Nathan Drake, charismatic hero of the Uncharted video game series that is praised by critics. But, would you really care for him if you watched him kill hundreds without remorse?
BY ALEX BARNARD
“You know what’s really exciting about video games is you don’t just interact with the game physically — you’re not just moving your hand on a joystick, but you’re asked to interact with the game psychologically and emotionally as well. You’re not just watching the characters on screen; you’re becoming those characters.” Nina Huntemann, associate professor of communication and journalism at Suffolk University said.
As much as Dr. Huntemann’s quote reflects the small handful of games that give the gamer full control, it misses the fact that most games fail to provide a true emotional connection with the gamer. This lack of affinity with your onscreen avatar breaks the immersion the stories in games rely heavily on.
It is a wide known fact that a majority of video games contain certain levels of violence. Although these games still try to tell an interesting story, many tend to fall flat emotionally. Take the Uncharted series, as of now there are two Uncharted games which have been praised by critics for their character development and game play. Yet when you actually play the game you spend the majority of your time pumping bullets into more pirates and mercenaries than are appropriate in any scenario. After you finish killing the enemies, the game progresses into a well told story segment that tries to get you to care about the main character, Nathan Drake, and the apparent danger that he is in. Yet the game manages to be completely oblivious to the fact that the charismatic main character the gamer is supposed to “become” has just murdered hundreds of people. Uncharted is far from the only game with immersion breaking moments like this, and this issue makes it seem like the game play designers have never talked to the story writers. Until the game play can fit in with a story, there will be a huge disconnect with the gamers emotions.
Now lets be honest, many popular video game franchises are based on war, where violence is expected and tolerated in almost every medium. However some video games seem to make an attempt to talk about the horrors of war one minute, and then glorify war the next; causing the line to be blurred. For example Brothers in Arms Hell’s Highway, a World War II game very similar to the Band of Brothers television show on HBO, takes time in the game play to show how hellish every thing going on around the player is. Unfortunately, the game also goes into slow motion when the player kills a Nazi. It is designed to gratuitously glorify the bullet blowing his head off in a way that made me feel disgusted for ever associating myself with this game. I tried to assume that the game was trying to show me that this was supposed to be horrifying and strengthen the “war is hell” message the narrative had set up, but the game instead gave me several achievement points when I did this and allowed me to compare my “achievement” to my friends in order to see who had killed the most. At this point I felt like the game had transitioned from a complex war drama into just a pointless arcade game in which I was doing nothing but earning silly points. Until war games decide whether they want to be truly mature or not they will exist in the shadow of war movies, books, and TV shows and the emotional depth they achieve.
Violence isn’t the only thing causes a video game player to feel un-immersed in the character he is playing. Take Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony for example, a game that tells the story of Luis Lopez working his way out of the world of drugs he grew up in. The story does a great job of satirizing modern culture as well as trying to break gamers out of any homophobia they might have by forcing them to work with gay characters. But while playing the game I felt utter hatred for the main character I was pretending to be. Luis Lopez was in all accounts a jerk. While controlling the game, I made him dress nice, obey the law, and stay away from his old drug-dealing friends. However, the game controlled scenes showed Luis abusing women, murdering civilians to make a quick buck, and helping his friends sell drugs. As much as I wanted Luis to be myself, when the game took control I was forced to act in ways I never would in real life. How can one be expected to invest their emotions in a character they can’t stand? Which brings up the ultimate problem with most game stories, people can’t feel immersed in characters they don’t have efficient control over, and without that control most games are just movies with unrealistic stories.
I’m not saying that games can’t tell stories, in fact many games, such as the installments in the Dragon Age, Bioshock, Portal, and Fallout franchises, tell phenomenal stories that offer an interesting emotional narrative that can only be told in a video game form. However, this is because these games give the gamer more of a choice in how they handle things in their virtual world, that’s the key difference. Until the majority of video games can give gamers control over their actions while in the game, people will not have the same emotional moments in games that they can have with literature and film.
