely by employing graphical finesse and extended character development. Despite a vastly improved control scheme and a wider variety of moves, Snake still feels hobbled by age, thus demonstrating the importance of passive game elements like cut scenes and graphical splendor in a medium increasingly lauded for interactivity.

Snake's age is striking because it is an aberration in the milieu of iconic video game characters. Mario has kept a decidedly robust figure over the decades with nary a grey hair in his mustache. Sonic has gone through some "extreme" phases (including lupine), but the blue blur looks essentially the same today as he did during the Genesis era. After fighting hundreds of battles, Ryu and Ken are in better shape now than they ever were. Although Link has been subject to some chronological wackiness, I will be surprised if we ever see a wrinkle in his noble Hylian visage. In the Neverland line-up of Super Smash Bros., Snake is the sole character for which time refuses to stand still.

MGS 4 illustrates Snake's aging by taking full advantage of the PS3's ability to imitate life. Grey and wrinkled, Snake moves deliberately and gingerly in the cut scenes. His low voice has become exceedingly gravelly the point of comedy, although things get less funny when he seizes with uncontrollable coughing spasms. The aggregation of old psychic wounds compounded with new physical ones make him reliant on pain relieving injections during his missions. While still able to sneak through enemy territory undetected, any moment of rest sees Snake groan and rub his undoubtedly sore back. Perhaps Tactical Espionage Action is better left to the young?

The interesting thing about MGS 4's overwhelming thematic focus on aging is that it exists in contrast to most of the gameplay. Until the last scenes of the final act, the player has more nuanced and varied control over Snake than in any previous Metal Gear game. Clearly the old dog has learned some new tricks: side rolls, strafing, log-rolling, face-up crawling, crouched running, along with a bevy of new customizable weapons make Old Snake the most skilled incarnation of the legendary soldier to date. The physical degradation communicated by the cut scenes and story often runs counter to the skill in which Snake utilizes cover and dispatches enemies. It seems MGS 4 is a textbook example of that bogey-man of critical gaming: ludo-narrative dissonance. So which end of this ludo-narrative tug of war wins out?

As can be gleaned from my Twitter posts, I was quite trepidatious about starting MGS 4. However, the disenchantment I felt for the series after MGS 2's overwrought story and MGS 3's stagnant gameplay was wiped clean by Snake's latest (and hopefully last) adventure. Although the controls and updated move set were welcome surprises, what I will remember most about this game is my empathy towards an aging Snake. As I saw him wince his way through the missions, I was reminded of how long I had been following this character, and how much punishment he has received. More accurately, I was remined of my complicity in his scars. I could not help but think about all the times I lead him into a suicidal firefight or carelessly traipsed through a mine field. The milege Snake acrued was milege I had put on him over the decades. This connected me to a character that I had only previously thought of as a campy, stoic, bad-ass, trained to fight on in a never-ending war. It soon became clear that this war did have an end, as did its chief combatant: Snake.

A common explanation for how games differ from other mediums focuses on the role the player takes in helping explicate their meanings. I have always been part of that subset of gamers that claim to be wholly devoted to gameplay; to hell with story and graphics, if something is satisfying to play, that is all that matters. MGS 4 is a powerful challenge to this mindset, as the game conveys the sense of Snake's aging by letting the graphics and cut scenes tell the story. The gameplay and the player have a relatively small role to play in creating the narrative, a design choice that seems to find itself out of favor in current games.

However, like Snake himself, these techniques persist, and they were able to express "aging" in a video game as I had never felt it before. Perhaps traditional narrative techniques themselves have aged better than we give them credit for?