A Messiah Complex…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on March 22, 2010

Warning – Fallout 3 spoilers follow. The game is now 18 months old, which by mainstream computer game years is ancient. But a lot of folks haven’t played it but may still intend to do so unspoiled and unsullied. If you are one of them, please read no further.

I finally finished Fallout 3 last week, as my new computer could finally run the game and only crash once every hour or so instead of every three minutes. I took plenty of time, and even took the “explorer” perk so I could check out much of the additional content beyond the main storyline. I played it without any of the expansions, like Broken Steel, which I understand “corrects” the ending of Fallout 3.

But I still wanna rant. If you have played the game, too, you may already know what I want to rant about (though the title of this post probably gives it away).  IMO, it’s not a trivial thing to write a good martyrdom story.  There’s a lot more to the story of Jesus than “oh, and then this guy chose to die to save others, the end.” I didn’t like it in the Matrix movies – where the whole martyrdom thing was at least handled better than in Fallout 3, but the later movies sucked the joy out of the first movie anyway – and it really has to be handled very carefully in a game  where you are playing the would-be sacrificial victim.

Ya really gotta, you know – foreshadow and stuff. The story needs to lead inexorably to this one moment where the hero must do his thing and make his sacrifice. Or hers. It shouldn’t be sprung at random, nor should the player be railroaded arbitrarily into being a sacrificial hero or a live jerk. (Especially when alternative solutions may be apparent to the player).

The point of the heroic death story is to reinforce the whole Spock-ism about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the one.  How it works in traditional media, however, is that the story is told from the perspective of someone else, so the audience can see the impact of the sacrifice from the eyes of those that it benefited. At least that’s been the way it has been handled in every movie, book, and show that I am familiar with. But in a game, if you are playing the poor bastard giving his or her all… it’s game over, pal. Maybe you get to see a nice epilogue, but that’s it. You switch discs and are playing another game five minutes later.

Really, to throw the principle of self-sacrifice into a game where the player is the sacrificee, the whole ultimate sacrifice thing is going to be very hard to pull off. The sacrifice of a couple of points of Endurance or Agility is going to be a lot more meaningful, because as a player you actually have to live – or at least play – with the consequences. And you need to see significant benefits coming to NPCs in the game that the player has already established relationships with. Having strangers run around saying, “Yay, we’ve received a 0.1% increase in our prosperity index, thanks to the hero!” isn’t going to cut it, either.

I’m not saying games should eschew stories of self-sacrifice: far from it! But making it not fall flat on its face is a lot tougher than it looks.

Filed Under: Design - Comments: 10 Comments to Read



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