Characters? In My Video Games? It’s More Likely Than You Think.
When I think about games, games like Pokemon, Mario, and Crash Bandicoot come into mind; Games that center around a character.
However, Ian Bogost seems to think otherwise. In his article titled “Video Games Are Better Without Characters,” which was published on The Atlantic on March 13th of 2015, he starts out with saying, “The real legacy of SimCity is its attemptㅡ and failureㅡ to make complex systems the protagonists instead of people.” Reading this line already threw me off, because what is a game without a character? Nonetheless, I continued reading.
A couple paragraphs down, he states that “SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors.” This, I do agree with, although having never played it, I understand by how Bogost is explaining it. It’s a game about successfully making a city and making sure it doesn’t crumble by salvaging the relationship between all the factors and contributors that go into making a city.
In the second to last section of his article, he brings up an argument that I’ve seen him make before concerning a different topic (why games shouldn’t have stories). That argument is the argument that “other narrative media succeed more often and more profoundly at producing identification and empathy with individuals of our own creed, color, gender, and sexual identification — or with those of other identifications.” He said the same thing about games having narratives: why should games bother with it if the other media already do it so well? In defense of games, I say that we should because not everyone has access or interest in other media. Ever since media other than books came out, the consumption of books for entertainment has gone down. The interest that was once there is somewhere else now. I can attest to this because I have never read the Harry Potter books, but I’ve marathoned all the movies (except for Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them).
After Bogost’s article, I read another article written by Kat Brewster and published on Waypoint that was pretty recent (published May 22nd, 2017), titled “The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside Your Own Experience.” This article was much more entertaining and interesting to me (not because I have a dislike for Bogost), because instead of saying “we don’t need characters in games,” it was saying “we need characters that more people can relate to and identify with.”
Brewster makes an interesting point in her article when she says “ There’s a growing movement within the games industry to tell these kinds of stories, to examine familiar stories and narratives from the point of view of the marginalized people who were so often reduced to stereotypes or ignored entirely. But while developers are increasingly committed to this work, the industry as a whole is still largely male and white.” This is a statement that I agree with wholeheartedly, because while I’m glad that the industry is making an effort to expand on telling the stories of marginalized people, they are telling stories that are not their own, and so they don’t have the experience and feelings needed to make the end product good.
She then quotes Jayanth in her article while talking about the game 80 Days. In the game, there is an arc where a girl of the indigenous Australian Murri tribe tells the protagonist (a white male) of the sufferinf that her tribe has gone through. You can offer to help, but she will continue to refuse your help because she is scared. Because you (the protagonist, a white male) look like the people that have oppressed her and her tribe. “‘Exactly!’ Jayanth says. ‘This is not a bug; this is the entire point of the game’” was the response to a user posting a comment stating “ Maybe it’s a life lesson: sometimes, no matter what you do to try to help, bad things will happen.”
Later in the article, Brewster makes another point supporting her argument that you can’t write about experiences that are not yours. She states, “ When the market is saturated with stories for, about, and by white cisgendered men, stories about anyone other than that requires respect, intention, and care. It requires research, consultation, and a diverse development process. And this takes time.” The context surrounding this quote is a conversation between Brewster, Ingold, and Humfrey about their [Ingold and Humfrey] new gmae in development “following Aliya Elasra, ‘an archaeologist who studies the lost places and forgotten history of the strange Nebula where she lives’” which then transitioned into a conversation about how in movies there is always a man twice the heroine’s age who is asking for her hand in marriage.
Brewster then brings up the fact that that is the same thing as having actresses act opposite of actors twice their age, saying that this trope should be left in the past, to which I agree.
The particular quote about stories about marginalized people requiring respect, intention, and care is a really important quote, because there are not a lot of stories like that. Although I and Brewster agree that they do mean well, the least that the industry can do is invite and seek out actual people of marginalized cultures as resources for their stories and criticisms.
While I disagree strongly with Bogost about not having characters in games, he does bring up a good point that games can show more about the systems and relationship between many things in our world. Brewster writes an excellent article about having more characters that people can identify with, to which I agree. But that’s just me. To each their own, as long as your own doesn’t put others in danger.
