Character Checklist

I'd like to talk about how to write characters, especially for sci fi. There will be very mild spoilers for Mass Effect: Andromeda's first hours.

It's clear that the Mass Effect team wanted to up the representation in this game. The characters are more diverse, both major and minor. For starters, there are a number of alien lizard women that don't have breasts, pretty much a first in the genre.

Care was taken to try and slot people into "nonstereotypical" roles. For example, the religious zealot is your scientist. The butch lady is straight. It's clear they were really trying to make this feel inclusive while avoiding stereotypes.

Unnnnfortunately, they're not very good at it.

In science fiction, we're currently walking a new path. The concept of representation in sci fi is thorny, because sci fi was built around representing other cultures and ideals with aliens. When sci fi is aimed at a single group of people, that works well enough - your target demographic is the baseline, and everyone else is an alien.

This may sound reductive, but that's how it's generally been. This allows sci fi to take how the target audience treats those people, those ideas, those policies... and show it separate from the complex intertangling of the real world.

Even Star Trek, a sterling example of inclusion, did this. Although the crew had minority crewmembers, they did not represent the struggle of minorities: Star Trek was portrayed as being past that. They were representations without the real-world baggage.

Rather than include any racial tensions on the starship, the writers would put the racial tensions into a representative race. For example, making a species that is half white and half black get into racial wars over whether they where white on the left, black on the right... or visa-versa.

This works reasonably well when sci fi stories are aimed at a specific audience. But once the audience expands, it becomes clear that being represented in that way doesn't work so well. The tribulations of the Mass Effect devs have made it clear that people want to see themselves properly represented. Not as a weird alien or a paint job on a default character, but as someone with similar concerns and goals.

Basically, everyone wants a power fantasy about them.

Nobody is monolithic. Each person cares about a lot of things. This is why Mass Effect found itself with fans that weren't really represented. It has anemic racial commentary and somewhat regressive gender representation, but those people also found things they liked. Space ships, cool adventures, an epic battle, hot folks you could date...

Mass Effect clearly decided those people deserved better representation, and struggled to work in a more diverse cast. This seems to have backfired with Andromeda, whose representations are painful tokens that mostly highlight a clumsy writer rather than making people feel welcome.

To me, the problem is clear:

Representation is not one thing.

In sci fi, representation can mean "oh, we're past all the problems you're struggling with", or it can mean "oh, let's explore that concept, free from the complexities of the real world", or it can mean "oh, let's explore that with all the complexities of the real world in a new context".

Moreover, in a video game, does an NPC even count as representation? Can we say that we are represented if we are not allowed to control ourselves? Does a background character going through a personal crisis represent us if we also went through that personal crisis?

Or does it only count if we actually have control?

Whatever you think the answer is, I think it can be argued that we should try to "centralize" representation. It should be part of the player's experience, not just part of the background noise.

The obvious problem with this is that there are more experiences we want to represent than we can cram into one timeline, and many of them are contradictory. Our hero can't be everyone. They will always be an outsider to some group just by their inclusion in another group.

... none of this is new.

Sci fi has always been about including a lot of different experiences via abstraction. Normally, the experiences we want to include are coherent. They cohere around a core idea.

Our universe might revolve around the idea of right and wrong, like Star Wars. Experiences revolving around that concept naturally pop into the writer's heads and flow smoothly through the player's adventures.

For example, in the Knights of the Old Republic series, we can easily have an evil android, a 'gray' Jedi, adventures in balancing the needs of the many and the rights of the few, of balancing law and morality. These are issues which naturally arise from Star Wars' obsession with good and evil. They all integrate with the player's own story to some extent, usually through party members.

But it is more difficult to include things like race, religion, or gender. Since they are not hooked directly into good and evil, you have to force them to fit. Sure, it's evil to massacre people because of their race or religion, but there's not much to explore. It's just evil being evil because you need to send a message.

Thus the endless stream of bandits in so many games. Just evil for evil's sake. Can't think of any way to make them more interesting, because we didn't set up our universe right.

If we want to be more inclusive, we have to orient our universe around inclusive concepts. For example, the Federation is about all people coming together for a better future. Not just humans, but all sorts of aliens living their weird, extreme, exaggerated alien lifestyles.

That's not a very viable theme in this case, because there's not a lot of discussion. Race, religion, and gender in this kind of universe are just accepted. We're past the conflicts that arise from them: the answer is always "yeah, as you like, now let's go space exploring!" Or, alternately, "let's show the oppressor why he's wrong!"

This is not a situation I have answers for, but if I were writing a sci fi setting these days, I might base it around the idea of acceptance vs rebellion. Accepting people or things or situations - or fighting them. When do you side with who, and how much will you sacrifice to help people you'll never meet again and who aren't magical paragons?

When we want to add in representation here, it should flow relatively fluidly. There are endless nuances and complexities to explore - not just things like "evil people hate minorities", but things like systemic injustice, unstable societies, and the difference between accepting someone and fetishizing them.

We would be free to either lift situations wholly from our reality, or create abstracted situations that leave out the entanglements of the real world. Both would play well in this environment.

These situations would flow easily and naturally, and we would be able to write them without feeling forced or feeling like we have a checklist. I think you'd be surprised how often you would naturally write something that resonates with people Mass Effect has been struggling for years to even acknowledge.

Conversely, we would have a hard time talking about good vs evil. It'd feel very forced.

Even with this theoretical franchise, we are left with some complex questions. Can facets of humanity be represented by aliens? Do technological handwaves diminish the validity of real-world struggles? How much of our writing needs to be vetted and rearranged by people going through the real-world versions of our abstracted situations?

But I think it'd be a pretty good approach. Just need to figure out a reason why acceptance vs rebellion would be the founding principle of the universe: Star Wars has the Force, Star Trek has the Federation, dunno what I'd use.

Anyway, let me know what you think.

Bioshock Infinite: Story Analysis

Okay, I finished Bioshock Infinite. It was a lot shorter than I expected, which was good. It was the right length.

Here I'm going to talk in some detail about Infinite's story, full analysis mode. If you haven't played Infinite all the way through, I recommend you stop reading. To say there are spoilers would be an understatement.

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Okay, let's dive into the story and what went right and what went wrong.

The story is very Vonnegut. People talk about how it bears a resemblance to Beauty and the Beast, but actually the story is much more reminiscent of Slaughterhouse 5.

That is to say that the story is full of magic and fairy tale bullshit, but that's just a coping device for the main character. More forgivingly, it's an analogy: I'm not saying that the game takes place entirely in the main character's head, but I am saying that, like many good stories, the events and setting of the story exist to highlight the core conflict of the main character.

This makes it sound like a bit of a masterpiece, but unfortunately the story is riddled with problems, both in terms of structure and in terms of execution.

Let's start with the structural problems.

The story was flabby. Really, really flabby.

The story's theme seems to be "escaping from your cage", with the female lead having a literal cage while the male lead has the cage of his past. It should be clear within just a few short levels that the female lead's literal cage is a reflection of the male lead's figurative cage, which is one of the things that spoiled the ending for me.

However, the theme veers to the side, crashes into a barn, and explodes. The end of the game has nothing to do with escaping cages, and is instead about assassinating you before you can put anyone in a cage.

Now, from a technical perspective it holds together well enough. Everything is logical inside the game world. But it doesn't support the theme as established. Instead of dealing with the idea of the cage, the writers just flip the chessboard over and walk away. Solving the character arc with magic is a big cop-out.

However, here's my thought. I think that the theme was really intended to be "parting with your daughter".

This holds true really well, because now the story is about the feeling of flinging her out into the world into the hands of a strange man versus keeping her locked in a tower all her life.

That would have been a great story. The ending would have worked well with only minor dialog changes: the daughter taking your ability to decide her future away from you and choosing it for herself. That would have been a fucking masterpiece and I literally get chills just thinking about how good it could have been.

However, that is not the theme. The theme is clearly established as being about escaping cages. You can't have two themes, and the first theme wins. You can have a twist ending, but it has to be a twist within the theme, not just randomly shooting off into the weeds.

Either way, there are several other flabby elements to the story. For example, the male lead's history has two pieces: war 'hero' and father. But these two elements compete rather than get along.

The "war" history justifies the character's ability to kill everyone with guns, but that's not something that needs to be explained. It clearly establishes the character's wish to be free of his cage... and it eventually "pays off" in that it explains why he became Comstock. But here's the thing: becoming Comstock only matters if the theme is "parting with your daughter", and the backstory only matters if the theme is "escaping from your cage". So the backstory collapses, supporting neither theme well enough to be worth it.

The "daughter" history would be really good if the theme was "parting with your daughter", but that's the theme the story should have had, not the theme it did. It was "revealed" quite late in the story, long after the theme was established. So this backstory could have stood on its own, but instead it was left too long in the shadow of the wasteful "war" history that consumed half of all the game's plot points.

Furthermore, the floating city should have been a very tight analog for the character's internal struggles... and it wasn't. No matter which theme you prefer, the city's theme was "racism is bad and cults are crazy". Those themes could have also made excellent games... but you have to pick one theme.The Vox Populi's actions don't reflect either of the story's themes, so they are simply wasted words.

Lastly, the ending with all the lighthouses was pretentious twaddle. If the theme had been "roads untravelled", it would have been fine, if a bit on the nose. It does vaguely fit into the "escape your cage" theme, except that the theme has clearly been talking about the metaphysical cage of your past and your family. The escapism of infinite doors leading to infinite possibilities just comes off as sounding like shallow desperation, a betrayal of the idea that there are consequences.

I can imagine different dialog which could have done a better job, but even so it seems like a poor fit for either theme. I can think of better fits.

Now... those were the structural errors. Let's talk about the execution errors. I'll be brief; this is already too long.

The problem with execution lay primarily in two places. The first is the secondary NPCs. None of them felt real. Perhaps that was on purpose, since the city exists solely as a thematic backdrop for the characters' troubles. But I feel they were just poorly executed. They were shallow, had bad dialog, and often took inexplicable actions that only would have made sense if there was a different theme.

But what really pisses me off about them is that they could have fit the theme so well. So well. Talk about escaping cages? The old general chooses to die in his cage. The freedom fighters choose to smash their cage. It could have been excellent. But the connections were never really established, it all just felt wonky and poorly written.

The other problem is with the main character.

An unlikeable main character is a mainstay of short stories. But a video game can't afford it, especially a first-person game where the player feels so much more in tune with the hero. He was just too unlikeable, and I was forced to take responsibility for actions he took, which felt annoying and unfair.

This is not a problem with the fundamental story - it's just an execution faff that left me cold.

Anyway, them's my thoughts.