What a Character
To me I believe that video games are better with characters. So, while in my last blog post I did agree with Mr. Bogost, I don’t really see eye to eye with him on the topic of characters not being involved in games.
I think that having characters in games makes it more personal for the game players and more relatable in a way. Especially in sports games such as, EA Sports NHL, they always leave the option for you to create your own player and work your way up the ladder of hockey, from juniors to the minors to the NHL. Being able to create your own character you can kind of get what it is like to actually going through the process of playing junior hockey, getting drafted and traded or what have you.
So, I think that goes for all kinds of games as well. Even games like Frogger and Super Mario Bros. all have characters and those were some of the most popular games not that long ago. I’m not really sure what all games would look like without any characters in them. The biggest example you gave was SimCity and I don’t think that is a great argument to games not needing characters.
Mr. Bogost even goes on to say, “This was a radical way of thinking about video games: as non-fictions about complex systems bigger than ourselves. It changed games forever — or it could have, had players and developers not later abandoned modeling systems at all scales in favor of representing embodied, human identities.” So, your biggest argument about SimCity, which was a game without characters and you build a city from the ground up, they made a game of the characters inside this world and called it The Sims. To me this is because these kinds of games can only keep people interested for so long before they get bored. They evolved the game to The Sims because, in my opinion, it dealt with human people that gamers could connect more with rather than a city.
However, one reason why I could see a reason to eliminate characters in games would be to eliminate a kind of racism in games. In, “The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside Your Own Experience” they talk about how in some of these games they portray different types of genocidal history using aliens. They say, “And sometimes games simply end up repeating real-world crimes and exploitation via those magical dragons. It was distressing to play through Mass Effect: Andromeda’s oblivious relationship to colonialism. Humans serve as a player-surrogate, settling on planets and killing their hostile native population in droves.”
So, there are some cases I can see where characters can cause problems in games. Like when games use characters, even though not realistic like aliens or whatever, to show a mass genocide of a race that relates to what has happened here in real life is where I would agree we don’t need characters in games for that. He also goes on to say, “This is not to say that there are topics which games cannot or should not address through metaphor, but when there are clear real-world parallels to presented scenarios which affect marginalized groups, those groups notice. Players and developers alike should be paying attention to the way they are calling attention to the mutilated and misleading parallels games so often employ.”
So, while I do agree that characters should be involved in games I can see where there can be a line that is drawn. I think characters in games make the game more relatable to the player and without any characters it could become boring. But I do see how characters could be used in games to bring attention to scenarios facing marginalized groups and that could start a conversation about those situations.
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/
The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside Your Own Experience. (n.d.). Retrieved September 26, 2017, from https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/9k9vw5/the-pitfalls-of-trying-to-tell-stories-outside-your-own-experience
