For Great Justice!

To Be The Hero

Since the programmer can only show us brief snippets of direct information regarding the objectives and circumstances of our involvement in the hero's life (assuming, that is, that they don't want to bore and irritate us), the most useful tool for drawing the player into the emotive back story is through the protagonist's conflicts. Spider-Man 2 (the game of the movie of the comic) is an excellent example of how this is done, while the sequel (of sorts), Ultimate Spider-Man, fails for exactly the same reason.

In Spider-Man 2, the game begins by dropping Web Head onto the streets of New York directly under the control of the player. All about the map are members of the public shouting for help, crimes being readily perpetrated and somewhere, one of Spidey's many fantastical enemies is causing havoc and endangering the lives of the strangers our hero feels obliged to protect. So, what do you do? The Lizard is tearing up a lab on the other side of town, two gangs are brawling in the streets, a little girl has just lost her balloon and there's only one Spider-Man! You quickly come to realize the thorny choices a hero must react to at every instance; and when it comes down to it, stopping the Lizard's rampage must take precedence over a balloonless child, regardless of how much it might pull at your heartstrings to hear her crying as you swing past.

So, even though the game has told us nothing about the inner turmoil faced by an overworked super hero whose only want is to save people the tragedies he once suffered, you are forced to appreciate his overwhelming situation on a very personal level, by suffering the choices Spider-Man must make every minute he is wearing his mask. The depth of character and inherent humanity of the Wall Crawler is shown to us through the actions of his antagonists and the difficult decisions he must make for the greater good.

In Ultimate Spider-Man, however, the same developer fell into a trap in which many a comic and movie script writer has become ensnared as a result of to the audience's apparent approval of a particular antagonist: playing the part of the bad guy. In essence, I have no issue with this, although simply switching roles and attempting to score the same audience identification with an immoral criminal is inherently flawed. This is not to say a protagonist can't have darker, less ethical sensibilities (we've already discussed the Punisher), but that central premise of wanting to help people cannot be at the core of Venom's or the Green Goblin's psyche, since their motivation - as counter-points to the hero - is about reckless personal gain without concern for others. You cannot engage with a character you subconsciously want to lose!

Venom is a terrific character - one of my all time favorites from the Marvel universe - and at first thought, it sounds like a great idea donning the symbiotic mantle of the anti-Spidey and wreaking up the city, but this also means retraining your emotions so you feel comfortable defeating Spider-Man; two story telling devices that are implicitly contrary and subsequently unable to coexist in the same story, leaving the player despondent and no longer caring about either character, and therefore, the game.

The gaming world has been in a vortex of controversy ever since the first Grand Theft Auto title was released, whereby the player's objectives were to act as depraved and low a character as possible; scoring points for car jacking and running down pedestrians. As I've said, I'm all for violence and debauchery (in fact, that's what I call "Friday night"), yet I also demand that the games I play to get that decadent fix have not simply had their duty to engage the player replaced by a continuous string of deliberately contentious gratuitousness. Anyone can come up with a sick, licentious idea for a controversial activity (off the top of my head: Hungry, Hungry Zombies - chase around a playground snatching children and throwing them into a pit of zombies, causing the undead creatures to overfeed until their livers rupture). Violence alone is not as entertaining as it may first appear; it must be backed up by the premise of acting for some munificent purpose.