Adventure Gamers - Forums

Warning: This thread will contain spoilers so if you’re posting use spoiler tags where appropriate, and if you haven’t played a game that’s discussed and are intending to… don’t read the spoilers.

While I was playing Resonance I thought of this topic, it’s by no means the only game to feature this problem but it really got me thinking about it. I always felt it strange to be playing as a certain protagonist and at the same time not knowing many of the things about him or her. For me if I’m not playing as myself - like in Myst for example - I need to be able to make in-game decisions based on who I am, what my personality is and my past history. So in Discworld I’m a novice wizard in training, Sherlock Holmes I’m a pedantic detective and Monkey Island I’m a wannabe pirate. That’s all there is to it - there are no secrets about my past history or hidden motives.

For those who’ve played and finished Resonance know, in the game one of the characters you play is
Ed, who is one of the first characters you control. Everything you learn about him and the things he says leads you to believe he’s one of the good guys but he turns out to have very different motives, which are only revealed later in the game. I felt this was a little dishonest. Here I am actually being a character and think I know who he is, while only later I discover his real identity.

So when do you think a hidden past become a problem?

I think in games like Overclocked where some of the characters you play are revisiting traumatic memories that you’ve repressed, in that situation it’s okay because you know no more than the character themselves know. There’s also, in very many games, for example, I Have No Mouth and Must Scream a complex history of the characters which you learn as you go along. I think this is fine too as long as it’s not a huge secret, but at the same time it puts the character on another level from me.

This might be why I enjoy games with a simple or generic main character, that you often find in first person games, or a very defined character, like the Sherlock Holmes series, more than the ones with very complicated backgrounds. I like to play as “me”, and if i’m not playing as “me”, I like to play as someone I know so I can pretend he/she is me. In Syberia we learn very quickly about Kate’s ‘other life’, her fiance, job and how she feels about those things. This is great because you can fill her shoes very easily and contributes a lot to the emotional impact of the game.

What do you think? Can you think of any games which handle this issue properly/badly?

‘Resonance’ does kind of work a bit like a “whodunnit” though, given the ensemble cast - it’s pretty clear early on that one (or more) aren’t going to be what they seem.

The twist is less extreme than the one in

Heavy Rain, but that also gave you a chance to play several characters. 

Can’t stand games where you play as a bland innocent who you’re expected to project all your personality onto.  It’s just a crux for lazy writers - dumping a naive, simple character into a new world to explore and meet all the interesting people is a pretty tired story by now.  The best games heroes all have distinct personalities other than “the player”.  Comedic games can get away with it a bit more, but even an everyman like Guybrush isn’t just a cypher (in the way even Sherlock Holmes tends to be in gaming form).

OneFlesh - 25 June 2012 05:46 AM

‘Resonance’ does kind of work a bit like a “whodunnit” though, given the ensemble cast - it’s pretty clear early on that one (or more) aren’t going to be what they seem.

The twist is less extreme than the one in

Heavy Rain, but that also gave you a chance to play several characters. 

Can’t stand games where you play as a bland innocent who you’re expected to project all your personality onto.  It’s just a crux for lazy writers - dumping a naive, simple character into a new world to explore and meet all the interesting people is a pretty tired story by now.  The best games heroes all have distinct personalities other than “the player”.  Comedic games can get away with it a bit more, but even an everyman like Guybrush isn’t just a cypher (in the way even Sherlock Holmes tends to be in gaming form).

You have to remember though, that games aren’t novels. They have the ability to tell themselves and the characters through what you, the player, do in the game. I don’t find that lazy. A game like Myst and its sequels isn’t about the protagonist but you play a huge part in the game, and I think that shows you don’t need a personality at all to play a great hero in a great story.

I liked Resonance and thought it was pretty good overall, but if I had to describe something as “lazy writing” it would be revealing a large chunk of important information after I had spent a lot of time getting to know and feel the character I’m playing. That, and the fact that I play four separate characters, makes me feel like I’m not really involved at all. Then again, others might enjoy the plot twists and find them intriguing so I can only mention my own feelings. I like to hear others thoughts though, especially on what they thought about this in Resonance.

diego - 25 June 2012 06:10 AM

That’s an interesting question - and of course it does make sense if done right. Gabriel Knight, Black Mirror… and even Monkey Island if you play later installments first, they all have some things you learn along the way, which are known to the main character - I actually like this in adventure, or any game - and I have no problem to relate with the character even if I know he knows something I don’t - I see this also as some kind of a puzzle - I will learn of it when the time is right.

It’s actually a design approach - sometimes, it isn’t necessary for a main character to say everything he knows, even though you can often guess things from subtle hints, just as I don’t object starting from the scratch along with my hero. Like in films, books… you’re not always presented at the beginning with some dark character’s background, secrets… but learn of it later.

Yes, I think I agree with this. Depends on the game though. I like to view 3rd person games as a different category of game than any first person game. It’s almost like you’re playing with a friend, telling him/her what to do and getting feedback. While in a first person game you’re usually just yourself.

Imagine this scenario: in the Journeyman Project you (Gage) discover late in the game that you are actually working for the evil Dr. Sinclair (who you have been fighting up until now) and have been all along. How would that come across? I have a feeling it wouldn’t be as welcome as we make it out to be - you’ve played a whole game thinking you’re with one side and then the guy you’re controlling changes sides for you. Or how about this: at the end of Monkey Island you find out you’re one of LeChuck’s undead minions! 

I’d call that simply one of many narrative devices in telling a story (in any medium).
What better way is there to make you aware of moral ambiguity?

First Resonance makes you care about Ed and identify with the character. When the twist comes, that’s why it shocks you, why it makes you feel (Because you CARE).

[spoiler]”...and the things he says leads you to believe he’s one of the good guys…”[/spoiler]

Who said he wasn’t. The whole point of this plot device is to make the player aware that Ed has loads of good and redeeming qualities. He’s a nice guy “like you and me”. His motives are pure: free energy source, peace & posperity for everyone.
Just his actions to this end might easily be put to question.

He wanted to stop the sinister Eleven Foundation from abusing Resonance up to the point of sacrificing himself.
Now tell me who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here?

 
The message here, how I read it, is “Ultimately, there IS no such thing as a GOOD guy/gal”. Not the character, not me, not anyone! Just means, ends and diverging motives.
Your actions are going define which group will asign the good guy/bad guy name tag on you.
Intrinsically, we’re both, the entire time. And so is ED!

Personally I love these kind of devices in any medium, they make me feel, they make me think, also “out of the box”. My box

Tramponline - 25 June 2012 07:19 AM

I’d call that simply one of many narrative devices in telling a story (in any medium).
What better way is there to make you aware of moral ambiguity?

First Resonance makes you care about Ed and identify with the character. When the twist comes, that’s why it shocks you, why it makes you feel (Because you CARE).

[spoiler]”...and the things he says leads you to believe he’s one of the good guys…”[/spoiler]

Who said he wasn’t. The whole point of this plot device is to make the player aware that Ed has loads of good and redeeming qualities. He’s a nice guy “like you and me”. His motives are pure: free energy source, peace & posperity for everyone.
Just his actions to this end might easily be put to question.

He wanted to stop the sinister Eleven Foundation from abusing Resonance up to the point of sacrificing himself.
Now tell me who is the good guy and who is the bad guy here?

 
The message here, how I read it, is “Ultimately, there IS no such thing as a GOOD guy/gal”. Not the character, not me, not anyone! Just means, ends and diverging motives.
Your actions are going define which group will asign the good guy/bad guy name tag on you.
Intrinsically, we’re both, the entire time. And so is ED!

Yes of course, those are very good points. It just seems manipulative to me, considering the game hid something from me for so long. After all, why don’t I get to play Ed after those facts are revealed? Why can’t I play as someone from the Eleven Foundation or someone from the government? They’re part of the story as well. I’m not sure they thought these things out.

Oscar - 25 June 2012 07:40 AM

Yes of course, those are very good points. It just seems manipulative to me, considering the game hid something from me for so long. After all, why don’t I get to play Ed after those facts are revealed? Why can’t I play as someone from the Eleven Foundation or someone from the government? They’re part of the story as well. I’m not sure they thought these things out.

I’m not sure if I understand your question properly.

Because the game’s author chose to tell the story in this fashion. Because we’d be bored stiff if we’d play both sides (mystery destroyed). Because it’s a dramatic plot device etc.!?

Also it’s rather difficult to speak of manipulation in any narrative medium, especially audio-visual ones. If you analyse the narrative “mechanics” behind those stories, they are in itself the purest form of one “manipulation” to the next. This is inherently how these mediums work. 

If you’d play through Resonance one more time in commentary mode, quite a lot of the developer commentaries from Vince will actually answer some of your thoughts & questions.
I’d recommend it, it is very interesting to hear his thoughts on various subjects in the game.

Another game I’ve forgotten about that does this is

‘Yesterday’ - I only played the start but the prologue goes in a really strange direction.

Oscar - 25 June 2012 06:17 AM

A game like Myst and its sequels isn’t about the protagonist but you play a huge part in the game, and I think that shows you don’t need a personality at all to play a great hero in a great story.

Is he a “great hero”?  It’s arguably a great story (though as a Myst-hater I wouldn’t agree), but it’s just a straightforward “explore this world and watch everything happen around you”, same as ‘The 7th Guest’. It’s a valid way to tell a story but it shouldn’t be the only way.

It also stops the horrible trend of the main characters having amnesia and having to suddenly remember their pasts.

Oscar - 25 June 2012 06:17 AM

but if I had to describe something as “lazy writing” it would be revealing a large chunk of important information after I had spent a lot of time getting to know and feel the character I’m playing.

I don’t see it as any different than any other kind of unreliable narrator - like in ‘Fight Club’ or ‘The Murder of Roger Akroyd’.  I don’t treat the game character as “me” any more than I would a film, as most adventure game heroes are clueless kleptomaniacs (and that’s the good ones!  If I had to be someone as annoying as Brian from Runaway I’d not want to keep on living).

Tramponline - 25 June 2012 07:57 AM

I’m not sure if I understand your question properly.

Because the game’s author chose to tell the story in this fashion. Because we’d be bored stiff if we’d play both sides (mystery destroyed). Because it’s a dramatic plot device etc.!?

Also it’s rather difficult to speak of manipulation in any narrative medium, especially audio-visual ones. If you analyse the narrative “mechanics” behind those stories, they are in itself the purest form of one “manipulation” to the next. This is inherently how these mediums work. 

If you’d play through Resonance one more time in commentary mode, quite a lot of the developer commentaries from Vince will actually answer some of your thoughts & questions.
I’d recommend it, it is very interesting to hear his thoughts on various subjects in the game.

I might do that, but not for a while - I’ve had my fill of the game for now. Thanks for the suggestion.

I was actually going to suggest a lot of these games like Resonance would be better off as movies but really, if it’s just one of the directions adventure games are going in, and people are enjoying playing them, then who am I to say that? I do wonder though, whether in a few years we will have a game where you play every character who has a role in the story. It would certainly be interesting. I thought the puzzles in Resonance where you had to use 2 or 3 characters were great and I wish they were used more.

OneFlesh - 25 June 2012 10:00 AM

Another game I’ve forgotten about that does this is ‘Yesterday’ - I only played the start but the prologue goes in a really strange direction.

Yeah I’ve played that one, and I can’t say I enjoyed it very much. Though that was mostly due to the characters and writing rather than the game’s style. Blech.

Oscar - 25 June 2012 11:02 AM

I do wonder though, whether in a few years we will have a game where you play every character who has a role in the story. It would certainly be interesting.

It’d be a very difficult game to plan as most of the time in these sorts of games the characters are just there as obstacles for the player (“fetch this item”, “solve this puzzle”) - if you played that character you could just give the hero what he needs without all this faffing about

A multi-player adventure where every single character was playable but by different people (like a murder mystery whodunnit) would be interesting - but as always with multiplayer games, it’d be hard to make it a decent narrative as replayability’s always such a necessary factor.

TimovieMan - 26 June 2012 06:29 AM

Imagine that you’re playing as a homicide cop chasing a serial killer, and finding out near the end of the game that the cop you were playing was the very killer he was chasing. Unless there’s a schizophrenia subplot or twist, that character would realistically know he was “hunting himself”. This would alter his actions from “finding out who the killer is” into “covering up everything that could lead back to him” - a vastly different approach.

I think if a developer did this I would never touch their games again
Seriously though, that would be fine in a movie but in a game I’m driven by what the character I’m playing knows, whether I’m playing as myself or as someone else. It’s meaningless to go through the process of solving a crime if the detective knows the murderer. What Resonance does is slightly different and obviously more complicated than that, but it still felt a little bit contrived to me.

diego - 26 June 2012 06:42 AM

TimovieMan - 26 June 2012 06:29 AM

But here we’re talking about playing with a character that has a hidden agenda that we’re not aware of. Personally I think that should be avoided in games, especially because it feels unnatural, it betrays the player and leaves the story open to many plot holes.

TM, I’m sure some of your favorite games do exactly that - Ben in Full Throttle doesn’t tell you right at the beginning everything from his past with Malcolm and the relation with other gangs; if you play Curse of Monkey Island first, Guybrush would tell you things from MI1 and 2 only near the end of the game; Bernand in Day of the Tentacle knows things about Dr. Fred you don’t if you haven’t played Maniac Mansion before…

Like Tramponline said, it’s just a narrative device, and it isn’t neither “right” or “wrong” by default. Or how about this: imagine a rich fantasy world in the vein of Tolkin - if you take role of some of the character in that world, how would it be possible for him/her to tell you everything he/she knows about that world right at the start? Unless intro is about several hours long.

I think something like that is unavoidable, I don’t know if you’ve played Resonance, but the game does much more than that. It’s the deliberate withholding of information from the player that feels unnatural, and I think that’s what Timmovieman is talking about.

Personally, I find the very withholding of information in Resonance and the way it’s done to be a stroke of genius and an incredibly immersive experience.

Now in adventure games there are two ways the player can relate with the character he controls. He can be completely identified with him or he can simply be an unseen “instructor” that tells him what to do to accomplish any given objective. The second version was extremely prominent in older adventure games where the main character would talk directly to the player and sometimes even flat out refuse to do what the player instructed him to. Now in these old games this “dissonance” in player-character identification was only used for comic effect and never for narrative purposes, but I don’t see why this sort of “part-identification” should not evolve further and be used for more complex and emotionally involving storylines. I would also like to mention that even in literature and film many people were outraged when this technique was still relatively new ground, for exactly the same reasons that are mentioned here (breaking the identification with the leading character). “The murder of Roger Acroyd” in crime literature, that has been mentioned in an earlier post, is I think a very characteristic example, as are many films by Hitchcock and Lang in cinema. It is a risky technique of storytelling and very easy to go overboard to being plain cheating and unfair, but when done right (as I believe it is in Resonance) it gives an incredibly rich emotional and intellectual experience to the reader/player/viewer. Lately several claims have been made that gaming is evolving into an art-form. If it is indeed so, why should games not be allowed the advantage of the same story-telling techniques used in films and literature?

Reagarding Resonance I was actually extremely immersed in the emotional-intellectual experience of the game. As for the main playable characters not being what they seem, we get an inkling into that, when Roy finds Bennet’s letter. That did not in any way draw me out of the game, it simply threw me into a maelstrom of uncertainty, as for a long time while controlling Bennet I wasn’t sure if I was actually helping or endangering the rest of the characters. That actually added to my enjoyment of the game making my emotional involvement with it much more complex and even contributed to the enormity of my shock and surprise when I found out I had been mistrusting the wrong playable character all along.

I think this whole thing is in a way similar to the old debate whether it’s better to have pre-determined or player-created characters in computer games (a debate often seen in discussions about RPGs). In my opinion, both types of characters are equally interesting and valid and (if done right) both can offer great enjoyment and immersion to the player, albeit each of a completely different kind.