Monthly Archive for October, 2010

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Fable III press launch and speak to lead designer Josh Atkins and lead artist John McCormack about sexuality in the Fable universe on behalf of PinkPaper.com. It’s an interesting topic that was addressed in greater detail in a recent issue of Edge (now available to read online) and, whilst I’m not the most qualified person to talk on such a subject, I thought I might add some of my personal thoughts on the matter.

Outside of the narrative-heavy or roleplaying-strata of the medium, games don’t often deal with sexuality of any kind. When your lead character, or any other character for that matter, isn’t involved in a romantic subplot, how do you reveal that those characters might be gay? There is, obviously, the choice to make a character outrageously camp, but that in itself doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re gay, and if it were then we’d be stereotyping a type of person that’s most definitely not representative of the gay community as a whole. Without a love story, sexuality becomes irrelevant and it’s left up to the player’s own mental ‘default’ to impose such a thing. When we bemoan the lack of gay characters in games why is it assumed (by the members of whatever research that took place to come to that conclusion) that Master Chief isn’t gay? That the various soldiers you play as in Call of Duty or Medal of Honour don’t have boyfriends waiting for them back home? Hell, it’s not like Sackboy’s out to save a princess is he?

The number of characters in games who could be gay seems to at the very least equal the number of characters who most definitely aren’t. But I’m rather obviously skirting around the issue here, because what we’re really talking about is the fact that the number of characters who definitely aren’t gay far outweighs the number of characters who definitely are.

I think John’s answer in the interview touches on the core issue. Unless it’s a roleplaying game then a story is usually linear, and if a linear story features romance, it’s almost always going to feature a heterosexual relationship. I say ‘almost always’, but for the life of me I can’t think of a single game with a gay relationship as the central romance of the story.  You can make excuses and say that emotional storytelling in games is relatively young, and in other mediums the balance isn’t exactly equal between gay and straight romance, so to get a gay-oriented story we just need more stories. But because storytelling in games is so young, surely it shouldn’t be bound by any of the societal constraints every other medium has had over the last century and beyond?

Fable III avoids the issue by removing love from the main story completely, leaving it up to the player to forge their own romances. Whereas Mass Effect wanted you to fall in love with a particular person as part of the overall narrative- making your gender choice the only reason you might end up playing a gay character- Fable abandons a romantic-plot altogether for the sake of freedom of choice. But for a writer, to remove love from a story altogether is a huge sacrifice. The only real middle-ground is to create a roleplaying game story featuring a romance, and re-write and remodel it completely for a gay character- and are there enough players out there who are either gay or want to play as gay to afford the extra cost? I mean, we’ve barely got to the point where you can choose to play as a woman, let alone a lesbian.

These are tough questions, and ones which I can’t even begin to try and answer.

But I look forward to playing the game that does.

The phrase ‘games writing’ means different things to different people and, in my experience at least, tends to conjure up images of Mass Effect or Fallout (or Monkey Island depending on your age)- dialogue trees, backstory, cutscenes- WORDS basically. So I thought it would be interesting to focus on three games whose premise and storylines are so simple in concept and so pure in their emotional response that the idea of the game being ‘written’ is less familiar. I wrote a script for a ‘silent’ comic once (no speech bubbles, captions or sound effects) and I remember a kid flicking through it at the market stall where I was selling it and saying “What did you write? It’s just pictures.”

This is for him.

Flower

I’m not joking when I say I BOUGHT a Playstation 3 for this game (actually I am, I bought a Playstation 3 so I could write my LittleBigPlanet Guide- but Flower was the first game I played on it). Not quite sure what to expect, I had assumed that the game would be a chilled out, ambient, goalless piece of beautiful time-wasting. Controlling a gust of wind? How on Earth could that be described as a character, let alone the premise of a plot?

And it wasn’t, until halfway through. It’s a magical moment when it suddenly dawns on you that the game you’re playing is something special, and for me it was when a simple piano chord at the end of a level made me realise that I had become emotionally invested in the story- and I didn’t even know there was a story, it just kind of… happened.

I should have noticed the clues from the main hub, the flower pots springing to life to open the next level, whilst outside the window the dark city streets gradually grew more vibrant (or should that be verdant?). You weren’t just any old gust of wind, you were nature herself- an embodiment of life tasked with restoring beauty to the world. The game transformed fluidly from easy little puzzler to an epic tale of light versus dark, and when the final fantastical battle exploded in a shower of blossom I almost shed a tear for the lonely gust of wind who seemed to be fighting not for any cause, but simply because it must.

Flower was the ultimate modern fairytale, and a game that just got everything right, from the heartbreaking soundtrack to the use of the end credits as a poignant final goodbye to the game. It was a story about appreciating simplicity and was an experience that simply couldn’t be replicated in any other medium, ever.

Windowsill

This game is what I like to call a ‘Mac’ game, because its aesthetics and simplicity just somehow fit perfectly in my little white-bordered screen. A small wooden truck goes on a journey across a series of windowsills whilst the views outside provide simple puzzles to retrieve the cube-key for its progression to the next. The story in Windowsill is probably the most abstract of these three games, but as the animations of the views outside become more elaborate, they also become more sinister. You can’t die in the game, but creatures will pick you up and toss you around, cell-shaded disembodied limbs loom over the screen, and in short your truck is shown to be never anything less than vulnerable. It’s a story about aspiration, inspiration and escape as the player realises that the truck isn’t happy to be simply trundling along the foreground past these views- it wants to be a part of them. The game’s stylings are especially effective, as your screen becomes the window frame and the free flowing animation makes the whole thing more tangible and so easier to empathise with. I can’t really talk much more about this game as it would spoil anybody’s experience of it, but it’s only £1.99 on Steam and well worth the hour it takes to play through (you can also visit VectorPark’s site for the game here).

Limbo

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of months you’ll have heard of Limbo, the wickedly gothic platformer on Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade. This is the game that inspired me to write this piece because whilst I’ve seen it get (much-deserved) praise nearly everywhere, I’ve also seen several comments about its ‘lack of plot’. I say to those commenters “au contraire- Simply because Limbo contains only two almost-cutscenes that last about five seconds, does not mean that its story is not sophisticated and powerful.”

There is a great deal of character development in Limbo and the motivation for the young protagonist’s journey through the monochrome landscape is revealed only halfway through the game (what follows could be classed as spoilers by the way). At first the lonely hero is a victim, a vulnerable boy in a wilderness of traps and monsters, and we feel for him because of that. But soon the dynamic changes, he vanquishes the terrifying spider that has been stalking him, pulling off its limbs to progress, and when he gets his own back on a tribe of feral children he’s no longer the victim of the story- he’s driven, a boy that will do anything to reach his goal and will happily resort to even the most sadistic of methods to do so. It’s around this point that the style of the game changes entirely, the creepy jungles replaced with industrial physics puzzles- our hero has become empowered, using the environment to his advantage, there are no longer traps, there are tools, and if that were all that were revealed about the boy then the player might lose the connection with him they had felt so strongly initially.

Except for the first ‘cutscene’.

Halfway through the game is a dreamlike revelation for the boy’s motives that restores our admiration for him. He’s not like the others, trapped in this world because he deserved it. He chose to go in, to rescue his… well I don’t really know what her relationship with the boy is.

The final few seconds of the game are heartbreaking as it cuts away, Inception-style, from the possibility of a happy ending. You’re left wondering if he truly succeeded, or if, like Orpheus and Eurydice, everything will be lost in those final moments.

Or maybe it was all a dream.