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RPGs: A Hero is Me
Jun. 12th, 2010 11:27 pmBased on the reviews, I'm pretty glad I decided not to pick up Obsidian's espionage action RPG Alpha Protocol. It sounds as if it's more shooter than RPG, and I suck at that kind of game. However, even before I saw the reviews I'd already lost interest ... at the exact moment I found out that you had to play a guy. More specifically, you have to play as secret agent Michael Thornton, who is a straight, white American dude because that just seems to be how these things go.
I don't automatically find it objectionable when a game forces me to control a male character, and have spent many entertaining hours ordering Tex Murphy and Phoenix Wright around. However, I am not keen on supposed role-playing games that give you no meaningful control over character creation, and I'm especially not a fan of the fact that these games always seem to have male protagonists. Other genres at least have the occasional Lara Croft to break up the sausage fest. It's not only the gender factor that puts me off RPGs with pre-created protagonists, though. Part of the appeal of the genre for me is making your own character(s), and the more detail about the PC the game fills in the less player choice there is.
This is not a problem for other types of game, because the relationship between player and player character is not constructed in the same way. I don't care that the protagonist comes with his own name, personality and motivations when I'm playing an adventure game or rocking out on an imaginary guitar. But while I've made plenty of RPG characters that were nothing like me in any obvious way, I do need to be able to identify with them on a level that just doesn't matter when I'm telling Guybrush Threepwood to go pick up that rubber chicken.
No RPG yet created gives the player a completely unfettered choice about the kind of character they create. The ones that offer the most freedom - Neverwinter Nights, Drakensang and the Icewind Dale games for example - tend to leave you in charge of interchangeable ciphers with no personality or background except what you imagine. Other games go too far in the opposite direction. The Baldur's Gate series are my favourite computer games of all time, but I've always felt they pushed a bit too much background onto the PC. Even apart from the Bhaalspawn origin that's the substance of the story, there's an underlying assumption that your character is about the same chronological age as your sister Imoen, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you're playing as an elf, a dwarf or a gnome. (Let's not even worry about how someone raised at Candlekeep became a druid or a necromancer.) Also, the sequel assumed that my character would travel with Minsc and Jaheira and that they would care about their sister's kidnapping. This was a sound deduction to make about my paladin, but not so much for my evil assassin.
The game that really nails this balance, IMHO, is Dragon Age. Giving the player six different origin stories to choose from allows a great blend of specificity and freedom. You can be a dwarf noble struggling with the politics of Orzammar, an elf from the ghetto or a human mage raised in the tower, and it all makes an equal amount of sense. There's an underlying assumption that the PC is young and inexperienced, but since you start as a level one character and there are no particularly long-lived races wandering around Ferelden this seems reasonable enough. In all cases, two genders are available. Unfortunately, there's not as much accommodation for characters of colour, since any visible relatives of the PC are white. (I did make both my mage and my Orlesian Grey Warden for Awakening black, since the subject of their parentage does not come up.)
Imperfect or not, though, I think the Dragon Age system is a good way of handling things. It takes more work on the part of developers, but the result is that the player gets a say in their backstory without being locked down to playing one pre-chosen character, and a degree of freedom without controlling a blank slate. That's a much bigger draw for me than playing as some guy called Michael Thornton.
I don't automatically find it objectionable when a game forces me to control a male character, and have spent many entertaining hours ordering Tex Murphy and Phoenix Wright around. However, I am not keen on supposed role-playing games that give you no meaningful control over character creation, and I'm especially not a fan of the fact that these games always seem to have male protagonists. Other genres at least have the occasional Lara Croft to break up the sausage fest. It's not only the gender factor that puts me off RPGs with pre-created protagonists, though. Part of the appeal of the genre for me is making your own character(s), and the more detail about the PC the game fills in the less player choice there is.
This is not a problem for other types of game, because the relationship between player and player character is not constructed in the same way. I don't care that the protagonist comes with his own name, personality and motivations when I'm playing an adventure game or rocking out on an imaginary guitar. But while I've made plenty of RPG characters that were nothing like me in any obvious way, I do need to be able to identify with them on a level that just doesn't matter when I'm telling Guybrush Threepwood to go pick up that rubber chicken.
No RPG yet created gives the player a completely unfettered choice about the kind of character they create. The ones that offer the most freedom - Neverwinter Nights, Drakensang and the Icewind Dale games for example - tend to leave you in charge of interchangeable ciphers with no personality or background except what you imagine. Other games go too far in the opposite direction. The Baldur's Gate series are my favourite computer games of all time, but I've always felt they pushed a bit too much background onto the PC. Even apart from the Bhaalspawn origin that's the substance of the story, there's an underlying assumption that your character is about the same chronological age as your sister Imoen, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you're playing as an elf, a dwarf or a gnome. (Let's not even worry about how someone raised at Candlekeep became a druid or a necromancer.) Also, the sequel assumed that my character would travel with Minsc and Jaheira and that they would care about their sister's kidnapping. This was a sound deduction to make about my paladin, but not so much for my evil assassin.
The game that really nails this balance, IMHO, is Dragon Age. Giving the player six different origin stories to choose from allows a great blend of specificity and freedom. You can be a dwarf noble struggling with the politics of Orzammar, an elf from the ghetto or a human mage raised in the tower, and it all makes an equal amount of sense. There's an underlying assumption that the PC is young and inexperienced, but since you start as a level one character and there are no particularly long-lived races wandering around Ferelden this seems reasonable enough. In all cases, two genders are available. Unfortunately, there's not as much accommodation for characters of colour, since any visible relatives of the PC are white. (I did make both my mage and my Orlesian Grey Warden for Awakening black, since the subject of their parentage does not come up.)
Imperfect or not, though, I think the Dragon Age system is a good way of handling things. It takes more work on the part of developers, but the result is that the player gets a say in their backstory without being locked down to playing one pre-chosen character, and a degree of freedom without controlling a blank slate. That's a much bigger draw for me than playing as some guy called Michael Thornton.