Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  When art, design, and programming come together, they create a world for players to experience. That experience is its own story, one that is told through the actions of the player. A writer can guide that story, elevate it, but they can’t create it. Without art, design, and programming, story can’t exist. It has no value, and yet alters the value of everything it touches.

  Story has no place in the band, because story is the song.

  10

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  CHARACTER FLAWS

  The types of games I make are what we call AAA games, or triple-A. These aren’t the games you play on your cell phone. AAA games are considered the best of the best, if only because they cost so much to make. Between development and marketing, an average AAA game will cost between twenty and fifty million dollars to produce, but it’s not uncommon for budgets to stretch well past one hundred million. When you’ve got that much scratch on the line, you stick to what sells—guns and glory. Each game has a different name, but they’re all just variations on a theme. Bad people do bad things, but you can stop them, and that’s good. The story, no matter what shape it takes, is just spin, a tool to help explain who you’re fighting and why it’s okay to shoot them, burn them, and blow them into bits. I am the minister of propaganda to the game’s one true ruler, that person-shaped void we call “the player.” And all of us—writers, designers, artists, and programmers—serve at its pleasure.

  Video games require external input or else they cannot function. That input comes from the player. For that reason, the player will always be the game’s protagonist. They will experience the events firsthand and resolve them through the use of the game’s core mechanics.

  The most popular core mechanics are shooting and hand-to-hand fighting, as evidenced by their having genres named after them. Games that emphasize both ranged and melee mechanics fall under the action-adventure genre. These games contextualize their combat through the narrative. The Uncharted series, a present-day spin on the globe-trotting treasure-hunter concept, utilizes modern firearms and brawling, whereas The Elder Scrolls has players wield medieval weaponry and magic spells found in traditional fantasy worlds. My personal favorite context is what I call “video-game science,” which is indistinguishable from magic. If games are to be believed, science and its many fields can grant you the ability to throw fireballs (drinkable science, BioShock), create localized black holes (biotic science, Mass Effect), levitate heavy objects and use them as giant bullets (gravity science meets gun science, Half-Life 2), and breathe through your bikini-clad skin (sexy military science, Metal Gear Solid V).

  Core mechanics are the tools players are given to complete a game and the method by which they interact with the world. When your core mechanic is combat, that says something about your protagonist.

  In the case of Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham series, that violent force is conveniently nonlethal. I say “convenient” because there is no visible proof Batman’s opponents are dying from repeated blows to the head. When enemies go down, they stay down until their bodies eventually just vanish. Since the character of Batman is known for not killing, we’re left to assume these superstitious, cowardly criminals simply woke up and ran away.

  Most games don’t bother establishing a nonlethal context for their violence. It’s cleaner and simpler to kill your enemies and be done with it. This only confounds the issues surrounding the player. Your protagonist will never be more righteous than the core mechanic allows. No matter how heroic or well intentioned, this is a person who uses lethal force to resolve conflicts.

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  IN GAMES, THERE ARE two types of protagonists—a character and an avatar.

  A character is a protagonist who possesses their own voice, name, and predefined personality. You may control a character, but you will never be them. The best character examples in recent years are Joel and Ellie from Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us.

  Twenty years in the future, the United States has been devastated by a fungal plague that turns people into mindless, cannibalistic monsters we’re meant to believe are not zombies even though that’s exactly what they are. Joel, a smuggler living in Boston, is recruited by a militia group called the Fireflies. They need him to escort a young girl, Ellie, from Boston to Salt Lake City. Somehow, Ellie is immune to the not-a-zombie infection, and the Fireflies believe she is the key to creating a cure.

  Over the course of their journey, Joel and Ellie develop a deep bond, which is tested when he finally delivers her to the militia. As Ellie is prepped for surgery, Joel learns the procedure necessary to create a cure will kill her. Unable to let her go, Joel makes the decision to rescue her. Controlled by the player, he kills nearly everyone in the hospital, takes an unconscious Ellie off the operating table, and escapes.

  “Turns out, there’s a whole lot more like you,” he says, when Ellie finally wakes up. “Ain’t done a damn bit of good, neither. They’ve stopped looking for a cure.”

  Ellie doesn’t believe him, and in the game’s final moments demands to know the truth. “Swear to me. Swear to me that everything that you said about the Fireflies is true.”

  Joel looks her straight in the eyes and doesn’t flinch. “I swear.”

  Joel’s final acts of selfishness go against what we expect from a video-game protagonist. Although you play as Joel for most of the game, you can’t call him the hero. The game’s climax deletes that word completely from the conversation. Ellie didn’t know the procedure would result in her death, but she still volunteered for it. When Joel decides to kill the Fireflies, he robs both Ellie and the player of their agency. It’s a powerful, unexpected moment that tells the player, “This is Joel and Ellie’s story, not yours.”

  I love characters. The characters I create can be heroic, flawed, or whatever I wish, because they don’t have to fit the player’s ideals or expectations. The opposite is true of an avatar.

  Avatars are meant to be the player’s physical representation within a game. They are blank slates, designed with no real personality of their own. Our industry has this idea that a player needs to project him- or herself onto a character in order to be fully immersed, which can be difficult to do if the character expresses thoughts and opinions different from those of the player. It’s an argument I don’t really buy into. People have never had difficulty relating and connecting to characters in stories. It’s shockingly narcissistic to assume controlling a character in a game somehow diminishes your ability to empathize with someone else.

  When I’m told to write a vague protagonist, what I hear is, “Make them boring.” If a player needs a boring avatar in order to feel immersed in a game, then that player is not projecting onto the character. Instead, they are relating to someone who is boring because they, too, are boring. The boring avatar isn’t pulling them deeper into the game; it’s just helping the player’s boring brain imagine what it would be like to live in a world where boring people are also powerful and important. That’s why you rarely see overweight, unattractive avatars. Players aren’t projecting themselves onto their avatars; it’s actually the other way around. By taking control of an avatar, players project its superior qualities back onto themselves. It’s not projection at all, really. It’s just wish fulfillment.

  One of the most famous avatars is Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of Valve’s celebrated Half-Life series. Gordon is a white male with glasses and a goatee. He is thin, but not too skinny. He is tall and has no trace of a slouch. Gordon has a PhD in theoretical physics, so you can assume he’s always the smartest guy in the room. As far as we know, Gordon does not play sports or exercise, but he is still in perfect physical shape. He is also a weapons expert, despite only receiving minor training once in his whole life, because dumb rednecks shoot guns all the time, so there’s no reason someone of Gordon’s caliber couldn’t figure them out in a single afternoon.

  Gordon Freeman is from Seattle.

  Gordon does not speak. His genius brain, which is housed inside a perfectly symmetric
al head that has neither a double chin nor a receding hairline, doesn’t have time to talk; it’s too busy contemplating supraquantum structures. Besides, words are for plebeians and should be used only to praise the great Gordon Freeman, never to nag him about taking out the trash or cleaning up his room. This sounds like a joke, but it’s true—almost everyone Gordon meets gushes over how amazing he is. Even the villains do it.

  It is ridiculous to think Gordon Freeman is considered one of the greatest video-game characters of all time. This is not a character; it’s a pile of insecurities molded into the shape of a man. Gordon is the most blatant, half-assed Mary Sue our industry has ever created. We are lucky Half-Life 2 wasn’t good enough to warrant a sequel, or else we’d still be subjected to this mute asshole on a regular basis.

  If your protagonist is a fully developed character, it’s easy to write around your game’s violent gameplay. A character can be flawed, hypocritical, or just plain evil. An avatar has to be a blank slate, so that its personality doesn’t conflict with that of the player. The only thing your avatar will have in common with its player is importance. As game designers, we assume players want to be the hero, so that means their avatar must also be the hero.

  It is very hard to write a hero who does nothing but kill people, but it can be done. That being said, I’m not the best person to explain how. Most of my characters have been deranged psychopaths, broken souls devoid of hope and humanity—the kind of people you’re dying to fuck in your twenties and desperate to escape in your thirties.

  Instead, I’m going to turn things over to two of the smartest, most talented writers I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with—Greg Kasavin and Anthony Burch. I’m not just saying that to be nice; Greg and Anthony produce masterful work. It also amuses me to know these compliments will make them both somewhat uncomfortable.

  Anthony Burch was lead writer on Borderlands 2, the second game in a first-person shooter franchise built around the simple promise of more guns, more loot.

  In Borderlands 2, you play an interplanetary treasure hunter/mercenary who travels to the desolate yet inhabited planet of Pandora to locate the legendary Vault, an ancient alien structure believed to contain vast wealth.

  “I’ve played games since I was a kid,” says Burch. “The more I play them, the more I respect games that are honest about how shitty games can be morally. It’s kinda fucked-up that we enjoy slaughtering millions of people in a game. Not that it’ll make you a bad person, but it’s kinda fucked-up.

  “I love Destiny. I play Destiny all the time. But Destiny keeps calling you a guardian of the galaxy for literally going from planet to planet and wiping out entire civilizations because you had a quest that said, ‘Kill fifty Vex.’ Why? Because they belong to one particular race, I should kill them? I literally have a quota of what race I should eliminate today? That’s fucking weird.

  “What really upsets me is in games like Call of Duty you’ll kill millions of people, and they’ll be like, ‘You saved the world. You’re a good person. You’re the chosen one.’ I find that so revolting and dishonest. It doesn’t respect the player or allow the player to properly contextualize what they’re doing.”

  These feelings were somewhat at odds with the task of writing Borderlands 2, the sequel to a game that holds the Guinness World Record for the most guns in a video game—17.75 million guns.

  “A lot of people wanted the Vault Hunters to be really badass, heroic figures who save the world. And I, as subtly and sharply as I could, along with Paul Hellquist, the director, tried to refute that at any possible turn in the game’s story, because what the player is actually doing is worse than just killing things. They’re killing things solely so they can loot their corpses and pick up their stuff and then use it to kill larger things. You’re the worst person in the world in this game.”

  Borderlands presents players with a world taken to its extreme limits of absurdity. This is a game that includes a gun called the Bane, which shoots flesh-dissolving acid bullets while a mad chorus of high-pitched, squealing voices shout “Rat-tat-tat-tat! Bang! Bang! BOOM!!!” It’s no wonder Pandora’s inhabitants are literally gun-crazy. Bullets, blood, explosions—these are what they live for, and they are all loving life.

  By playing into that absurdity, Anthony was able to create a narrative experience that embraced the game’s over-the-top-violence and satirized our industry’s obsession with bullet-porn.

  “The way we tried to make that okay was to acknowledge it and kinda have fun with it . . . You make jokes about everything. You make jokes where the punch line is ‘You’re a piece of shit.’ You make jokes where the guns are the punch line . . . It was way more fun for us to go ‘Yeah, you’re a badass, but you’re also kind of a bad person. It certainly lessens the ludonarrative dissonance [the conflict between a video game’s narrative and its gameplay] to be able to say, ‘Yeah, you’re being a piece of shit, but what would you have us do?’ ”

  Greg Kasavin went a different direction when writing Bastion, the first game developed by Supergiant Games.

  Bastion is an action role-playing game that takes place in what remains of Caelondia, a city destroyed by a cataclysmic event known only as the Calamity. You play the Kid, a young boy who wakes to find his city has been destroyed. With nowhere else to go, he travels to the Bastion, where everyone was meant to go if things went bad. From there, he begins to rebuild Caelondia.

  Greg and I worked together at 2K Games on Spec Ops: The Line before he left to make some absolutely stunning indie games, of which Bastion was the first. When it comes to interesting characters, Greg agrees that using a blank-slate avatar can lead to boring characterization, but he still believes there is value in the convention.

  Greg says, “Part of why we wanted a silent protagonist was that you get those games where the main character is voiced and you get those moments where the character will say something or act in a certain way where you, the player, really disagree. You’re like, ‘Oh man, what an idiot. I never would have said this.’ And those moments are really dissonant because you’re supposed to be playing that character.”

  To avoid this, Supergiant developed a secondary character for Bastion that would serve as the game’s narrator, providing running commentary on everything the player did. The narrator added depth to the world and also gave players a different way to emotionally connect with what was happening on their screen.

  It’s sort of the magic of someone interpreting your actions, so it’s okay for him to be wrong and for you to think he’s wrong, and having that lead to very interesting moments where the player can sort of feel betrayed or weird about it. We wanted these characters to provide both context and an emotional connection. They were all about speaking to things the player couldn’t necessarily discern on their own, and speaking to the subtext of the situation.

  As an early example in Bastion, you go into a little bar and have a little fight in there right at the beginning of the game. And there’s an ashen statue of a guy there, and you go in and the narrator says, “Caelondia’s most famous watering hole. There’s ol’ Rondy the bartender. The Calamity got him before his drinking did.” . . . So you already feel something, like “Man, that’s kind of heavy.”

  All you can do is hit stuff with a hammer, so if you destroy him with a hammer and he bursts into a cloud of dust, the narrator says, “Rondy always wanted his ashes scattered here.” And you’re like, “Oh shit.” You’re just walking about and hitting stuff, just like any action RPG, but in this game we’re gonna make you think about it. You’re going to stop and have a moment to consider what you’re doing.

  We found that when people destroyed Rondy’s statue, some of them would feel really bad. But the narrator is kind of reassuring you: “No, that’s what Rondy wanted.” And suddenly it’s putting intentionality into the character where there might have been none.

  Intent is the thin line between good and bad. Without it, your protagonist is just a force of nature, a tornado destroyi
ng anything in its path. A noble goal won’t count for much in the real world, but in fiction it’s much easier to suspend disbelief. If we’re making a shooter, people are going to die. The genre asks for death and shall receive it in abundance. We can’t change what the player does, but we can change their target.

  There are enemies so universally evil, all it takes is one glance to know they should die a bullet-riddled death. Nazis, zombies, demons, and aliens: these are perfect villains. Years of pop-culture refinement (or recorded history, in the case of Nazis) have defined these villains as the embodiment of destruction. If the player is a tornado, then these monsters are wildfire. They live only to consume and will not stop until you put them down.

  If all our games were built around killing fascist hell zombies from outer space, we’d never feel a single ounce of regret or stab of guilt. Sometimes, though, you want a kill that means something. You want to look someone in the face, really size them up as an individual, and then shoot them. That was Anthony’s goal when creating Handsome Jack:

  “Jack is Borderlands 2, in terms of my narrative philosophy for that game. I just really like villain-centric video-game stories, because I tend to feel like those really work in terms of game-space violence. You should be looking for something you emotionally care about fighting.”

  At the end of the first Borderlands game, the Vault is opened to reveal it was actually a prison for a giant alien known as the Destroyer. After it was killed, a strange new mineral called Eridium began springing up all across Pandora, drawing even more people to the planet, including Handsome Jack, president of the laughably evil Hyperion Corporation.