Tag: characters

Friends Through The End

Gaming

This month’s Gamer Banter topic didn’t inspire me.  It was “Which game character do you identify yourself with most/least and why?” and I spent time thinking about it and the simple fact is that I don’t really even identify with video game characters at all.  Sure, I like to follow along the story, and I might be immersed for the duration, but it rarely lingers.  The characters that stick are the ones I create in MMOs.  Even now, years after cancelling my EQ account, I still think about Ishiro Takagi, my human agnostic monk from Qeynos.

But after firing off an email to the Gamer Banter coordinator about how I wasn’t inspired to participate, I thought of a new angle on the topic.

The closest I even came to identifying with a character was Gordon Freeman in the Half-Life series.  The reason was because Gordon is a shell in which I sit while I play.  Gordon never speaks, and the game never has a 3rd person view cut scene.  I am Gordon at all times.  This makes Gordon more like my MMO characters than your traditional video game character because he has no personality unless I give it to him.

Thinking along this line, I drifted to a couple other games by Valve: Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2.  Here, we don’t have Gordon-like shells.  The four survivors in each game quip and banter, they call for help.  Even when I play one, I’m not them, I’m just controlling them.  However, because the game is light on cut scenes and outside the quips and banter the characters are player or AI controlled and not just standing around, these games have given me a group of friends to survive the zombie apocalypse with.  And through them and their banter, I care about them.  Ellis has told me so many stories about his buddy Keith that I want to know if Keith is out there surviving the onslaught of the undead too.  (I secretly pray that Keith is one of the survivors in the inevitable Left 4 Dead 3.)  In fact, since most of the time I play with my friends, the survivors are my friends.

These eight characters have come to define my view of zombie Armageddon.  When the day comes, I want these people, or at least people like them, by my side.  Even when I’m playing solo, I find myself rushing to their aid, not just to keep them alive but because I don’t want them to die.  A subtle distinction, but an important one.  Even when playing solo, I find myself talking to the other survivors, asking them what the hell they are doing, telling them to hurry up, even reminding them to cover me.  It’s almost a little unnerving to realize that I do that, but there it is.

So yeah, the truth is that most of the time I don’t identify with characters, but in Valve’s Left 4 Dead series, they’ve added just enough to the shell I (and my friends, and the AI) inhabit to evoke a response.

This post was part of Gamer Banter, a monthly video game discussion coordinated by Terry at Game Couch. If you’re interested in being part, please email him for details.

Other Gamer Banter participants:
Pioneer Project: The importance of character creation
Silvercublogger: Will Sing Opera For Italian Food
Game Couch: Gabriel Knight
Extra Guy: Who I Identify With
Next Jen: I’d Rather Be Me
carocat.co.uk: A rushed love letter

Alias

Reviews

12 out of 13 nots
for awesome spy stuff, characters I cared about, and actually having an ending

So, I managed to make my way through all five seasons of the TV show Alias.  Damn, that was some good television. Read more

The Challenge of One

Gaming

An idea that I always come back to that I wish MMOs would figure out a way to feasibly implement would be to allow a player to have only one character (or one character per server). My main reason for liking this idea are for community and accountability. If people are who they always are, its easier to find them, to remember them, and reputations have a much better chance of sticking.

However, building a game that only allows one character would necessitate design changes to the existing paradigms, or major overhauls in player expectations. Assuming I can stick with this theme for a bit, I’m going to examine different elements of existing MMOs and how they would benefit from and/or need to change for a single character per player (per server) design.

This inaugural entry is going to begin to cover what I think will be the biggest impact from a single character decision: alternate characters.

The issues brought up by not allowing alternate characters are many and deep. The first and foremost is education. If a player is new to MMOs, they may not be familiar with the various archetypes present in the genre, so when presented with a character creation screen they might be presented with descriptions of what a warrior or a cleric is, but without game experience they probably won’t understand what that description really means.

One thing I would propose would be introducing the concept of a “trainer module” to the game. A simulation of the game. Let players build a character for the trainer, any level, any skill set, any stats, any items. Then throw them into a randomly generated dungeon, an instance just for them completely detached from the game world. On one hand, this will give players a place to try out and understand characters. On the other hand, it also gives you and your players a tool for testing character builds for bugs and flaws.

If this worked out well for solo play, let players do the same thing but run through the dungeon with a group. Even PvP if you wanted. This might also be a good place to work on that LFG tool so players wanting to test can find each other. Hook it up to an IRC chat server and players can even sit around discussing the game. And if the multiplayer aspect of it works, you might even consider throwing in raid training.

The catch is, nothing is saved. These characters are not persistent. You leave and they are lost. You gain nothing. No experience points, no items, no badges, nothing. If you want to test a buid over and over, you have to rebuild it over and over. Maybe if people complain you could allow them to store builds, but that shouldn’t be a first priority, the major objective here is giving the players the ability to understand characters without investing hard work and time that they’ll get angry about later when they discover the character does not play the way they interpreted the description.

A good idea? A bad idea? Of course, no idea can exist in a vacuum, and future entries I plan to explore more options and issues.

Gender in Gaming

Gaming

By now, you may have read about the following news snippet:

Shanda (Nasdaq: SNDA) subsidiary Aurora Technology has frozen game accounts of male players who chose to play female in-game characters in its in-house developed MMORPG King of the World, reports 17173. Aurora stipulates that only female gamers can play female characters in the game, and it requires gamers who chose female characters to prove their biological sex with a webcam, according to the report.

Most of the news revolves around decrying the company for trying something like this, or as expected from the crass Kotaku commenters the CEO of the company must have had an encounter he isn’t proud of…

But let’s take this off in another direction. The game is claiming to be an MMORPG, the key being RP. Role Playing. The problem, as I see it, is that most (and I’d feel safe saying at least 70%, or in the case of World of Warcraft 99.9%) players of these games do not role play beyond the simple fact that their avatar is not a picture of themselves. Would people be as upset if the company had announced that they will be banning players who announce their true gender, breaking the role play?

Henchmen

Gaming

Inspired by Friday’s post and the comments that followed… How would you handle multiple characters under a player-NPC style system?

One thought would be henchmen. You’ve started a fighter character, gotten him a sword and some armor, but now you decide you want to play a mage… So, you roll up your mage, but you don’t want to go it alone, so you pull up your characters and pick your fighter to be a henchmen. Your fighter is now an NPC pet that you can give orders to.

Immediately, its appearant that in a game with levels this probably would be game breaking and unbalancing. Even a skill based game could make this a challenge to implement. But in a game without levels and skills, one that is based on player skill and goal achievement through narrative (quests), this could work very well. A system like this would allow a player to be his own party and play it like the old days of the AD&D games made by SSI, or allow a few friends to fill a gap in their group when they can’t find a player to fill it.

These pets wouldn’t be super smart, they’d be much like current game pets, simple commands and defending the owner, etc, because you wouldn’t want pets to be the defacto method for playing your MMO. Obviously much research and legwork would be needed to make this function, and it would have to be a “right fit” for the game being designed. But for now I just like thinking stuff up until I hit that lottery jackpot…