For an audience, it is easier to sympathise and align ourselves
with a hero who has an almighty villain standing in his way. On the
other hand, if that villain seems underpowered or if we are not given a
sufficiently clear reason for why we should be rooting against them,
it's hard to connect to either the hero or his conflict. This is why
it's not uncommon for villains to be given more depth to their
characters than the protagonists and why the bad guys will often be the
focal points of discussion about any particular story. It's important
that if the protagonist is a big character, the antagonist is at least
as big so the dramatic odds seem stacked in their favour. Everyone
loves John McClane, but Hans Gruber is remembered just as fondly. When
Alan Rickman (again) stole the show as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,
Kevin Costner demanded that the film be re-edited because test
audiences were enjoying the villain far more than the hero: the
finished film, for all bar the Sheriff's scenes, was considered a
critical failure. Rickman is one of a long line of actors who are
considered specialists in playing villains, because no matter how
complex and intelligently written the story, audiences need someone to
boo and hiss at.
As storytelling becomes an increasingly important part of gaming,
this key dramatic device continues to go largely overlooked. When
talking about their games, developers will go to great lengths pointing
out how much backstory has been written for their heroes and the worlds
they inhabit, yet scarcely allow the villain so much as a footnote.
This is a particularly unusual development because if anything, having
strong characters as protagonists in games is less important than in
any other medium. In gaming, we do not following a protagonist as much
as become them. Their actions are our actions and while we need
motivation to do perform the tasks demanded of us, all but the key
points of any extended game protagonist's backstory becomes irrelevant
the moment a gamer picks up the controller. Nobody cares that Marcus
Fenix is in prison for saving his father or was previously a war hero,
because none of those things have anything to do with us or the mission
we are engaged in. The gamer's story is the hero's story, written while
fighting as one.
While all this information on Fenix ends up doing little more than
filling out space in the manual and drawing out cut-scenes, it often
seems to have been at the detriment of providing a compelling
antagonist for the player to look forward to conquering at the end of
the game. Taken as a whole, the Locust are fine for gunning
down/chainsawing on a battle-by-battle basis. But the game's supposed
true antagonist, General RAAM, is given little more development than
being bigger than the other Locust and killing one of Fenix's allies.
On the basis of Gears of War as a standalone story, RAAM does
not feel linked with Fenix's journey other than to provide a boss
battle at the conclusion. There's little effort made to give a
prevailing reason for gamers to want to beat him any more than the
multitude of other Locusts. Even if he is ultimately revealed as the
henchman of a higher power in the Gears trilogy, we aren't
given enough information about that power to make doing damage or
learning more about them by conquering RAAM any greater motivation:
just knowing they exist doesn't make them a credible enemy. It's unfair
of course to focus entirely on Gears when that game is no more culpable of making this misjudgment than countless others. The villains of the Uncharted games are mired in cliché, Modern Warfare
designates villains by role (ultranationalists) rather than action,
while Nintendo repeats themselves so often with the likes of Ganondorf
(I'll excuse Bowser, since he's supposed to be one-note and ridiculous)
that even with greater personality his threat becomes negligible
because we've beaten him so many times before – plus his most powerful
attack only takes off three hearts, but that's a different problem
altogether.
But while Ganondorf has become tiresomely overused, one of the few
occasions Nintendo did use a different villain proves how much a
well-developed antagonist can add to a game. In Majora's Mask, which I wrote about in a recent article,
Skull Kid (or Majora, if you prefer) is not only developed fully as a
character, but in a way that makes him key to every aspect of the drama
(Link arrives in Termina because of him; his hatred is the reason
Termina is in peril) and symbolic of the game's themes through his
opposing nature to that of protagonist Link (Skull Kid's mission is to
destroy lives because of his loneliness and lust for revenge; Link
wishes to save the friends he makes and find those he lost). The more
we learn about him, the more he as a character makes players want to
keep fighting until his plan is thwarted. System Shock 2's SHODAN or BioShock's
Andrew Ryan are equally fine examples of how fully constructed
villains, made integral to the dramatic experience of a game, can
become focal points for player immersion and drive. As the medium
slowly but surely finds its artistic feet, hopefully more videogame
writers will start to see the importance of duality in their drama,
giving their protagonists worthy foes to give meaning and purpose to
his efforts throughout the game, rather than just for end-of-game
spectacle.
