Significance of Characters in Video Games

Video games need to have characters. From Mario Kart to Call of Duty, Call of Duty to NHL, NHL to 80 Days… All of these games have meaningful characters, that in one way or another, add significance to the game. I chose these games to talk about because they are all different genres, if you will, and all include characters. Mario Kart for example, could not even be a game without characters. Half the excitement that comes from this game, is gathering around the TV with your friends and fighting over who gets to be Peaches, Toad, Princess Daisy, Donky Kong, Mario, Luigi, and the list goes on. The same goes NHL, as friends fight over which team they get to be with their favorite players. Call of Duty games have made upgrades and included the use of personalized characters, you get to go into battle with. Other than just adding excitement, and fun to the games, developers are using characters to attack heavier burdens. Bigger than all of us. In the article, The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside Your Own Experience, Kat Brewster addresses the issues of colonialism, sexism, and racism. Brewster 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.” For example, the game 80 days, attempts to use characters to take the weight off of the greater cause. Although I have personally never played the game, I read that you start the game out as a white privileged, male protagonist, similar to myself. At a certain point in the game, you run into an indigenous Australian girl of a Murri Tribe. This allows you to have a conversation and offer to help her troubled tribe. However, she will not let you because of a lack of trust. The lack of trust has piled up over years of the protagonist’s “ignorance of local culture and politics,” correlating almost perfectly to modern day problems. After several attempts to help, taking different routes each time, you come to conclusion that nothing will help this situation. One user put, “sometimes, no matter what you do to try to help, bad things will happen.” The message is intentional and this is what the creators wanted to arouse. This attempt at a life lesson on stereotypes is not possible without these characters. One of the game contributors, Jayanth, claims the girl was not supposed to ever accept help from the protagonist. Jayanth says, “This is not a bug; this is the entire point of the game.” The idea of enabling characters in video games to address social causes are in the early stages, but Brewster is onto something when she says, “when more stories by more people are told, this weight might be slowly lifted.” Before reading “The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside of Your Experience,” I had never thought about using a video game to attack world problems, but I support this idea. Being an American, white male, I am fully aware of how foreigners look at me. We have our own stereotypes because of the ignorance of culture, and I’d like to become more aware of other cultures. If I can do that while playing a video game, or at least realize I need to be more culturally aware, I think that is pretty cool. Kids, such as my siblings, are growing up with these games, and are at very impressionable ages. If they can become better people without even knowing it, that could be life changing. Maybe our future generations aren’t as screwed as many people believe. This message is the first of many that needs to be received, but this is a great start and potentially has endless opportunities. In the end, characters are needed in video games, not only for additional fun, but to teach life lessons, as it has been proven it works, in 80 Days.

Bogost, I. (2015, March 13). Video Games Are Better Without Characters. Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/video-games-are-better-without-characters/387556/

Brewster, K. (2017, May 22). The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside Your Own Experience. Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/9k9vw5/the-pitfalls-of-trying-to-tell-stories-outside-your-own-experience