J P Smythe’s Website.

Over recent weeks I have been devouring computer games at the weekends. I’ve been working hard on editing during the week and have been left with these two day chunks where I want to do nothing but vegetate, so I’ve been doing that with my consoles. Two weeks ago I played Bionic Commando, last week was inFamous, and this weekend has been devoted to Red Faction: Guerilla. The quality of the games isn’t what I care about here (but if you want some reviews, here they are, in order: Mediocre, Quite Good, Great Fun But Gets Dull); rather, I’m concerned about the characters that these games are throwing at me.

There’s a joke/meme/thing about bald space marines this generation, and how representative they are of current game avatar stereotypes. It’s a sloppy joke, mainly because – I suspect – the baldness aspect comes from the difficulty of making decent looking hair in games (seriously!), and the space marine aspect comes from a lack of imagination with regards to the setting of the game. After all, who else are you going to have parading around alien worlds and abandoned space-craft? Nobody’s going to send a plumber, are they? The problem isn’t that they’re generic heroes; it’s that barely anybody takes the bald, plain-faced chap and offers them something resembling a personality. And when they do give them a design outside of this stereotype, they still fail to give them personalities.

Bionic Commando was an interesting game. The hero was designed to have dreadlocks and a big robot arm, and the story put him in prison for years until broken out when the government needed him for a mission. It’s not the most involved tale, but there’s potential there, right? And then they hired Mike Patton – Mike Patton! – to do the voice of Nathan Spencer, the main character, which meant it would be even cooler, right? Right?

Uh, no. Instead, the character swears. Mike Patton is paid to grunt a bit, bark angrily, and occasionally swear in what is actually less-than-inventive ways. The character design, whilst interesting, is utterly bereft of anything resembling charm. I thought that the game was dull as it was; playing as this absolute twunt just made me hate it. Seriously, by the end I ignored the story as it became more nonsensical, and the character became less likeable. (SPOILER: There’s a bit where you discover that the soul of your wife is trapped in your robotic arm. I am not even close to joking.)

So, the next weekend I played inFamous, Sony’s great hope for Summer 2009. Infamous is fun until it isn’t, but suffers horrendously at the hands of the worst characterisation I have ever seen in a game. The main character? Hateful, dull, arrogant, whiny. His best friend? Irritating, needy, unfunny (but constantly making jokes). The main character’s girlfriend? Piggish, bitchy, unpleasant. I was meant to want Cole, the main character, to get back together with her over the course of the story – particularly as, SPOILER: there’s a bit where you have to choose whether she or 10 doctors should die. It should be a hard choice, but it really isn’t. Cole was super-generic, and did nothing to warrant me caring about him – or, conversely, the world that he inhabited.

And this weekend I have been playing as Alec Mason in Red Faction: Guerilla.

Side story: On friday I went to see Terminator Salvation at the cinema. It was fine, wobbling between moments of awesome and awful, but bugged me at the depth of some of the character backgrounds. Common played somebody – tellingly, I can’t remember the character’s name – whose entire motivation was that they brother was killed by a robot once. Did I care? Not a jot.

As Red Faction starts, Alec Mason’s brother – tellingly, I can’t remember his name – is killed by somebody. That’s Alec’s motivation for freeing Mars from the tyranny of a weird corporation who seem utterly ineffective at doing anything, despite their fighting you with thousands of armoured troops when you only have a big hammer.

Coming out next week: Protoype, a game where you play a man called Alex who wears a hoodie. The week after, the PS3 Ghostbusters game, where you play the bald, nameless Rookie. It goes on, whole games that might just be ruined by the presence of these useless main characters. It’s not about what they look like, or where they live, or even – sometimes – what the story that they are involved in is. It’s about making you care, and want to be that person for 10 – 15 hours, and make you want to know what happens to that person in the sequel. It’s why people care about Master Chief, about Kratos, about Commander Shepherd: they had personalities, and those personalities bled through the controllers and into the people involved. A film or book with characters that you can’t stand to be around wouldn’t get watched or read, so why should a game be played? We don’t want generic heroes who curse constantly for want of anything clever to say, and whinge when bad things happen: we want them to rise to challenges, to be powerful and awesome, and to fix those bad things in a way that is great to play, and that the player will remember for a long while.

When I was working on Dungeon Hero I was writing a bald man with swords, no externally-individual qualities to speak of. He was almost autistic in his responses to danger, and he liked to hit things. But I tried to make him funny, give him real personality in his responses, give him real emotional investment at the points where it was needed, and provide him with other motivations when it wasn’t. I wanted him to be cool to play as, more than anything, something that none of the above characters provided, with their whining and moping and generic chattering. I wanted the player to think that – even though this character’s back story was shrouded in mystery – being the Hero of this game was the coolest thing in the world. Why is that so hard for other games writers to fathom?