An important part of any narrative experience, whether presented in a video game or a pen-and-paper experience, is the supporting cast. Few weeks ago, I critiqued the over-population of heroes and hero narratives in gaming, and this week’s discussion is sort of connected to that issue. A diverse and interesting supporting cast doesn’t merely offer more characters and distractions to a heroic narrative. The supporting cast provides most opportunities for characterization of the hero, and this is especially the case in gaming. This is as true in BioWare games (after all, we get a much better idea of who Shepard is in light of his/her treatment of the many characters in the universe who appear for a moment and then disappear for the rest of the game) as it is in cinematic action/adventure games like God of War or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. This is also where the narratives of most action/adventure games fail, in my opinion. A supporting cast is also important for verisimilitude, and, if the narrative is interested in establishing a setting, a good supporting cast is essential.
Having a strong supporting cast is partially its own reward. This is self-evident, and won’t need further explanation. A strong example of this raw narrative value is Shale, from Dragon Age: Origins. She’s interesting in and of herself, and though that isn’t her only value to the narrative, her own self is the primary contribution to the work. So we’ll skip right past that point, and head right into the other two reasons why a supporting cast is essential to good storytelling.
The Master/Slave Dialectic
The first essential function of a supporting cast is to enhance the main character. Let’s not mince words: the avatar character is the focus of the great majority of game narratives. Convincing the player to empathize with the avatar character can make an incredible difference to the player’s enjoyment of the narrative as a whole. That link is just a fact of gaming. In narrative terms, the main character(s) are more real than the supporting cast. They are given more screen time and more agency. A good narrative will seek to increasingly reveal aspects of the main character(s) to the player/viewer, while also inducing and displaying character growth. Due to various constraints, this means that the supporting cast is essentially less real to the player, or at least serves as a mirror, or foil, to the main character(s).
The problem with many action/adventure games is that the cast is too small or too limited to give even the main character a chance to grow in response. It is typical to see the reckless hero treat every other character they encounter in roughly the same fashion. Kratos, for instance, has three basic reactions to the people and people-like things he encounters: beautiful women without any plot use are screwed (the beautiful women demographic of the cast corresponds 100% with the infatuated-with-Kratos-and-his-god-like-physique demographic), anything foe-like in nature is eviscerated, and anyone else is brutally used until its usefulness is expended, at which point it is also eviscerated. Therefore, Kratos never obtains any sort of depth, and this is partially due to lack of quality supporting cast.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is an example of a higher-quality supporting cast. The cast in LoS is able to humanize Gabriel, the hero of the tale, to a much greater extent than Kratos. For instance, early on in the game, he encounters a young mute woman (she has telepathy, so she’s not too mute) and her protector, a murderer punished by eternal imprisonment in a giant suit of armor. At the end of the second chapter, when the woman is murdered and Gabriel is left holding the knife, Gabriel is forced to reluctantly kill the girl’s massive and enraged bodyguard (since he does need the gauntlet worked into the giant’s armor, and there’s no talking him down). In that scene, Gabriel displays anguish over the death of the girl, though the feeling are tempered by Gabriel’s resolve to stop the Lords of Shadow and resurrect his dead wife. That scene begins to complicate Gabriel, essentially making him more human.
While LoS is far from perfect in this regard, its comparatively large supporting cast is almost always useful for characterizing Gabriel. Without these interactions, Gabriel would have been another Kratos; a stubborn man who expresses only rage and a determination to see his goal fulfilled. These cast members are included in the game not just because they propel the plot, but because they are interesting foils to Gabriel, even if they aren’t that interesting in and of themselves. Even the Lords of Shadow, despite being plenty megalomaniacal, are the shadow selves of the ancient heroes that founded Gabriel’s holy order; they are pure evil, yet intriguingly so, and serve as constant reminders of what Gabriel could become. They become voices in Gabriel’s own psycho-drama.
A better example is the Uncharted series. Nathan Drake is an enjoyable main character, but the game would be much less interesting if the villains were not good foils, and especially if Elena weren’t around. Not only do Nathan and Elena have fantastic chemistry, she brings out a very human (and often frustrated) side in Nathan. Without her, the narrative simply wouldn’t work as well.
This is exceptionally true in role-playing games. A GM includes a supporting cast not because he wants to play characters too, but because in a game without non-player characters (and thus a believable, interesting world) to respond to player action, player action becomes totally empty. This is because actions are, ideally, performed to affect change; the best way to display the ramifications of player action in anything more complex than a dungeon crawl is through the non-player character. The non-player character can, for instance, be opinionated about the player character’s activities, for good or ill. Hearing their own actions recited and framed by the people of the game world can be equally encouraging and sobering for players. Moreover, a diverse cast of non-player characters allows players to explore the nuances of their characters; perhaps a barbarian character only respects non-player characters who are not rich and greedy, but then he discovers that a previously respected NPC, now a friend, was slumming when he met him, and is actually an incredibly wealthy nobleman. A good GM will seek to bring out these nuances in his player’s characters.
A Culture Is Made — Or Destroyed — By Its Articulate Voices
Take note, because I rarely use Ayn Rand quotes. This makes a good point, though. To some extent, the supporting cast is an element of game setting. Members of a supporting cast often represent organizations, races, and philosophies that feature in a narrative. In interacting with these specific NPCs, they function as pathways to understanding the narrative’s setting, and often its themes.
The obvious example here is Dragon Age. Characters like Sten, Zevran, and Leliana are interesting characters, but they’re also windows into cultures and locations that the game doesn’t directly explore. This is especially the case with Sten; Qunari culture is so radically different from the cultures encountered in the game that Sten feels very alien, and discovering why he acts so strangely is simultaneously fun, intriguing, and revealing of the setting. Each member of the party contributes to the player’s knowledge of the world in some way, though; Alistair explains the templars and the Grey Wardens, Leliana has both fantastic and historical stories, as well as knowledge of Orlais, and so forth. This gives the player a broader sense of the world, as well as a reason to care about it, by way of the supporting cast.
An even better usage of the supporting cast is to shore up a narrative’s themes. This is seen in Dragon Age 2, actually. One of the largest issues that the game deals with is freedom, namely how much an individual, especially a potentially dangerous individual, should have. This is seen most clearly in the conflict between Kirkwall’s mage and templar populations, though it’s prevalent in plenty of other parts of the story. Most of the characters have strong opinions regarding the political climate; there is Anders, who believes that mages should be free from templar rule, but has specific ideas about what mages should be free to do, and he certainly doesn’t condone the actions of blood mages or mages who have contact with demons. Merrill cares less about the politics at work between the Circle and the templars, but she is also willing to go to any lengths, even blood magic, in order to discover more about her elven heritage. Meanwhile, Fenris argues strongly for the necessity of the Circle, which is weighted by the fact that his earliest memories are from a land where mages rule with an iron fist. Combine that the fact that your avatar character’s sibling is either an apostate mage or is so tired of hiding apostate mages that he becomes a templar, and you’ve got plenty of tension brewing among your own little group. If the political issues of Kirkwall remained present only in rarely re-occuring NPC characters, the tension would be considerably less. Instead, characters that the player cannot help but care about embody the poles of this tense discussion, which draws the player into the issues at hand in an incredible way.
This is, again, doubly true for role-playing games. Any good GM will tell you that if you want to make the players really care about a tense issue in your campaign world, make sure the issue touches an NPC that they see often and care about. It’s a huge aid to a game if the GM can successfully humanize a number of NPCs and then use them, probably by doing a lot of mean things to them, or having the NPCs do incredibly mean things to other NPCs. Never underestimate the ability of humanizing characters to drive themes home and to bring incredible narrative weight to a session.
That’s it for this week, folks! See you next week.
Brak komentarzy:
Prześlij komentarz