Post-Traumatic Wastelands

As a life-long fan of computer role-playing games, I've seen the genre embrace ever more complicated ideas as to what can actually be role-played.  In the beginning, it was enough to traipse through an underground maze, boot some monsters in the ass and take their money.  Occasionally you'd find a treasure chest, and so your generally worthless rogue now had something to do.  Overall, the game mechanism tended towards the simplistic, focusing primarily on the combat experience. 

This started to change in the mid 90s, with the introduction of better (or should I say actual) writing.  Many people will say that the Ultima series really defined the CRPG genre in the 80s and early 90s, and I guess that's true (even though I was never a huge fan, personally) but nobody can ever accuse the games of having solid writing. The first real “literary” experience I ever had with an RPG was Betrayal at Krondor, with its chapter breakdowns and fully-formed NPCs that you controlled.  Here was a party-based game with some meat on its bones, with characters that had feelings, faces, attitudes and histories.  It was the beginning of something new.

BioWare revolutionized the genre yet again when they rolled out the Baldur's Gate series, particularly the second one.  Not only did you have fully-realized NPCs, you could have relationships with them.  Game decisions would determine who could stand you, who would travel with you or who would tell you to piss off.  It is the opinion of many gamers that they've sort of jumped the shark in this particular area, creating “romances” that are verging on the absurd (take Dragon Age's hilariously bad cut-away polygonal sex scenes.  Hint: sex scenes will always look stupid in a video game.  Always.  Don't even bother, BioWare.) 

But whether or not you choose to have sex with a bi-curious elf who sounds like Antonio Banderas, the trend seems to be continuing – game developers are trying to incorporate more and more “realistic” elements of adventuring as they expand what an RPG can do.  Two games especially – Dead Space II and Fallout: New Vegas – have tackled with various success two key elements that I think have been horribly, almost criminally, overlooked.  These are: 1) The effects of violence on the psyche and 2) The emotional tolls of dealing with that violence. 

Dead Space II follows the perennially unlucky Isaac as he tries to cope with the loss of his girlfriend, and the harrowing experience of being trapped on the Ishimura, where he saw human beings warped and twisted into aliens and then was forced to dismember them with an assortment of mining tools as he struggled to save the ship.  I mean, if you really sit down and think about it, this is a pretty goddamn gruesome scenario.  If you were trapped on a spaceship and were being mobbed by horribly disfigured, bestial humans and were forced to hack their limbs off with a plasma cutter, wouldn't you pretty much be screwed up for the rest of your life?  

Of course the answer is “YES”.  Dead Space II begins where the first leaves off, insofar as Isaac has escaped with his life, but at a heavy cost.  His experiences on the Ishimura have left him mentally unstable, prone to hallucination and other maladies.  In short, Isaac has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and a good chunk of the game is centered around his dealing with it.  One might point out that being forced into a similar situation – in this game, Isaac fights his alien/human hybrid enemies on a colony instead of a ship, but he still gets to chop their limbs off with various tools – is exactly the worst thing for PTSD, but in a sort of endearing, naive way, the developers have hyper-Americanized Isaac.  He's going to find peace at the business end of a rifle.  The cure for horrible mental trauma isn't to go around, it's to go through.  Those necromorphs got you down?  Kill some more of them.  You'll start to feel better eventually.

Unfortunately, the Isaac situation sort of peters out at the end, lacking a satisfying emotional conclusion beyond “Isaac has earned redemption, and now feels better!” as if kicking PTSD's ass is as simple as earning an achievement on Steam. The reality is, a guy forced to go through the same horrific scenario twice is probably going to have a brain as fragile (and as useful) as ground beef.  You're pretty much done for, at that point.

Additionally, we learn that the dementia/hallucinations Isaac suffers from are the results of his contact with alien technology . . . so the moral impetus sort of withers away.  I think the designers missed a big chance to really “say something” about the effects of his experiences on his brain, but that didn’t happen.  Oh well.

Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas – claimed by some to be better than Bethesda's Fallout 3, and I think I agree – takes a more comprehensive approach to the kind of violence that is so prevalent in their own game world.  Fallout is by any measure a bleak mythology – when your genesis is nuclear annihilation, the bar for human happiness is set pretty low.  If you don't get raped and murdered by a cannibal, congratulate yourself for having a good week.

The first Fallout was lauded for its maturity, a morally gray continuum that really had you making the best out of a horrific situation. Part of the Fallout narrative dealt with how the ravages of violence (physical, and other kinds) really change a person.  After being sent out of the Vault to find a water chip, and returning victorious, you're told in no uncertain terms that your time in the wasteland has changed you to a degree that you are no longer welcome in your home.  You scare people, and you scare them because of what you've become – a killer.  Maybe reluctant, maybe not.  But it doesn't matter.

This is by no means a new theme in literature.  Joseph Campbell's Heroic Cycle describes the hero's descent into darkness, the grim journey he must make in order to morph into his heroic self.  Or to put it another way, the trial is a testing by fire, and the successful hero is the result of that proofing through the flames.  In Campbell's world this seems to be positive moment (though it is very often tinged with sorrow, as the descent into darkness is, as you can imagine, no walk in the park). In Fallout, the descent into darkness, while revealing a strong character, does not always produce a hero.  You could be an incredible bastard in Fallout, if you wanted.  But the journey itself, though it refines you, does not lead to a happy place.  It leads to your exile, to another descent.

Curiously, this gravity was missing in Fallout 3.  While I enjoyed the game, I always felt like Bethesda was way too eager to engage in tongue-in-cheek silliness.  After a while, it started to feel like an author intruding into his own story.  Every ten minutes I was running across something that was Bethesda saying “HEY, HOW ABOUT THIS GRIM AND DARK UNIVERSE, HUH?  IT'S PRETTY GRIM AND DARK, AND SARCASTIC!”   I think they did an admirable job on the technical aspects of the game, but like all their projects since Morrowind, the Bethesda team had serious problems with their writing.  Don’t take my word for it – they practically admitted that their story was garbage, that it “breaks down” to use the words of the lead writer.   But anyways, I’m getting off on a tangent about how Bethesda sucks at writing.

I was thrilled when Obsidian was given the license to make Fallout: New Vegas, as Obsidian has a lot of the guys who worked on the first two Fallouts.  But more than that, a lot of those guys were involved with Planescape: Torment, one of the most unique and engaging RPGs ever made, a game which received near universal acclaim for its writing. 

When I started playing New Vegas, I wasn’t disappointed.  (I should contain myself, here, lest this become a New Vegas review, so I’ll just stick to my original thesis.)  The Mojave Wasteland is bleak, disconcerting, with only the occasional bit of kindness to be found amongst the debris of western civilization.  One of your companions (and again, sorry, Obsidian’s companions were leaps and bounds better than Bethesda’s) is Craig Boone, a former sniper for the New California Republic.  Craig is probably one of the most mature, interesting companions I’ve ever had in a game.  He doesn’t volunteer his life story – in fact, you practically have to drag it out of the guy.  He tags along because he wants to kill Legion soldiers, for a reason that you will only learn much later.  What you do know is that he was at Bitter Springs, a battle waged by the NCR against the Khans, a semi-nomadic group of tribes who travel the wasteland and engage in (moderate) criminal activity.  This was no ordinary battle, however, as we eventually learn – Boone, with several other NCR soldiers, massacred non-combatants as they tried to flee the battle.  The way Boone tells it, it was a miscommunication between soldiers on the ground and the guys upstairs. Either way, the situation has wracked him with guilt.  Shortly after the battle, meets his wife, Carla, who talks him into leaving the NCR military. Carla is eventually captured by the Legion to be sold as a slave, and after he tracks her down, Boone is only able to offer her a mercy killing from long distance.  (Here, Bethesda could learn a lesson in story telling.  The grim narrative is told by bits and pieces, instead of dumped on the player in a verbose monologue.)

Boone now wanders the wasteland with you, and his only interest is killing Legionnaires, but it is his mannerisms that give weight to his character.  Boone is a psychologically scarred individual.  He’s depressed, suicidal, violent, angry, flippant, and uninterested in anything other than perforating someone’s brainpan. The player has a chance, much later in the game, to help Boone “deal with” his demons, and I won’t get into the particulars here.  But he is given a shot at redeeming himself, and if you push him a certain way, he ends up feeling “better”. 

I guess even Obsidian couldn’t resist writing a happy ending for Boone, though to be fair if you take certain story paths, Boone becomes a assassin, or seeks revenge on the NCR officer who led the Bitter Springs battle, or embarks on a suicide mission to kill Caesar all by himself.

So what’s the point with all of this?  You really have to play the game to see it, but I feel like Boone is a case study in how to write a believable character who suffers from the effects of violence.  Honestly, that kind of story-telling simply doesn’t exist in most games today.  Maybe it’s because game designers have no clue, or they’re not willing to indulge that level of realism.  But it is an interesting aspect that is routinely overlooked.  You can’t traipse around a wasteland, shooting people, and not have it effect you.  Similarly, you can’t drop someone in a fantasy setting, have them fight zombies and horrific creatures, and not have it immediately affect how the player reacts to the game world, or vice-a-versa.   

How do you implement such consequences in a game?  I don’t know.  You can’t just have some kind of Psychosis Meter, right?  That sounds like something straight out of a Japanese RPG.  It would have to be more subtle than that.  But ask yourself: if you were a humble shopkeeper in the magical world of Elf-Land, and some guy walked into your store who you knew had killed a bunch people in grisly battle, wouldn’t you talk to him differently? More important, wouldn’t you think certain things about the guy?  Go kill a hundred people with an edged weapon, wipe their blood and brains off your armor, and then try finding the disposition to haggle over a new sword.  I imagine your tolerance for such routine shenanigans would be pretty low. 

Most RPGs nowadays focus strictly on problem solving via combat – pretty much every game mechanic is designed to emphasize the combat scenarios you are going to face.  I think the player should be paying the price for that.  The lack of gravity cheapens the horrific aspect of what you end up doing.  Killing someone – even a fake someone – should have more effect on the game than giving you experience points.