Something Actually Gaming Related

OK, so my introduction here was a bit long-winded and not particularly on-topic, but us Dancing Bottles types are a bit ADD. I'm actually very prone to wax philosophical when I get a notion rattling around in my head for too long.

So, onto games. I beat my copy of Pokemon White version recently, and the whole thing got me thinking...why does Garbodor have bad mouse ears?

Seriously, though, it got me thinking about villains. For those of you adverse to spoilers, read no further, because I'm about to spoil the plot of every Pokemon game ever. (The random 10 y/o kid wins!)

OK, while Pokemon is never a franchise renowned for its plot, I'm gonna stick with it as an example, because it offers us many different types of villains, fewer people mind Pokemon spoilers than, say, Final Fantasy, and N is who got me thinking in the first place.

We can start with the word "villain," which in and of itself seems to convey an evil person. This is not necessarily true. A villain is really just somebody who opposes a hero. They come in many flavors. Pokemon favored an evil villain early on, in the form of Giovanni. Here was a ruthless man who was running all of the organized crime in the Kanto region, seized control of the largest corporation in the country in an attempt to blackmail the CEO into mass-producing the best capture tool known to man for exclusive use by his criminal grunts, ordered the production of the monster known as Mewtwo, and ran all of these operations out of his Gym in Viridian City. After his sound defeat, he sees the error of his ways and vanishes, leaving you to clean up one last mess of his in Cerulean Cave.

These days, we get N, who appears before you, speaking to your Pokemon, speaking of liberation of his "friends" so that humans can never hurt them again. He talks about how his ideal will eventually drive apart people who love Pokemon and the Pokemon they love so much, and how this breaks his heart. When he clearly has the upper hand, he tells you how to oppose him, and asks you to stand as the legendary hero of Unova and try to defeat him, so he can be sure that his ideal is strongest before he completes his plan, which he's only doing for the good of Pokemon so they can be perfect beings again. So, what gives? How did we go from the perfect mafia boss to PETA and still have a working antagonist on our hands?

Villains have some important components. These include (but aren't limited to) character, motive, and plans. Giovanni was shown clearly to have all three, with a personality befitting a mafia don, a very understandable motive of wanting more money and power, and plans that involved a lot of brute force and intimidation. He worked well. N, on the other hand, showed a very kind and empathic personality, a strong desire to liberate Pokemon from perceived suffering, and he planned to reenact the legend of the hero who rallied all of Unova behind him without the need for force. While the two are both polar opposites, they both exist as viable villains because they can fulfill important criteria of being such. For similar reasons, Teams Aqua and Magma fell flat, because they couldn't. Their characterizations were bland, their motives were frankly stupid (a desire to destroy all/most land/water in the world is in no way realistic), and their master plans were to awaken the ancient beasts of legend (with the wrong Orbs) to fight to the death like it said in the legends of old... The same legends that mentioned the fight would be stopped by Rayquaza and his GIANT SPACE LAZOR... And we're left with a facepalming player and hero who has to clean up after a pack of morons.

We as players crave villains we can understand. We don't have to agree; it's often better if we don't. But there is also a market for villains we don't get. Team Aqua and Team Magma were in that category, but failed to deliver us an experience. For villains who did, we can turn to the likes of Cyrus and Cipher. Cipher was a great villainous organization, but it's not because we got their motives. They were hauling in innocent Pokemon, turning them into heartless killing machines, and giving them away to a poverty-torn region, rife with street rats and crooks, and utterly devoid of wild Pokemon. To what end? We're not sure. But that was scary. The plan was something that worried us, because we could extrapolate it to logical conclusions. Maybe Shadow Pokemon had a trigger that would make them obey Cipher. Maybe they were establishing a black market to finance a larger machination. Who knows? And Cyrus? How are we supposed to understand a man with no emotion whatsoever? And the scary part with him is that he WON. His plan was flawless, and only foiled by something he thought didn't exist. We couldn't understand where he was coming from, but he was a terror, because he almost undid the whole world.

Now, moving off of Pokemon, we can put this discussion into the scope of villains as a whole. Villain-crafting is needed in pretty much any series, all in assorted scopes and backgrounds. From the standpoint of a would-be game designer and frequent DM, I can cite one huge pitfall I often see with villain design, and that is the favorite archetypes. Villains have trends, it seems. Some people have a favorite build for the persona and motive, or for how the plans should go. And let me tell you, it gets stale. Villains are so variable. One of the most refreshing moments for me was when, after a long string of complex personas, complicated motives, and borderline agreeable philosophies, I got to a villain who was ready to end the world because of a simple inferiority complex. He was immature, but not totally unrealistic. Remember, not all villains are pure evil, but they can't all be good or ambiguous. Jok the barbarian probably doesn't threaten the world, but the Unholy Goddess Tr'anik probably doesn't care about the remote peasant village. Hell, not all of them even need to pose a threat in the classic sense.

So, in short, we at Dancing Bottles advocate diverse, three-dimensional villains, so keep some of these basic concepts in mind when designing or analyzing villains. For our own projects, we've tried very hard to keep our villains feeling quite alive and variable. For designing your own villains for any purpose, I highly recommend checking out Rich Burlew's take on it instead of just listening to me ramble.

Until next time.

-the Hill Giant

An Unsolicited Philosophical Rant

Greetings to any who may be reading this. It's not often I put my thoughts out for the consideration of the Internet as a whole, and certainly my first time doing so here, so I owe an introduction. Around here, I'm known as the Hill Giant. Just to dispel any preconceptions that may be anchored to such a moniker, it's worth mentioning that I'm currently sitting in the kitchen typing while I cook myself a meal, am wearing a giant fuzzy bathrobe, despise any sport not named dodgeball, and I'm here to talk philosophically. In a nutshell, yes, I am somewhere between 6'9” and 6'11” and weigh well over 400 lbs. (been a while since I last got measured), but I lack the sort of persona one would expect to go with the stature. And that, dear readers, leads me to what I wanted to discuss today.

You ever hear the people bitching that there is no justice in the world? You hear all the stories about the people who work their asses off and still can't make ends meet to feed their starving children, while some fat white guy in a suit rolls around in more money than some countries have to their name (which he got just for being born). But, you don't hear about the people who do good, honest work and live comfortably for it. You hear about Microsoft gobbling up smaller businesses, killing jobs to expand their shoddy software, and trying to establish a monopoly, but you don't hear about Steve Jobs starting in a garage, overcoming the challenges in his path, constantly innovating, giving his loyal customers what they ask for, and being hugely successful for it. And the list goes on. I'm not going to inject too much of my stance on the above issues, as it's rather irrelevant, but their existence should shed some light on a huge discrepancy. If the world is just, why are good people struggling by on a nonlivable minimum wage while 90+ percent of the wealth is with 2% of the population? If the world is unjust, is it just coincidence that the woman who went through college and aimed for a decent career, never giving up and always giving her all, can support her family comfortably for her effort?

The world is always sketchy, wrought in enough shades of gray to constitute a colorblind Crayola box. And yet, we as humans crave the world in black and white. If it could be presented to us an an easy pop-out book format where “right” and “wrong” would jump out of the page at anyone who could be bothered to pull a handy little tab, I'm sure many people would happily take that. So, what gives? Humans are fond of sweeping this discrepancy under the rug by painting a worldview of their own. Everyone has one, and I'm no exception here. There is, however, an underlying problem with worldviews. I say “painting” because it tells the process and the shortcoming, and that shortcoming is just like an artist's canvas. On it is the wondrous world that the artist set out to capture, with everything that was wanted neatly contained. What lies beyond the canvas, however, is unseeable. It seems a safe assumption that the rest of the world mirrors the small portion snapshotted with the canvas, but there's no guarantee. In other words, we see the world in the context we want, and we make these “blind spots” where our canvas runs out. I mean, look at the unjust world example above. The person who wants to see the world as unjust will see the minimum wage people, forced to forever toil for not enough money, but not the people earning a good living for solid effort, and vice-versa for one who wants to see a just world. Organized religion can make this blinding process even easier. After all, there's a convenient book telling all the practitioners what is and isn't good, and what is unknown to the book is either God's newest blessing or some heinous blasphemy, depending on whether or not the old dude in the pope hat likes it. OK, so maybe that's a bit harsh, but point is that these blind spots are there, and can often times border on the ridiculous.
To offer an example, working my job at a convenience store, I once had a black man enter the store, talking blatant Ebonics into his cell phone, iPod blaring hip-hop on earbuds that weren't in, wearing a sports jersey that looked fresh off the high school campus, sporting a plethora of excessively gaudy gold chains and pendants, and he sauntered up to my register and asked for some blunts. I will reiterate that all this man needed to be his perfect walking stereotype was a 40 of Big Bear in hand, and yet, when I asked for his ID for the cigars like I do everyone else, he openly accused me of only asking because he was black. So, here's a man who stood before me as a walking caricature of his own race, and yet he found me racist for a) being white, and b) inconveniencing him. From my side of the counter, the hypocrisy was so blindingly obvious, but he was too absorbed in his own perception of my supposed prejudice against his skin color to notice how ridiculous he was being.

And this brings me to my next point. Worldviews don't just dictate how we react to information, but also how it gets to us in the first place. They give us a context that we filter everything through. This goes back to that whole painting metaphor I was using. Let's say I have a painting of a white adult male, with long brown hair, unkempt robes, and a beard and mustache, sitting cross-legged with his arms open, talking to a bunch of people sitting around him. I paint this man on a blanket in a park in what appears to be 1960's America, and he's a hippie, clearly discussing, peace, casual sex, weed, and whiny protest music. I paint him in ancient Israel and put a holy yellow glow behind his head? Oops, turns out it was Jesus. Distortions happen because we try to put a context to new input. And the worst offenses of this happen when people try to define what's beyond their canvas. If you ask some groups, there's the people they know, and then everyone else is this brainwashed myrmidon, working until they die, unintelligent, consumed by “the system” and forced to buy any product that there's a commercial for. And yet, I have never laid eyes on this myrmidon species that the goths speak of, and the people I come into contact with at random strike me as a more diverse lot than emo kids ever will be. I'm starting to think that these poor drones are like trans fats; they aren't found in a damn thing, but one morning everyone decided to proudly proclaim that they don't contain any to look better. Nevertheless, these “counterculture” groups will all emphasize how each and every constituent member is unique by all differing from this fictitious stereotype in the exact same way.

Where am I going with all this? It's hard to say. I think what I'm getting at here is that people make asses out of themselves by letting narrow and individualized standards define the whole world around them. I've had somebody try to tell me that national security is a joke because one man at a major airport forgot to turn on the metal detector at the start of his shift, and was immediately fired when his mistake was noticed (and yet, according to a research project I did last semester, our enhanced security has saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives). I've heard complaints that the government doesn't respect our Constitutional rights from the same people who expressed lament when they found out that even crackpots like the Westboro Baptist Church were protected by the First Amendment. (Let me say, I think Westboro is a very incorrect, crazed, and disrespectful group who are very deserving of karmic just desserts sooner or later, but as citizens, they do have the rights as us.) Hell, a substantial majority of people see my stature and that I pack Tab A as opposed to Slot B in my pants, and say I should have a deep booming voice, listen to hard rock and metal, have a love of football and basketball, and be able to bench press an SUV. A good 50% of these people immediately assume I'm gay when they find out my voice is a bit softer than they expected, that I listen so gentler music like 80's rock and 90's pop, and that my hobbies include role-playing games and cooking. Why? Because the context associated with my appearance doesn't match how I am, so a reason is quickly produced.

Gamers are often accused of living in their own little worlds. We're said to be escapists, crafting realities to our liking so we don't have to deal with it. In truth, we just catch flack for being honest about doing what everyone else is doing. And perhaps we do it deliberately and with purpose. As I've mentioned, I am aware of the problem of human worldviews, but I can't claim exception to it. That would be pretentious. But, I think people need to understand that they all live in created worlds. People need to open up and understand the worlds of those around them, too. While I can't hold hypocrisy against the unaware, I can attempt to open eyes. Look at the people around you, and most of all, look at yourself. The truth of things is subjective, and it's created by everyone. There is always a bigger picture than you've painted for yourself to look at. Never forget that.

This has been my two cents, also known as the delirious ramblings of a big guy who thinks too much. And with that, I'll sign off until next time, when I bring you something actually gaming-related!

-the Hill Giant