55 réponses à ce sujet

[Allan Schumacher]

Ragabul the Ontarah wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...
Can you disassociate the two? Especially if you're in a situation where it IS a hot topic? (i.e. Kirkwall)

What I see as interesting characters are characters that have their perspectives and justifications for why they see the world the way they do in a manner that I think is appropriate.

Yes, they can be.  I'm talking about a design philosophy.  Instead of starting by saying "we need a pro-mage character" or "we need a pro-Circle character" it's better to build a character because you need them for some specific plot moment/gameplay role/etc. and then ask "given this character's background and personality, how would they respond to situation XYZ?"

Gaider is better equipped to answer this, but I don't believe we create characters with the idea of "we need a pro-mage character."

In the first place, the character is designed to reflect a theme and tends to become almost exclusively about that theme.  They aren't a character I can form relationships with any more than I can form a relationship with the Grim Reaper, whose sole purpose is to embody the theme Death.  They aren't there for me to form relationships with.  They are there to educate me.  In the second place, the character builds depth and nuance by being allowed to respond organically to an organic world.  If you know Anders is "that pro-mage guy" before you even know what Anders will do in the story, everything he does is going to be crammed through the "pro-mage guy" filter.  Is it impossible for characters developed to address a theme to be nuanced?  No.  But combined with the plot centrality of the issue they care about, it becomes pretty darn hard.  What person on Earth is defined solely by some issue they are passionate about?  

Even if we don't create characters to clearly be "pro-mage characters" there's nothing we can do if those that play our game still label them as so.


As for your last point, sociology has already coined the term master status and I'd definitely argue that people like that do exist in life.

[Allan Schumacher]

Having a dominant trait doesn't mean it's your *only* trait, nor does it mean that you don't have individualized reactions to whatever you perceive your dominant trait to be. If this weren't the case, all mages or all black people or all "mothers" or anybody with a "master status" would be completely homogenous. The fact that a mother finds her identify as "mother" more important than anything else doesn't mean she has no opinions on anything else and never thinks about anything else.

You're right. And because you only see someone's master status doesn't mean that they don't have other traits either.

At this point I think you've mostly just gone and muddled up the idea of "I found Anders boring" by introducing justifications that don't really need to be said.

Why does an RPG set in a huge, complex, lore rich world need to centrally focus on only1 issue?

Why shouldn't it? It's also degenerative, because you can boil down a lot of games to centrally (a safe word that allows for the existence of exceptions) focusing on a single issue.

That said, I still don't agree that requiring a plethora of issues inherently makes it better. In DA2 attempts were made at exploring how a lot of perspectives view mages and what justifications are deemed acceptable.

To pick on an example you used, motherhood, I think it'd be an interesting idea for a narrative (video game or otherwise) that exists as an examination of the status and what it means to different people.

One of my favourite movies, Crash, centrally focuses on the issue of racism. Introducing more into its narrative would've been distracting from the narrative.


You can not like what we did with Dragon Age 2, but at some point it degenerates into "I didn't like the story that you did. You should have done something different" which ultimately is a pretty universally applicable response to stuff that a person doesn't like.

Then they stop seeming like a character who cares about the issue.  They
instead seem like a construct trying to educate me about how nuanced
the issue is.

There's an observer bias in this too, however.  Writer intent (fairly) doesn't mean very much if the reader takes it in a different direction.  So even if we didn't intend for it to be an attempt to educate you about how nuanced the issue is, if you take it that way there's nothing we can do about it.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 01 novembre 2013 - 09:54 .

[Allan Schumacher]

David7204 wrote...

You do not spend 50 hours telling a story about a group of characters and then, at the climax, have a bunch of either minor characters or characters the player has never seen before at all come in and solve everything while the player character and party stands by and does nothing. Are people seriously trying to defend such a thing as good writing?

You're changing what your arguing somewhat with this .

Characters like Alistair and Loghain are not minor characters in Dragon Age, and the context by which they sacrifice themselves makes sense within the narrative (and is still driven by the player character as well).

You are starting to flirt a line though, as I think it's time to step back and recognize that different people may want different things out of their narrative experiences than you do.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 01 novembre 2013 - 11:53 .

[Allan Schumacher]

David7204 wrote...

AresKeith wrote...

David7204 wrote...

The protagonist confronting the central conflict of the story does not make 'the universe revolve around him.' It just makes him the protagonist.

I don't think anymore is arguing that David, but you claim it's repulsive if a companion does it

Not at all. I'm claiming it's repulsive if a companion does it by sole virtue of being the player's least liked companion.

To be clear, are you asking game developers to protect you from sabotaging your own game play by sacrificing the character you like the least (you want them to die because you like them the least) and dealing with the juxtaposition of the character you like the least being acknowledged for the sacrifice?

[Allan Schumacher]

David7204 wrote...

At the very climax of the story, the very crux of the conflict, yes. In stories like these with lots of characters carrying lots of themes, a character shouldn't have a defining role unless they've been a defining character of the story whose themes are very in tune with the central conflict.

Even if it is a result of a direct choice the player makes?

It's a difficult line to draw. Because I have no problem with a
character dying on the suicide mission, for example. The story doesn't
become about them. But If Javik alone accompanied Shepard at the end,
and was the one to give a final speech about something or other, that
would bother me. It would bother me with any squadmate, even one I like a lot.

Just a comment, but no one made the assertion that a different character would be the one that gives the final speech or anything like that.

Modifié par Allan Schumacher, 02 novembre 2013 - 07:26 .

[Allan Schumacher]

The Mad Hanar wrote...

This thread is no longer on life support. It has been killed and mutilated. Now people are shooting at this thread's dead carcass.

Yup.  And some comments have greatly angered me since I was last here.


Locking thread.