This is a trend that?s been bothering me a lot recently when I go to the movies or play video games. This is about the representation of evil. Understand this; people are not evil. Of course there are people who do evil things, and while I, and most other people would call them evil, they themselves would rarely agree. Perhaps a better introduction would be people are not good or more accurately yet, people are neutral, and will do what they think is right for themselves 100% of the time, without exception.
The problem is that people have the ability to justify just about anything, any conceivable act of staggering cruelty you can imagine; and many you can?t. Every atrocity you hear about had someone on the other side who thought themselves completely in the right. The people who flew themselves into the world trade centre really believed that they were vessels of God; they were looking forward to spending eternity in the special garden of paradise reserved for martyrs, with friends and loved ones they had lost, for all time. In other words, they were human beings.
That?s just the way the world is, but while environment plays a crucial role in who you are, you ultimately make your own decisions in life, and evil must be punished. Most people have a good sense of right and wrong, there are natural morals built from your evolutionary heritage, most people don?t murder, or steal, or lie compulsively; from tribes living in the Amazon to rural Hertfordshire, people are generally good. It?s up to each of us to seek out good and reject evil, and decide which is which for ourselves. These are the aspirations we often see in movie heroes or when we jump into the protagonist of the latest action game.
It's only one side of the story, an adventurous tale of obvious good over obvious evil, with evil often depicted as a dark shadow that drifts in and out of the plot; evil for evil?s sake. Real life is never so black and white. People have motives, people have desires and fears, both the good and the bad, and understanding these things about the character yields a much better experience and emersion. If you understand why the protagonist is doing what she?s doing and more importantly, why the ?bad guy? is doing what they?re doing, then you feel the investment a lot more in what?s going on, and end up routing for whomever best fits your own moral test, which may not always be that of the traditional heroes we so often see.
By motives, I mean I want something more substantial than, ?bad guy wants to take over the world", though there are ways of doing that right and of doing it wrong. The Modern Warfare and Transformer series being examples of the disastrously wrong, Bioshock and Apocalypse Now, of the refreshingly right. Evil must be explained, or its presence is meaningless. Didn't you ever wonder what Sauron intended on doing after he?d destroyed all of Middle Earth, and is left with millions of dirty orcs? Or why Drake doesn?t retire on what he?s already made before he gets arrested for temple robbing and murder on the scale of a small genocide?
I don't mean to say that we shouldn't have armies of aliens at the disposal for much needed stress relief, but it's all about the context. Half the time in GOW or COD I have no idea wtf is going on, or why I should care. In portal, for example, I understood my motivations; trapped, confused and slighlty paraniod that thing's weren't adding up. I wanted to be free, and the portal gun was my means of escape; I wasn't just fucking around with some toy I'd found. I felt my character's thrill at getting behind the scenes of the facility and again when finally confronting the none so traditional "evil" in the satisfying conclusion. In GOW, you know it would just be another grey level, with the same base-layer amount of emotional attachment. What Yahtzee writes, about the difference between macho and manly, (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9163-Manly-Vs-Macho-in-Gears), is a key part of this larger problem.
Less so with movies, but if games want to move into the realm of a respected media art-form (pretentious! Moi?) then it has to get more mature when it comes to representing evil in the narrative; yes it?s cheaper not to develop characters in a meaningful way, and yes it?s easier to feel hate towards the Locust Horde than it is towards a sympathetic villain, with motivations and reason, easier to churn out simple, white, American space marines than to develop a real-world complex character, with confliction and doubt... But this is lazy, and it is we the consumers who feed their lazyness when we don?t demand better story-telling in games, and thus a more accurate portrayal of the human soul.
The problem is that people have the ability to justify just about anything, any conceivable act of staggering cruelty you can imagine; and many you can?t. Every atrocity you hear about had someone on the other side who thought themselves completely in the right. The people who flew themselves into the world trade centre really believed that they were vessels of God; they were looking forward to spending eternity in the special garden of paradise reserved for martyrs, with friends and loved ones they had lost, for all time. In other words, they were human beings.
That?s just the way the world is, but while environment plays a crucial role in who you are, you ultimately make your own decisions in life, and evil must be punished. Most people have a good sense of right and wrong, there are natural morals built from your evolutionary heritage, most people don?t murder, or steal, or lie compulsively; from tribes living in the Amazon to rural Hertfordshire, people are generally good. It?s up to each of us to seek out good and reject evil, and decide which is which for ourselves. These are the aspirations we often see in movie heroes or when we jump into the protagonist of the latest action game.
It's only one side of the story, an adventurous tale of obvious good over obvious evil, with evil often depicted as a dark shadow that drifts in and out of the plot; evil for evil?s sake. Real life is never so black and white. People have motives, people have desires and fears, both the good and the bad, and understanding these things about the character yields a much better experience and emersion. If you understand why the protagonist is doing what she?s doing and more importantly, why the ?bad guy? is doing what they?re doing, then you feel the investment a lot more in what?s going on, and end up routing for whomever best fits your own moral test, which may not always be that of the traditional heroes we so often see.
By motives, I mean I want something more substantial than, ?bad guy wants to take over the world", though there are ways of doing that right and of doing it wrong. The Modern Warfare and Transformer series being examples of the disastrously wrong, Bioshock and Apocalypse Now, of the refreshingly right. Evil must be explained, or its presence is meaningless. Didn't you ever wonder what Sauron intended on doing after he?d destroyed all of Middle Earth, and is left with millions of dirty orcs? Or why Drake doesn?t retire on what he?s already made before he gets arrested for temple robbing and murder on the scale of a small genocide?
I don't mean to say that we shouldn't have armies of aliens at the disposal for much needed stress relief, but it's all about the context. Half the time in GOW or COD I have no idea wtf is going on, or why I should care. In portal, for example, I understood my motivations; trapped, confused and slighlty paraniod that thing's weren't adding up. I wanted to be free, and the portal gun was my means of escape; I wasn't just fucking around with some toy I'd found. I felt my character's thrill at getting behind the scenes of the facility and again when finally confronting the none so traditional "evil" in the satisfying conclusion. In GOW, you know it would just be another grey level, with the same base-layer amount of emotional attachment. What Yahtzee writes, about the difference between macho and manly, (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9163-Manly-Vs-Macho-in-Gears), is a key part of this larger problem.
Less so with movies, but if games want to move into the realm of a respected media art-form (pretentious! Moi?) then it has to get more mature when it comes to representing evil in the narrative; yes it?s cheaper not to develop characters in a meaningful way, and yes it?s easier to feel hate towards the Locust Horde than it is towards a sympathetic villain, with motivations and reason, easier to churn out simple, white, American space marines than to develop a real-world complex character, with confliction and doubt... But this is lazy, and it is we the consumers who feed their lazyness when we don?t demand better story-telling in games, and thus a more accurate portrayal of the human soul.
