The Hero We Deserve

One issue I’ve been coming up against repeatedly in these articles is the concept of the video game protagonist – that cipher for the player, for whose actions the player is, in whole or in part, responsible. Nowadays, when we think of the Typical Game Protagonist, the figure that comes to mind is, almost invariably, a grim, stubbly white dude, probably stoic and gravelly-voiced, quite often toting some kind of firearm, which may well be obscenely oversized. Take a quick glance over footage from most years' E3s, and you’ll see wave upon wave of Mr Typical Game Protagonist as far as the eye can see*. It’s no secret that this industry has, perhaps more than any other, a massive problem of representation. Women in games are often oversexualised, reduced in narrative terms to fridge-bait or sexy lamps – a result partly of the innate ultraconservatism of much of the industry with regard to social issues, partly of whining man-babies with a disproportionately loud collective voice whose fragile minds are threatened as much by difference as by any kind of disagreement.

All of this is why I want to take a few moments to appreciate a character who I’m coming to believe may be my favourite video game protagonist; an antidote to many of the prevailing clichés of the industry. A man, admittedly, but one surrounded by interesting, complex female characters on whom he relies constantly, without sexualising them and with only hints of romantic interest in one of them. Rather than stoic and grim, he’s passionate and often goofy, prone to saying remarkably stupid things in situations of great pressure. Rather than solving problems by shooting and/or hitting things, if anything he stands against those who use violence, using his wits to confront them with the evidence of their crimes. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m talking about the man in the blue suit: Phoenix Wright.

 

The man certainly can point.

Oddly enough, Phoenix isn’t even my favourite character in the Ace Attorney series, an honour which goes to his burger-chomping assistant Maya Fey. But he is a deeply fascinating character, and a brilliantly-constructed protagonist. Over the course of the series, we see him as a child abandoned by almost everyone; a lovestruck, easily-manipulated student; a callow rookie defending his mentor’s sister from a murder charge in only his second trial ever; a dogged defender facing down infamous criminals and intimidating prosecutors; a disbarred stubbly pianist apparently awash in a sea of “grape juice”; a loving and protective father; and finally (to date, at least) as a mentor, semi-legendary already in his mid-30s. It’s quite a ride.

But throughout all this, what’s most fascinating about Phoenix as a protagonist is his sheer ordinariness. He’s not some special chosen one; he’s just a man with a law degree. He’s not the most intelligent or even the most logical person around, and he doesn’t have any special powers, even if he has friends who do. What he has is a good heart, and a determination not to abandon the innocent, born from having been in that very position himself.

I think this partly accounts for why I feel Phoenix is a more interesting protagonist than his two proteges, Apollo Justice and Athena Cykes. He lacks Apollo’s semi-mystical bloodline, with his ability to spot people’s tells like a magic version of Tim Roth in Lie to Me, or Athena’s super-sensitive hearing and consequent ability to read emotion in people’s voices. All Phoenix has is a badge, a sharp mind and a deep belief in people. Even after he gets a magical jewel which allows him to see when people are hiding things, it’s still up to him to figure the mystery out; he can see that people are keeping secrets, but not what the secrets are.

Then there’s his goals. He doesn’t set out to fight monsters (in any literal sense), or save the world, or even anything as grandiose as bringing justice; he just wants to help people. And so he does, not only defending the innocent from murder charges, but managing to save people from themselves – Edgeworth from his ruthlessness, Maya from her low self-esteem, Franziska from her obsession with perfection, Godot from his single-minded hatred. Person after person refuses his help for one reason or another, but he tries anyway. His help may not be enough, or it may come too late, but his relentlessness is admirable nonetheless.

What’s more, he’s not a perfect protagonist**. It’s all too easy to fashion a player avatar who is constantly right, whose biggest obstacle seems to be other people not recognising their blessed brilliance; when is Commander Shepard, for instance, ever wrong about something? Phoenix, on the other hand, makes plenty of mistakes. In court, he frequently doesn’t have a clue what’s going on (which can be mildly frustrating for a better-informed player). Outside of court, he’s not a pure avatar of virtue and rightness either; he snaps at people who bring up Edgeworth’s disappearance in Justice for All, he’s too blinded by infatuation to acknowledge the mounting evidence against Dahlia Hawthorne (a good example of his best feature, his belief in people, working against him) and, most infamously, he attempts to run across a burning bridge when his best friend is in danger. It all combines to make him wonderfully human in a very endearing way.

Historically, games, from platformers to shooters, have tended to be combat-focused, or at least to have some strong element of what might loosely be termed violence, to the Daily Mail’s everlasting horror. It’s part of the wish-fulfilment nature of the medium, making the player feel strong. In a sense, Ace Attorney still does this, but in a different way. Phoenix’s job, and the player’s, is to outsmart his opponents, to cut through the lies of the villains. While the series has its share of moral complexity, it still tends to go in for relatively straightforward good versus evil clashes, and boo-hiss villains. What’s refreshing, though, is that these battles never come down to a physical fight. The villains are defeated by confronting them with irrefutable evidence of their misdeeds, and it’s no less satisfying than shooting or punching them, especially given the elaborate breakdowns which the series tends to afford them. The games go to considerable lengths to make you hate these people, just to make yours and Phoenix’s eventual victory all the more pleasurable.

Since I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago (I was working on it slowly, OK?), a new Ace Attorney game has been announced, and the only returning character revealed at this (very early) stage is Phoenix himself, who would appear to be the focus of the game. Hardly surprising, since he’s the only character to appear in every instalment of the series (if you count his cameos in the two Investigations games), but some fans are already complaining that plot points involving other characters are being left hanging. While there’s some truth to that, as far as I’m concerned, Phoenix is the heart of the series, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Now please give us Maya back, Capcom. Go on. You know you want to.

Even Conor Lenihan wants to be Phoenix.

* - To be absolutely fair, as many commentators pointed out, this year’s E3 was notable for quite a few prominent female protagonists, which may hopefully be a sign of some slow progress. The industry certainly does not lack for prominent and talented female commentators and creators.

** - He does, admittedly, seem to be completely impervious to harm – he’s been tasered, poisoned, fallen from a bridge into a freezing river, hit by a speeding car and whipped into unconsciousness, yet he never seems to require more than a day or two in hospital.

Clementine Will Remember That

            In the last post, I discussed the way in which games make the player part of the narrative, which is part of what makes them such a fascinating medium. Yet there’s something else they can do which is even more remarkable and revolutionary, something that’s really come to the fore in the last few years thanks to a rash of choice-focused games. Game players can not only take part in a narrative, they can actually shape it, decide on its course.

            Theoretically, this can happen in just about any game which features a narrative to some extent; the player jumps at the wrong time and, rather than confronting Bowser and freeing Peach and a succession of Toads, Mario meets an ignominious end in a fiery pit. But there’s still a linear, set narrative involved; it’s generally impossible to choose to side with Bowser, entertaining as that prospect is*. Increasingly, though, games are offering players freedom of choice not only in how they play the game, but how the game’s narrative unfolds.

            I daresay Bioware would, rightly or otherwise, consider themselves the most prominent champions of this trend, beginning with the D&D-inflected Baldur’s Gate games. The Mass Effect and Dragon Age series have offered a narrative that unfolds over the course of several games, altering in response to the player’s actions such that subplots in the third game of the series depend on decisions made in the first. Then there’s Telltale, whose games make a point of informing the player at the beginning that the story changes in response to their decisions. Characters (apart from the protagonist) live or die based on the player’s actions, and scenes can progress in entirely different ways based on decisions made previously.

            There’s a pitfall that both of these examples fall into, though. Simply put, the narrative isn’t mutable enough for many players. Bioware’s Mass Effect 3 in particular attracted a great deal of criticism for its ending, which seemed to many players to negate their choices; they felt excluded from the ending of a story which they had essentially helped to craft. There is often a sense with Telltale too that the effects of one’s actions are little more than cosmetic; the story still goes to the same place, taking much the same course, no matter what you do. It’s still brilliant interactive storytelling, but it can feel frustrating once you start comparing notes with other players and realising how little that decision you agonised over really mattered.

            This partly stems from technical limitations, of course. Unlike a tabletop RPG session, where the story, via the gamemaster, can evolve in all kinds of unexpected ways based on the unforeseen actions of the player characters, only a certain number of possible paths can be coded into a video game – hence a limited number of choices, in action and dialogue. The trick is always to create the illusion of total freedom and unpredictability within the story, at least for the first playthrough. Effective immersion is key here; smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the technical workings. When I first played Persona 4 (full disclosure: my favourite game of all time), I assumed that the dialogue choices and relationships with characters mattered, that they affected the course of the story; only discovering that most (though not all) are cosmetic on subsequent playthroughs. But, crucially, the story and characters drew me in enough to create the illusion that I could affect this world, and then enough that I didn’t care much once the illusion was shattered.

            Even if a fully player-shaped narrative is more elusive than it might seem**, though, there’s still a lot to be said for the notion of player choice in games. For one thing, it heightens the sense of immersion which I talked about in the last post, by giving you more influence over the game world and events. For another, it allows for a customisable experience; a great talking point with friends, even if “So who did you choose to kill?” is a fairly worrying thing to overhear in casual conversation.

            Even more remarkably, it allows for the ability to experience essentially the same story in different ways, the much-touted “replay value”. The more agency the player has over it, the more the story becomes mutable. In fact, many games encourage replaying the game from a different perspective, even if that’s something as simple as the choice between a male and a female character, as in Persona 3 (a choice which, in this case, does have a significant effect on the relationships at the heart of the game).

            One of my go-to examples of the concept of divergent paths in game narrative is (not coincidentally) one of my favourite games, Virtue’s Last Reward. The game is essentially a visual novel which features a limited number of crucial decisions; which door to enter, and whether to “ally” or “betray” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma-style challenge at the heart of the game’s story. Each of these decisions leads the player down a separate path, like a variety of universes within a multiverse (a concept which is in fact significant within the game). Some decisions, as in many visual novels, will lead to “bad ends”, usually death, while others lead to “good ends”, usually centred around a resolution to one of the game’s various mysteries. So far, so normal. Where the game is unique is that it features a flowchart, accessible at most points in the game, allowing you to jump between unlocked paths (warning: this image is potentially spoilery):

It's not a short game.

This is crucial, because the game requires you to use information from one path (a code to deactivate a bomb, a computer password) in order to progress in another. Naturally, this means that, while not every variant on every decision has to be experienced (the bad ends are optional), the player has to consider consequences carefully, and figure out where each decision might lead them. Every major path, though not every branch, has to be played through to finish the game, and so the narrative takes on a curious non-linear form, where the only constant is the protagonist’s consciousness.

            In a sense, the logical conclusion of the “many paths” approach is something like what’s being done with Fire Emblem Fates. The game features at its core a momentous decision of which of two kingdoms to side with, and is being sold as two separate retail versions, one for each side of the decision***. At first glance, this might seem excessive and money-grubbing, but that one decision changes the entire game from that point on – the characters you meet, the battles you fight, etc. The decision to separate the campaigns not only allows for a much bigger game overall, but highlights the significance of player choice – just by choosing which version to buy, the player is already determining their character’s fate (so to speak). If anything, I’m surprised that it’s taken Fire Emblem, a series in which your tactical decisions can lead to the deaths of characters, this long to come around to the notion of player decisions being at the heart of the story.

            If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to pique my interest in a game, it’s the notion of player choice being significant; whether that’s framed as creating one’s own character through dialogue choice, having multiple routes through a game/level, or simply the ever-popular multiple endings. It’s why I’m so passionate about gaming as a narrative medium - it allows the player to act as co-author of the story they’re experiencing. Even something as simple as dialogue choices help to draw the player in and make them feel like this world, this experience, is fundamentally theirs. 

* - The first generation of Pokémon games (Red/Blue/Yellow) contained an unavoidable NPC who would ask the player if they wanted to join the villainous Team Rocket. There was no “yes” option, something for which I felt hurt and betrayed throughout my childhood.

** - Actually, the closest thing to a truly player-shaped narrative is probably the meaning imposed by fan communities. We saw this prominently in the last couple of years with the absurd masses of lore retroactively imposed on the fairly basic horror game Five Nights at Freddy’s and its interminable sequels by fan overanalysis. Far more interesting were the strange memes spawned by the unmitigated chaos of Twitch Plays Pokémon, in which random acts were given quasi-religious meaning by an audience who were collectively simultaneously spectator and player.

*** - There is a third, DLC-only option which involves siding with neither kingdom. Some fans have criticised this, seeing this option as the “true ending”, and lamenting having to pay more for it. Not having played any version of the game yet, I can’t speak with any authority, but my sense is that there is no “true ending”; that the three versions of the game are equally weighted.

Even Better Than the Real Thing

Here’s a nice, big, broad question: why do we play video games? Is it for escapism? For a challenge, or sense of competition? To experience a narrative? Obviously, there are as many answers to that question as there are players of games. But one thing all answers have in common, banal as it sounds, is the simple experience of playing games, which is entirely unlike any other form of media. There’s a sense of direct control there, a synthesis between player and avatar, that goes beyond anything else. We may empathise with the protagonist of a film or book, but we are the protagonist(s) of a game, at least for as long as we play as them. Our actions directly correspond to what’s happening on the screen, and even influence the course of the narrative.

This sense of immersion is one of the reasons why I think games can and do provide narrative experiences which are outside the reach of other media (though perhaps not as often as I’d like). At best, games can convey a sense that the events unfolding are happening to you, the player – even if the player is represented by a named character with their own personality*. Inhabiting the skin of Lee or Clementine in The Walking Dead doesn’t make certain decisions any less stressful, nor make the player feel the consequences any less keenly.

This is, of course, the reason why Japanese RPGs (and other story-based games) from Pokémon to Persona ask the player to enter their name at the beginning***. It’s an assumption by the character of the player’s identity, or vice versa. It’s a kind of ritual which demarcates the entering of another space, without losing one’s sense of self (unless, of course, one wishes to, in which case many games provide default names for the donning of an alternative identity).

The upshot, naturally, is that the player will spend the rest of the game being addressed directly by name. This is, presumably, why many traditional dating sims include the name-entering option; it dovetails with the general wish-fulfilment angle of those games. Not to say that that angle isn’t present in other games, of course; RPGs are very fond of having characters say things like “Nice work, _____!” or “I’m so glad I met you, ______!” at every turn – particularly in games like the Persona series, where cultivating friendships (and, optionally, romantic relationships) with other characters is a central tenet of the game.

Again, the point is obvious, but it bears repeating: no other form of media does this. Even choose-your-own-adventure books don’t actually address the reader by name. The barrier between player and game is thin at best; the player is an active participant in the world of the game. They have observable effects on the game world, from talking to NPCs to destroying objects in the world to placing a block in the right place. This, I think, partially accounts for why games can be so therapeutic: the consequences of your actions are always clear, always substantial, from saving the galaxy to finding someone’s lost pet.

What’s more, to further encourage a rapport between player and protagonist, the latter’s success or failure is dependent entirely on the actions of the player. Again, this is something which is unique to gaming. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes will not fail to identify a criminal if the reader is stumped by the clues he finds, but the game version of him will, because his destiny is tied to the player’s wits. Luke Skywalker will always successfully blow up the Death Star; a player might not, and there might well be consequences for that other than having to repeat the level, if the game’s writers and designers are savvy and ambitious enough.

And then there’s the concept of character creation. There are two broad schools into which players fall when designing a character: that character can either be a representation (possibly idealised, to some extent) of themselves, or an entirely invented character****. This is particularly prominent in a game series like Dragon Age, where the player also determines, to a great extent, the personality of their character through their decisions and dialogue choices. Does your character respond as you would, or as you have decided they would? The former is essentially the player playing the game as themselves, while the latter adds a layer of creativity to the process wherein the player’s created character is simultaneously analogous to and distinct from the player themselves; both a representation of the player and a presence in and of themselves. It’s enough to make postmodernist theorists cry.

One of the chief goals of fiction is to draw its audience into its world. By blurring the lines between spectator and participant, games are uniquely qualified to do this. This is not to say that every game does this, of course, nor even every narrative-focused game; there is a strange fetishisation of the “cinematic” in many major big-budget games, especially certain wildly popular first-person shooters, whereby the player is effectively barred from interaction with the game’s world and its story, and is in many cases reduced to watching the game unfold rather than, you know, playing it. Gaming is still a relatively new narrative medium, and there’s untold tapped potential in it.

* - This is one reason why I’m not generally fond of the “silent protagonist” trend. It’s very difficult to convey personality without dialogue, and at worst it can bring about a sense of baffling passivity. Protagonists in games like Dishonored stand about mutely** during cutscenes, twiddling their thumbs while terrible and momentous things happen around them. If the idea is to bring the player inside the character’s head, it backfires, because it’s so strange as to be immersion-breaking.

** - Some fans interpret these characters as actually being mute, which seems to me to be overly generous to the writers (which is, of course, a possible definition of fandom).

*** - And, in some cases, other characters’ names as well, such as the rival in some of the Pokémon games, perhaps purely so that the player can spend the rest of the game being informed that “POOFACE wants to fight!”

**** - Then there’s a third option, which may well be unique to me: create the closest representation of David Bowie allowable by the game’s design tools. It’s the simple pleasures.

The Return of the Thin White Duke

Why, hello there! How are you? You're looking well, I must say. How's your niece? Did her exams go well? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, but she can always repeat, right? Or I hear the circus is a viable option these days too.

Anyway, enough of this playful banter. Yes, you're probably surprised to discover that WAKE UP still exists. I know I was, having not given it a second thought since, apparently, the 2012 presidential election. Oh dear. I've retained the link in my Twitter bio, though, and (very) occasionally entertained thoughts like "I should really go back to that blog someday". Well, as it turns out, today is someday!

Naturally, I didn't want to make this triumphant return, throwing darts in lovers' eyes, without some kind of, y'know, actual content. As such, I've got a few posts lined up for the next few days on aspects of narrative in games, a concept that's been intriguing me for the last little while. After that, who knows? It's all change around these parts; I'm moving to another country in three weeks, so perhaps the Yorkshire air will stimulate my blogging muscles.

Anyway, here's a relevant picture to tide you over: