Month: May 2017

Video Gamers as Writers – Twitching Our Way Into Character

Some writers hone their skills by a mix of soaking up lessons from the masters and researching specifics, from history to sentence structure. I’ve done all that… but one of my best tools is playing video games.

I’m a lifelong fan of role-playing games. I’ve written about that here once or twice, and the challenge of building a real story using a mix of other players and random die rolls. A campaign of D&D can do wonders for a writer’s eye for how different tastes merge, for adapting to the unexpected… making a story a lot like life.

But I’ve found there’s a different lesson in breaking out the PlayStation.

Mostly I play what are also billed as RPGs there; there’s no way I’d give up at least the feel of storytelling. Games like Final Fantasy and Mass Effect let me walk through a kind of Hero’s Journey, some with more richness than others. Where a tabletop game might let me build a story in shifts with time to appreciate my friends’ input, a console game is the simple pleasure of riding along in a story and helping the hero along… with simpler, non-creative help like how to shoot and when to check up on supplies. The fun of playing a part in the tale, without any pressure to write it.

–Alright, until a certain killer demon starts teleporting in and crushing me with one hit if I don’t dodge perfectly…

The thing is, it’s that simple “game” challenge where my PS has taught me the most about writing.

Most games might be only a joystick test wrapped up in the rough shape of a story. But that means there’s at least a hint of someone’s head to get into… and a whole game system to express what walking in his shoes might mean.

 

Fight Like a (Mage) Girl

One of the best times I’ve had was in Dragon Age: Origins, opening with the customized background adventure for a mage. A young wizard raised apart from society so as not to endanger them, and then her masters toss her into the demon-world to test if she can withstand their temptations? My character started to feel like a powerful but frightened girl, who used her initial spells of Slow and Flame in a frantic attempt to keep the demons AWAY until she could burn them down.

That was the key. For the rest of the grand Dragon Age storyline, I was able to look at Neria as a study in fear and slow-won confidence, and see how that led her master to protection and weakness spells rather than going for the kill. Or, how impressed she’d be with the rebel witch Morrigan as a teammate, who could teach her to wade into battle herself as a bear or bigger, If she was ready for it.

I still consider DAO the best epic adventure ever set to disk (discovering The Joining… or that mad voice in the tunnels calling “That’s why they hate us, that’s why they need us…”). But the finest edge of that pleasure was in letting those simple how-to choices show me what it’s like to be Neria.

 

One Giant Leap

Or today? Media tie-in games are usually a disappointment… actually they’ve all disappointed me except the Batman Arkham games. –Come to think of it, this principle might be one thing they’re missing: even if a game can play like being Frodo, I already know how Frodo thinks, and a Tolkien game probably won’t give me enough different strategies to discover him in his actions anyway.

Anyway, I stay away from the tie-ins. But this one was Attack On Titan.

How am I supposed to resist a game that even brushes against that ani/manga’s savage storytelling? Even though this game’s very crude in its nods to the plotline it lumbers through, just to set up more and more of the same school of battlefield challenges, it’s become quite a guilty pleasure.

Because this time I know the characters… and yet there’s room to distinguish them because the battles give more than one option. Like:

  • Eren Jaeger (hot-headed hero): I don’t play him on a mission unless I have time to cut down every Titan on the board, because there’s no way he’d leave one alive if he had a choice. Even the distress signals he might not notice until he killed any Titans nearby.
  • Armin Arlet (budding strategist): he’ll go after every rescue he can, partly out of kindness but also because he’s the best at deploying reinforcements. And I can see him working his way up from small foes to the bigger multi-Titan brawls… feeling for the moment he’s built up the confidence to go for the scenario-closing kill.
  • Mikasa Ackerman (stoic combat genius): As Mikasa I find I prefer targeting the bigger crowds of Titans, figuring the stragglers are what her less skilled teammates can pick off. And I rush for the final target as soon as it appears, because why waste time? (Assuming “protect Eren” isn’t actually in the scenario, otherwise boulder-sized heads are gonna roll.)

They’re simple choices that a game lays out for us, but the game gives us the ideal chance to explore them. And in that exploring, I remember: only some heroes charge in, or work in teams, or any other of a hundred shaded possibilities. It’s too easy to write a scene and let genre or a sense of the obvious pick the details of how a protagonist acts on his decisions.

“He just picks up the gun and shoots his way free”? Before you say that, try spending half an hour trying to play someone who’s offered a good, controllable pistol on one shelf, and a wrist-breaking Magnum on the other, and knows he’ll have to make that choice work based on how he sees a battlefield. Then try to feel just which twist of the fight will make him charge in, or fall back, or throw himself as a shield in front of his friends.

Or how he sees those friends, his goals, his triumphs and despairs. How he acts, down to the smallest detail.

It’s often said a writer should know how a character walks with his cane, breathes to savor the open air, and does his laundry. Gaming with my awareness open helps me build that feeling.

And it starts with how to kill giants. Not too shabby, no?

 

On Google+

Grappling with the Superhero Grapnel

How much of a comics nerd am I? I grumble about heroes’ grappling guns being unrealistic… at least for the superheroes that are claiming to be possible.

Meaning Batman. And Daredevil, and the idea that “skill over power, rooftop-dwelling heroes” don’t default to flying, they traditionally get around the city by swinging between the buildings.

Grapnels – the Same Old Line?

For one thing, Mythbusters busted even fast-grappling up to a roof. Yes, a gun can shoot a grappling hook (they used tripod-launched ones back on D-Day), and they do make “ascenders” to zip you up the line. But the simple spike Batman‘s used since Tim Burton’s movies to stick into any wall and hold his weight… what’s that supposed to be? And Daredevil’s got the worst design of all, a simple weight that always wraps around a target tight enough to hold him, and then comes loose a moment later.

It might not bug me so much… except that these “gritty, realistic” heroes are stealing moves from the guy who actually had a reason to pull it off, Spider-Man. When they’re supposed to be human.

Stop a moment: if you think about swinging from rooftops, what’s the first thing that ought to come into your head? One hint, that first Spidey movie scene where he tried to web-sling:

SLAM!

It’s all on YouTube. (Though they left out that moment where Peter’s limping home thinking “I really must be stronger than human, I’m still alive.” Or maybe with the George of the Jungle theme stuck in his aching head.)

That’s the basic problem of using a grapnel line to do more than climb: you’re throwing yourself at a wall. So there’s just no way a hero can swing far with one grapnel—he’d need two, to start toward one wall and zigzag off to another and onward, like that movie actually showed for Spidey’s second time up in the air. Plus, those lines would need just-not-human science to instantly attach to anything and to spit out line after line (without hauling much weight) so he wouldn’t be stuck in midair. Not something one billy club’s good for, Mr. Murdock.

Hooked on Grapnels

To be fair, the “heroic swing” probably started with movies about pirates (with ropes dangling from a mast) and swashbucklers (chandeliers), followed by Tarzan and his vines. Because if the setting justifies a—lucky!—hero finding a line already attached and dangling over open space… well, turning gravity itself into your propulsion looks cooler than just about anything.

And then comics, and then animation, built on how easy it is to draw a hero swinging along a hundred feet up. Plus, any kind of mobility is the fastest way to bring a hero into the action, with a one-panel nod to how visually awesome he is before the fireworks fly: “while on patrol, our hero spots—”

Yes, it’s comic book characters. Is there really a point to arguing about whether a human can cheat basic ballistics when he’s already likely to wade through five thugs with guns, and when the other heroes do actually fly? But… fists can hit faces, swinglines can’t not hit the wall they hang from, if it’s one line. If we lose track of the boundary between human and superhuman feats, it’s sloppy storytelling.

In fact, live-action superhero stories tend to show more respect. Of course that’s making a virtue of necessity; when every backflip from a flagpole costs effects money (and possibly blood) instead of ink, heroes like Daredevil and Arrow tend not to be so casual about it. Come to think of it, I don’t remember too many of those live heroes on a random patrol blundering into a major villain either; there’s more respect for good guy and bad both planning their moves and trying to catch up to each other on their terms.

Build a Better Grapnel (or Don’t Bother)

Could a grapnel work, at least for a single swing? I wonder if you could make one with a clamp, with teeth made of say industrial diamond, so you could fire it at a building’s corner or any kind of ridge and it dug into it on both sides? (The harder part might be building something into the clamp to work the teeth loose when you were done.) A hero could zip off the street, but not swing and keep swinging—instead of sweeping the city for crime he’d have to know where to look, like Batman’s skills and Daredevil’s senses already have covered. Still, the classic swing from one close-by building down through a window or warehouse loading bay could still panic a roomful of mobsters.

But, there’s a part of us that wants to blur the lines; even the Dark Knight Trilogy had a weakness for it. Christopher Nolan’s the best thing to happen to Batman in decades, but he does tend to be… generous with Bats’s mobilty. The Tumbler solves the Batmobile problem (what does the best car on the planet do in traffic? same as every other car, not a thing!) by letting Batman ram through everything on the road like one of his villains drives. And that gliding cape… it laid all the groundwork (so to speak) to making sense in the most awesome way, except that a cape just isn’t going to catch enough air to carry a man, and anyone who’s seen a hang-glider knows that. They were so close, couldn’t they have just said locking the cape into glider shape also unfolds an extra ten feet of cape, and we get an instantly-iconic image of “the Big Bat” in flight?

–And now we’ve got Attack On Titan giving soldiers rapid-fire grapnels they control with their sword hilts as they dive at maneating giants… okay, points for reaching a new level of sheer coolness. And no story with thirty-foot giants is staying that close to physics anyway; we’re just amazed the humans last five minutes in what’s normally a job for a giant robot. (Hint: they usually don’t last that long.)

Honestly, I’m starting to appreciate the simple Arrow approach to getting around. Oliver uses the occasional grapnel arrow (never mind how it sticks well enough to hold his weight), but his team mostly race around the city on something that can get where they need: motorcycles. Backed by a van, a simple unmarked van, as their mobile base.

Some things are cool. But it means something that I can believe this one.

On Google+

Photo by {Thud}