The recent trend in video games, or at least, those ones considered really good, tend to be to make epic cinematic adventures, and for some reason, try as I might, I haven't really been able to get into them. When I talk about these games, I mean games like Uncharted 2, that are meant to represent everything great about modern gaming, but it's only when I was playing (and finally completed) Dragon Age: Origins (that's the old one) that I realised why.
Dragon Age: Origins is one of those games that's all about your decisions. It's not a carefully scripted cinematic experience, because everything you do can make the game run off in a different direction. It's also ridiculously long. When a game is nearly fifty hours long, not every minute of it is going to be brilliantly written and directed. So there are some stupid, hammy moments in it. But you actually feel like what your character is saying matters, because you never know how it'll come back to haunt you. And it's not always obvious either, some decisions I made really screwed my character over later in the game, even though I had thought they were for the best.
But the reason I really liked it was because I seemed to end up filling in some of the blanks myself. And I think that's why I don't like these great cinematic games. There's nothing for my imagination to do. The game does it all for me. I think the moment I realised the type of game I liked was in Dragon Age when a pivitol moment from my character's past came back to be confronted by me. This felt more personal to me, because it's a game that lets you choose background stories for your character, and then you have to play through those background stories. So for the first six hours of the game, your experience is pretty unique to which gender, race, class and background you pick. This means you could play through the game multiple times, and find it different each time, but to do that, you'd have to have a heck of a lot of time on your hands...
...but what it does mean is that certain situations and settings have special meaning to you as a player and you become more attached to your character, provided you let yourself. I experimented with quite a few of the origin stories, and ended up settling for quite an unusual one. My character was a female slum dwelling elvish rogue. A bit of an odd choice for me, I admit, but I became attached to her after the introductory story placed me in a position I'd never really experienced in a video game. All the other characters start out with weapons, or spells, or abilities of some kind. Many are even nobles, feared and powerful, set up for a fall during their introduction. My elf girl had none of this. She didn't even have a weapon, or any combat techniques. She was, however, getting married, to somebody she'd never met. During the marriage, a human noble (humans are twats in the Dragon Age universe it seems) showed up, kidnapped all the women from the wedding, including my character, to rape them. I have to admit, I've never had my main character threatened with rape in a video game before...
And the real interesting part was when I realised I couldn't defend myself. I didn't at this point have any techniques or weapons, and I knew the game well enough from my other origin story experiments to know an unarmed rogue couldn't defeat the four armed guards that had captured my character, even though the dialogue options were leading towards a fight. I can't readily think of another video game experience like it, that turns your character, especially when it's a freeform RPG, and your character is supposed to be your ultimate hero, into a literal damsel in distress. Of course, my character did get rescued, rather than it be a very short game, and I got to kill the enemy responsible. Unfortunately, the heroic rescuer, the husband-to-be of my main character, got killed in the progress. I'm pretty certain you can avoid that happening, but I just went with it.
And then, way later on, after I'd ventured around the entire world, united four armies under me, and was ready to win over the rulers of the land to let me save the world from an evil army of deadly orc-things, my team met the father of the noble who had done all that at the start. No matter how you play it, he's a villainous character, but I realised, to me, he had more of an impact, because he was technically responsible for everything bad that happened to my character (after murdering a noble's son, my character got arrested and press-ganged into a secret order that started all this to avoid execution). And I found myself picking dialogue choices against him that I knew weren't beneficial for my quest. I knew it wouldn't help me get a reward, I knew it wouldn't help me complete the quest I was on, and I knew it'd actually probably make it harder for me to achieve my goals. It didn't even match up to my usual play style, which given the options I usually picked, my rogue was apparently the nicest, wussiest rogue ever. She always tried to avoid a fight and always tried to do the right thing. Except here, I picked all the dialogue options that tried to start a fight, making threats and trying to attack him in a big courtroom full of important people.
Why? Because I saw it as something my character would do. Despite her usually nice nature, I had a good idea in my head of the type of person my character was, the way she'd respond to this man, and the fact that she'd want to kill him. It even worked into a character arc for her, as if over the course of the story she'd grown from a bit of a coward, scared of a confrontation, into more of an altruistic hero, trying to avoid a fight if neccesary, and now into somebody finally letting her anger and developed fighting abilities get the better of her. And I imposed all that myself. It's not there, in the game, told to me. I filled in the blanks and made up my character's motivations and story to fit into the game. Basically, my imagination filled in the blanks. And that's what I think I like. When I can imagine more is going on than the game presents. When it's too slick, too cinematic, too much like a film, I loose interest because the character doesn't feel like my own.
I don't mean doesn't feel like me, I mean, unless I'm a female elf and nobody's told me (Boote, shut up). I just mean, I feel like I'm playing as somebody elses character. Nathan Drake doesn't feel like he belongs to me, I feel like his every thought and action has already been decided by somebody else. In contrast, say, Link from the Legend of Zelda, I do feel belongs to me, because I can impose my impression of what his thoughts are, because he's silent, even though he's a fully developed character in terms of design. It's even moreso when I created the character. I feel that the character is mine to define. By the end of the game, I had a fully developed personality in my head for that character, and it'd all developed just for me over the course of the game.
And that doesn't mean things worked out for her. My character survived the ending of Dragon Age, but not through choice. My choices had some pretty severe impacts on my adventuring party. One tried to kill my main character (I suppose that teaches me for not using him enough), another abandoned me after I turned down a sinister sounding deal with her, and a third died. These weren't outcomes I wanted, because I knew I was going to go on and play the sequel, where I wanted the characters from the old game to still be around, but they happened because of the character I'd made my little creation in to.
Of course, I could have cheated and gone back and revised those decisions, but again, that'd of defeated the point. Then, at the end of the game, I had my character turn down all the rewards she got offered, because I imagined she just wanted to run away (and the game gave me that choice too, to 'travel for a bit') given how much she'd lost. Which was again, not neccesarily what I wanted, as I thought it'd be funny to set my character up as some kind of ruler for Dragon Age 2, when my new characters would then have to be aware my old one ruled the land or something, but it fitted in character, so I did that instead.
And that's why I liked it. I like the kind of games where you can fill in the blanks. Maybe it's why I like DS games so much. They're not slick enough yet to make everything preset. I hope that as games develop, we'll still get experiences like that one, rather than they become increasingly cinematic. Sadly, Dragon Age 2 looks like it's gone that way already, with only one character for you to play as, with a full voice and personality, so I won't be able to invent my own character.
Which sucks.
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