The Legend of Batman

As the summer begins in earnest and the blockbuster movies start kicking in I find my thoughts turning to Batman. Of course it's not very hard to get me thinking about Batman, since he's been one of those pop-culture mainstays/father figures I grew up with. I had been thinking about how much I was just tooting my own horn talking about how great video-games are and how much potential they have. So I decided to try and make a Batman Videogame.

Unfortunately, one man cannot make a videogame alone, especially if he has no knowledge of programming, limited time and funds, and a chronically short attention span. 

I have already done a little concept work and have a friend working on a side-scroller engine, but any help/encouragement would be greatly appreciated. 

I hope to post some of the concept work within the week, but any word in the interim is welcome.

GTA IV: Tough Choices

There are many reasons to like GTA IV. It's a technical achievement that has tons of features, great gameplay, a fully fleshed out and realized recreation of New York City, and compelling characters with snappy dialogue. However, as much as I appreciate and enjoy all those, they aren't the specific reason why I, personally, enjoyed and liked GTA.

The Choice is Mine, But Do I Care?

Player choice is not a new mechanic in videogames, it has been utilized in games for a long time now, but often it is not used properly or to its full potential becoming simply a way to have multiple endings for a game, or to choose your "alignment". They often lack depth, emotional involvement, and/or intellectual motivation. In too many games that I've played, the choices are too easy, very few actually make me weigh and consider the options. I am naturally inclined to choosing the "good" option of any choices given to me, and so many games make it so plainly obvious which choice represents the moral high ground and which ones don't. I barely even give that much thought to them, thus the impact of having a choice is lost on me. All I see them as is the different paths to the alternative endings, if I feel so inclined to replay the game.

The first game I've ever played that actually made me sit and consider which choice I should actually take was the sublime Deus Ex. There was no obvious moral high ground in the game, each choice carrying a variety of associated good and bad consequences to it. I really had to bring my own judgment and thoughts to the game to really try to plumb which choice was the best one for me to make, which one would, in the end, would do the most good. It has been a long time since I've come across a game that has made me feel similarly.

Bioshock was the next game that I can recall that added a higher level to the choices they give the player other than "get good end/bad end". The intellectual and theoretical emotional implications between choosing whether to save the twisted girl beings you found, or end their misery (so you might convince yourself) while gaining greater profit, where more profound than many other games. However, I, in the end, could only appreciate the intellectual motivation behind the choices, but emotionally, they were void of conflict or feelings. You profited just as much, if not more so, by saving the girls while also keeping the more empathetic and moral high ground. I read some reviewers having such a hard time deciding what to do with the little gathering girls, but my mind was made up before I even got to them. They were mentally stimulating to consider and think about but, ultimately, they left little impression upon me, which is not what you want to be said of having to make supposedly hard choices.

Difficult Choices

Grand Theft Auto IV was the first of the GTA series that I've actually played through the main story. I've never owned one of the previous installments (by virtue of my parents), and my experience with them was limited to small bursts of random enjoyment. While it seems that they had more side missions and larger maps, the whole experience was aimed to be much more comical and satirical rather than a serious narrative venture. IV, though maybe not having as many sidequests or as much landscape to travel, it certainly seems to have expanded upon and matured their narrative. They haven't entirely discarded GTA's satirical nature though, but it's now made all the poignant and relevant by the equally compelling story and its residents.

That's what really made the experience for me; the characters. They are empathetic yet reprehensible, likeable yet disgusting, they are aspiring yet ultimately their own flawed humanity undoes them. They feel, very much so, like real people; mixed with a bit of good and a bit of bad. You can't really dislike any of them, while you can't really love any of them.

What does this all have to do with choice? At certain points in the game, GTA gives you a choice where you must choose one person to live and another to die. You can't save both and you can't kill both, you can only side with one. It is not the first time such a situation has been brought before me; Mass Effect, for example, did a very similar thing with two of the characters. However, GTA, unlike Mass Effect, does not simply leave you to save someone from a fatal, antagonistic force, but rather it is you that are the fatal force to befall on the character of your choosing.

This was an interesting twist to the choice paradigm normally presented in video games. Most often, the good choice is in the abstaining of an action, usually to kill someone, while the evil choice is to follow through with it (or, vise versa, depending on the situation). However, here, there is no choice of inaction, you have to do something, and no matter which way you choose, you are going to perform an altogther immoral deed. That is ultimately what got the hooked me: not that I had to simply choose between a moral choice and an immoral choice, but that I was now stuck with deciding which was the less immoral choice, the lesser of two evils.

The particular situation in this choice was choosing between killing the characters of Dwanye Forge, or Trey "Playboy X" Stewart, neither of them being either a saint or a demon, further adding to the moral muddiness in choosing between the two. They're both gangsters, both were and are involved in illegal activities, and probably have killed people themselves. But they both aren't psychopathic sociopaths, they both realize, somewhat, the wrongness of their deeds, but yet they cannot do anything else for it is all they know. They are faulted people, trying to survive in a world that is harsh and violent. However, as events turn out, Dwayne and Playboy both end up telling you you must kill the other.

I remember quite clearly, as I was driving along to the district in Algonquin where they both lived, trying to choose which one was the lesser immoral action, in the game, the sun slowly drew down behind dark stormy clouds, from which rain started falling. I drove along slowly, giving myself time to ponder, with Phillip Glass' Pruit Igoe playing on the radio. It was that moment that keenly defined GTAIV for me, driving along, contemplating the consequences of each action, while the deeply melancholic music filled the air, and the cityscape of New York stood towering in the rain. It was then that the narrative took me, and fulfilled me in a way that few other story-telling mediums has managed to, not just videogames themselves. It was then that I finally experienced the interactive experience of choice, and the weight of the consequences that might ensue from that. GTAIV transformed from being merely a great videogame to being a great experience.