“Let’s go, pal.”

These immortal words set the world on fire. At least, they did in my small corner of the intertubes that deals with video games as fans the country over rejoiced at the announcement of the long awaited Fallout 4.

You see, over the last week the video game industry has been holding their annual trade fair show: the Electronic Entertainment Expo (better known as E3). This is little more than console developers and big publishing studios’ chance to put out a metric tonne of advertising and build hype for upcoming titles meant to push units and sales. It’s big. It’s glamourous and it’s entirely not for me.

You see, I’m a PC gamer which means I primarily enjoy my little hobby on my personal computer instead of utilizing one of the many handheld and dedicated machines built to solely play these morsels of amusement. I am primarily stuck to this “one console” lifestyle due to an element of cost. It’s not financially feasible for me to purchase every single platform which can run these video games and so I stick with the one that has the broadest options and the lowest cost. The fact that I need to have a computer anyway makes this a no brainer in terms of decision making.

As a PC gamer, however, E3 has spent most of its years quite joyfully ignoring me.

I don’t begrudge them by any means. The show is what it’s meant to be: a massive marketing ploy funded by the big companies willing to throw enough money at it. I pay a little attention to the trade fair for the select few games that would be ported to the PC a year later.

Well, this year things were different! This year they had a PC conference! And then they went and promptly showed multi-platform games that are primarily console focused and will be ported to PC later. Needless to say, I didn’t watch.

I did hear that Bethesda finally announced Fallout 4 and I did watch the trailer.

And now, here we are.

For the world’s quickest summary on the Fallout franchise and why I’m discussing it now: Fallout was originally a isometric role-playing game produced by Interplay and developed by Black Isle Studios back in the days when Interplay existed and Black Isle Studios was still around. The franchise was inspired by Wasteland which, in turn, was inspired by Mad Max in dropping the player into a world ravaged by a massive nuclear apocalypse. The primary difference between Fallout and Wasteland is the visual aesthetic. Wasteland projected a world that was created when the bombs landed during the grim and gritty 1980s. Fallout envisioned a world lost in the far more incongruous 1950s.

Needless to say, I’ve enjoyed Fallout more than Wasteland because of the anachronistic element that, for the most part, was better executed in the original Fallout and Fallout 2. However, Interplay died as video game companies are wont to do and the IP sort of floated in limbo for many years until Bethesda snatched it up.

Bethesda then released a rather successful third person shooter/action role-playing game Fallout 3 that, outside of sharing the visual elements, setting and lore had really nothing else in common with its prior games. It was… ok. I enjoyed it when it first released but it’s certainly not aged well. It’s a mixed bag made all the worse by the fact that Obsidian Entertainment got to do a spin-off of sorts in Fallout: New Vegas.

This ended up being everything that Fallout 3 was not. I loved it and you can read my reviews on its DLC somewhere in these archives.

That’s a long story short. So what does this have to do with the opening quote?

Well, Bethesda’s reveal trailer for their next instalment ends with the protagonist uttering those lines to his faithful canine companion.

And that has me in a furor.

I do not like voice acting. It has been an ever expanding and ever popular development in video games. People praise it for increasing their immersion with the medium. Companies spend big bucks hiring named actors to read a handful of lines so they can advertise that Sean Bean or Patrick Stewart or whoever is in their latest release. The player then gets to listen to upwards of twenty to forty hours of Nolan North voicing the main character and then a handful of three or four people voicing every single other person that you meet. Which wouldn’t be a problem if you only ever meet three or four other people but by the time you’ve come across your third city populated with the uncannily same voiced citizens you either wonder if the world has developed instantaneous transportation or why mimicry seems to be the past-time of choice for its minor characters.

I understand the love for voice acting. It lets people forget for a moment that they’re playing a video game and buy into the illusion that they’re playing a really lengthy movie. The problem is that video games aren’t movies and shouldn’t ever have made that their goal.

Now, I’m not going to try and argue that voice acting can’t bring value to the medium. One of my most cherished games is Baldur’s Gate and it has voice acting. It has some of the best and I can’t help but still recall some of the more powerful speeches given by its primary antagonist and just how spot on the actor delivered them. But for every Baldur’s Gate, there’s a dozen Deus Ex games where it’s distracting, aggravating and possibly controversial.

And much like everything else, the real use of voice acting needs to be focused on playing to the medium’s strength rather than trying to co-adopt techniques from elsewhere wholesale without any concern for its impact on the product. This brings me to the reason why I loathe seeing voice acting. In role-playing games–a genre that’s already well beyond a movie’s experience as those that are twenty hours in length are generally considered “too short”–the addition of full voice acting for every character heavily detracts from the main draw of the game. For every line that needs to be voiced, there is way more than a dozen of lines that have to be cut due to file size and cost of production reasons. Voice acting really bloats the memory usage of a game and pushes against the technological limits that our current computers can maintain. It also puts monetary strain on developer’s budgets that now have to pay actors for every line delivered. So, to increase the ever popular “immersion” of a play, the developer must sacrifice options and length.

If I’m ever given a choice between depth of experience or “ermersion,” well I think my choice would be rather clear.

The irony, of course, is that people always bemoan how the modern role-playing games are often filled with cliches and shallow plots. Well, part of the reason for this is your demands to have everything voice necessitates that your options are extremely reduced down to an inconsequential option between three “attitudes” that all say the same but let you say it nicely, neutrally, or dickishly.

However, even if we were somehow able to handwave away the practicality of voicing every piece of dialogue and somehow made it a non-issue (whether through the magic of technology or accepting that unvoiced is superior) it, ultimately, wouldn’t address why video game stories can’t compete with novels.

The real reason plots are paper thin and contradictory while characters are shallow and stereotypical is because there is no environment in the video game industry for producing great stories. Unlike a novel where the focus is placed primarily on character interactions, motivations and world pressures, the onus first and foremost for games is being games. Thus, the majority of the development is placed on rendering and bringing to life all the game systems, physics, lightning and technical doodads that bring a digital environment to life. We’re looking at an industry that has teams of hundreds of people working to create a project. How many of those are going to be writers? Probably less than 1%.

And if we chose to solely focus on role-playing games, the genre that arguably has the most people working as writers in it, things become even more bleak. While we will have more people working together to give words to voices scattered all across the wasteland, the sheer organizational and manpower requirements necessary to fill them all with good voices is practically impossible. The reason that novels work is because there are few “cooks in the kitchen” so to speak. You can keep consistent voice and tone when you have one or two people overseeing it. When you need three writers just to fill one city and start including the writers that are tasked with creating the companion characters, major quests, major locations, minor locations, minor quests, primary villains and whatnot… well the number of competing voices starts to create a traffic jam of different hands in the pot.

So, yeah, I’m disappointed to see Bethesda opt to create their new game with a voiced protagonist because it places an emphasis on writing that they never were capable of achieving in the first place. Having actors try in vain to bring non-nonsensical writing to life simply makes the experience awkward. On the other hand, Bethesda doesn’t really have the ability to make a strong story experience without voice acting either so it’s really a moot issue in the end.

So what’s the solution? Ultimately, I don’t know. I know I’ve been scaling back my expectations and I’m no longer looking for improvement in narrative and writing within video games. I think that expectation was wrong in the first place. I’ve ranted before about how the nature of television creates poor story structure and it’s unfortunate that video games share a similar fate. This isn’t to say some of it can’t be interesting, however. I still enjoy Obsidian’s work and there are a handful of talented writers in the industry. The simple fact is, however, when someone says they want a game with a “good story” and I hear a person reply back with “well, read a book” I don’t think I’m going to argue that response.

Our expectations for what makes a good story simply cannot be met in a digital space. However, I do think there is room to grow. The one element that video games beat out all other mediums is in that dreaded “immersion” factor. Nothing else lets you get in there, get your hands dirty and shift the pieces around quite like video games do. So, perhaps in the future there will be a way to really deliver some truly reactive and compelling writing. Until then, however, I think we’re going to have to simply smile and enjoy the few nuggets that appear and get repeated over and over again.

Because war, war never changes.

Pretty But Dead – Why Breastplate Doesn’t Include Breasts

So this weekend there was apparently a marathon of bad children’s movies. One that happened to catch my attention was Percy Jackson And The Butchered Greek Mythology. I was intrigued by it partly by my sister’s mention that she had attempted the books and partly because Heather is an avid fan. How bad could it be, I wondered.

Well, pretty bad. But that’s not what I want to discuss today. Instead, I’d rather talk about a very specific, nit-picky detail that has farther reaching cultural infiltration. Specifically, when Percy arrived at the awkwardly titled Camp Half Blood there was a greater crime committed than horribly mangling the most culturally saturated mythology in the Western Hemisphere. I am, of course, speaking of Alexandra Daddario.

Though, to be fair to the young actress, it wasn’t her rather lackluster performance but more the costume she was squeezed into. Despite the impracticality of traditional sword warfare in a modern world riddled with guns, for some bizarre reason every single girl at this camp had been issued a custom fitted leather cuirass complete with delightful boob pouches. Granted, this design for women’s armour wasn’t a unique creation of the Percy Jackson movies. In fact, this type of armour design is rather ubiquitous in modern times.

I mentioned how ludicrous this armour was which prompted a rather curious response from my family. “Women aren’t men!” they proclaimed, “and they can’t wear men’s armour. That would be uncomfortable.”

Well, of course it would be uncomfortable. Armour has always been uncomfortable. There was a kid in my high school who was really into the Medieval Ages and had a hobby of creating chain mail shirts. He was kind enough to lend me a finished one that he had fashioned for the day and I walked around school with it on. And I can tell you, the thing was heavy, cumbersome and restricting. But had I got into a knife fight, it probably would have spared my life or at the very least a few extra knife holes.

See, the sole function of armour is to deflect blows and edges from striking and piercing your fleshy bits. It’s not designed to be comfortable or a fashion statement. They’re basically giant metal shells that people wore if their lord valued their life over the handful of arrows that the enemy would drop you with. Having two large mounds in the middle of your chest is going to do the exact opposite of that. Those big pretty hills are going to be directing blows right into your chest instead of away thus increasing the likelihood that an attack pierces the metal and kills you.

As such, function has always trumped form. In fact, the concept that a woman’s shapely bits would even need special pounded pouches in the outer metal plates is rather ludicrous when you consider traditionally what was worn underneath. Warriors didn’t just throw a naked brigandine over their body. They wore a rather large padded jacket called a gambeson in order to cushion the body against the metal, absorb some of the kinetic energy of a blow and to reduce chaffing. Straight from wikipedia: “It was very insulatory and thus uncomfortable, but its protection was vital for the soldier.”

Over this, you would then wear the aforementioned chain mail shirt. Then you would finally wear your breastplate, cuirass, brigandine or what have you. If a woman managed to keep her shape through all that then surely she would make even the Venus of Willendorf jealous. Even more worrisome, if a woman fell over in one of these metal bodices, the pressure of the impact, increased by the weight of the armour itself, could very well crack her sternum which could lead to damaging your heart and lungs. These breasted plates are less protective shells and more metal death traps.

To give the misguided designers a bit of credit, however, I can only assume that they were inspired by the classic  Grecian muscle cuirass commonly depicted in Roman and Greek art. Here we have finely articulated pieces included nipples, navels, abs and defined pectorals. Surely if the Ancient Greeks wore these then they must have been real. Except, archaeological finds of relatively unadorned cuirasses suggest otherwise. Considering the muscle cuirasses were typically depicted on generals and emperors suggests that these were strictly ornamental pieces used to display the idealized physique than actual armour suited for combat.

Unless, of course, ancient smiths were secretly trying to off the management during combat with faulty design. Which, if ancient bosses were anything like modern ones, might not be too far fetched.

This, of course, isn’t to say that you can’t take the unique physiological differences between men and women into consideration when crafting and creating armour for either sexes. It just depends how much you care about them being fitted and alive over pretty and dead.

Story of Myself:

Deconstructing the Mary Sue

My sister was perusing a book discussion thread this morning and tittered over some moderator’s listed rules for writing fan fictions. This humoured me as well, as I didn’t realize that hobbyist fiction written with established characters and copyrights would maintain a strict set of rules given their work is regulated strictly to free entertainment. However, a discussion about Mary Sues developed and a curious poster asked what the term meant. My sister read me a curious response stating that a Mary Sue is a “Girl, either real or imaginary, inserted into a fan fiction.”

This seemed a grossly over-generalized description especially since the term has become associated with a great deal of negatively. The suggestion that any female added to a fan fiction is an immediate Mary Sue is both misleading and curiously stifling for a form of writing which, by its nature, is fairly irrelevant. The emphasis on gender also seemed rather strange as well and this prompted a conversation between my sister and me over what it actually meant.

And at first, I believed I had a great grasp of the concept. A Mary Sue, to my understanding, was an idealized version of the author inserted into a work of fan fiction. They served as a vessel of blatant wish-fulfillment, representing all the best perceived qualities of the individual and becoming immediately celebrated and adored by an established cast of characters even if it was incongruous with the established personalities or the world itself. If they had any flaws, then these were either downplayed or used for humorous or endearing effect. As it turns out, my understanding was not too far from the original concept of creation.

The term itself arose from a satirical Star Trek short written in 1973 by Paula Smith. Titled “A Trekkie’s Tale,” the story was set to poke fun at apparently commonplace stories written about adolescent female antagonists and their grandiose adventures on the USS Enterprise. So prolific was this phenomena that the editors of what I can only assume is a Star Trek fan fiction magazine called Menagerie released this statement on the characters:

“Mary Sue stories—the adventures of the youngest and smartest ever person to graduate from the academy and ever get a commission at such a tender age. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm-wrestling. This character can also be found burrowing her way into the good graces/heart/mind of one of the Big Three [Kirk, Spock, and McCoy], if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.”

Now, I am hardly versed in the fan fiction world. I would lie if I didn’t know anything about it. When I was younger, many of my own stories were a certain kind of fan fiction. Typically, I would be inspired by the ideas or worlds of other entertainment and spend hours creating my own stories in these worlds. I mean, who hasn’t been so enthralled with a work that they didn’t imagine themselves experiencing it in a more direct manner? The power of fantasy is its ability to carry us to incredibly imaginative worlds and places that are both exciting and strange. I can easily find youtube videos of people acting out their own Star Wars lightsaber battles, so this is hardly an isolated experience.

For me, however, I more enjoyed the world itself. The characters were entities completely unassailable in my work. I hadn’t created them so I didn’t feel comfortable trying to write them. My words wouldn’t rival that of the original authors and, to me, these individuals would only come across as pale imitations of the individuals I loved. Besides, my wish fulfillment was to have the adventure myself. I didn’t want to share the limelight with the great heroes who would inevitably take centre stage and solve all the issues on their own.

So my stories always involved unique locations and new individuals with, perhaps, tangential comments or references to the source material. My earliest remembered fan fiction was a story set in Blizzard’s Diablo world where a party of adventurers explored a cove for treasure and become the playthings of some unspeakable demon who had taken refuge within. I also spent one summer working on my own Harry Potter work that took place not in England but in North America with its own schools, teachers and political intrigues.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fan fictions as they are seemingly harmless in their adoration of an author’s stories. They’re just a reflection of the enjoyment readers get from the author’s work. I couldn’t get into them for the same reason I couldn’t write a proper one. While I enjoyed the original stories, it was the writing and characterization that I adored and no one but the original creators could truly do their stories justice.

That said, I have no interest in the Mary Sue character. I do prescribe to the traditional notion that characters should be well rounded, developed individuals complete with strengths and flaws. A character that is perfect at everything, is liked by everyone, can do no wrong and is always in the right is just boring to me. Most grievous is when these characters are clear author surrogates.

And it is the author surrogacy that may lead to the Mary Sue term’s most difficult characteristics. While this aspect is debated whether it’s necessary for a Mary Sue, it’s the one element I prescribe to the charge. I’m not sure why this specific self-indulgence makes the wish fulfillment even worse than an idealized character that’s not meant to represent the author but it’s something I find even more amateur than creating an unfaltering paragon. Course, by its nature, it’s hard to tell when a perfect character is acting as an avatar for the writer. A telltale sign is if they share some common characteristic, which may be exaggerated in the story even if it doesn’t truly deserve to be.

But I’m not sure why this surrogacy annoys me so much. Ultimately, the author is going to insert themselves into their own work. When you break down the characters in the story, they essentially are aspects of their creator. Our perceptions and experiences are highly personal and while we may recognize similarities in those communicated by others, we can never truly feel the exact same things as someone else. We can only infer based on our experiences. Thus, no matter what character we write, on some level we are ultimately writing about ourselves.

Take, for example, my D&D stories. The characters are unashamedly based on those I actually know. However, if you were to meet the inspirations for Derrek, Jeremiah or Kait, you would invariably find that they aren’t truly like their fictional counterparts. In a sense, I use the real people to craft a mould for my characters but I must fill that mould with my own thoughts and decisions. When Derrek decides not to inform his friends about a dangerous magical ritual being performed in disguise, it is a decision that I made. I can’t know what the real Derrek would have done in that situation and certainly he wouldn’t have done it exactly as I describe.

In essence, a story is a collection of aspects of the writer. Each character is just a faucet, be it major or minor, of his personality. They think and act and feel as the writer imagines they would. And in that imagining, the line between the writer and the character blurs. When a character grieves over the loss of a lover, perhaps we are truly reading the feelings of a writer reflecting on her own loss of a close pet or relative. The more provocative, real and powerful these emotions the more we’re likely reading the personality of the creator.

And perhaps this is why I, personally, find the Mary Sue such an atrocious character. Their appearance almost universally degrades the personalities of all the supporting characters in the story. They stop being these small faucets breathed brief life by the care of their creator and instead become shallow cheerleaders whose sole purpose is to stand on the sidelines, cheering on one person. They are automatons created with the single purpose of making the author elevate themselves above all others. It is the dishonest murder of the self to feed the needs of the id and the desire for self-relevancy. Take the example from The Name of the Wind and how sycophantic all the minor characters are that surround Kvothe. They have little personality and their sole function is to praise Kvothe’s skills at whatever or to commiserate how awful the events of his life were. They have never suffered like Kvothe has suffered because they lack that bit of life to bring them alive. Had they been written with deeper backgrounds, I have to wonder if Kvothe would need such dramatic and over the top characteristics. By necessity, an author will have to break apart his own characteristics if he is to achieve individuality from his cast.

Course, Name of the Wind can’t have a Mary Sue because it’s an original work. But original works can certainly have the flaws inherent from Mary Sue-esque characters or situations.

Ultimately, I feel the existence of the Mary Sue is wholly unnecessary. By developing a cast of well rounded major and minor characters, the writer creates for themselves a scattered universe of their own personality. Each character, whether they be young or old, male or female, brave or cowardly are all small motes of their writer. There doesn’t need to be a single vessel for the author; they can find themselves in the hero, the hero’s parents, the rival, the mentor and everyone  in between. The death of the Mary Sue is the birth of a richer, more diverse world ready to bud from the seeds of conflict of an author struggling against himself.