"Playing the Player"

Ken Levine (the head of Irrational Games, formerly 2K Boston)once said in an interview that "Games tend to be very trustworthy—good guys are good, bad guys are bad. What you see and perceive is real. Sometimes characters are betrayed, but the player never is." And this guy should know, as he put together two of the best examples in recent memory: System Shock 2 and Bioshock. ...Ok, maybe that is really more of just one example, as they are more or less the same, but the point remains. For the uninitiated (here there be spoilers!!), both feature a friendly side-character who acts are your primary guide after you are rudely thrust into a hostile environment. They guide you through the danger, instructing you and warning you and generally proving indispensable, only to reveal about 3/4ths of the way through that they were actually the bad guy all along, using you and your naivety to further their own goals.


You can almost hear the unspoken "meatbag", can't you?

In relation to the quote above, Levine makes a good argument. While both cases are shocking (pun most definitely intended >__>), neither are wholly unexpected. Especially if you played one before the other, as their set-ups are near identical. So while the event may be particularly traumatic for the character, a genre savvy player will already be looking for ways to get away from his new nemesis and looking for the next objective,or at least a new NPC to tell him what to do. There is no shocking sense of loss or betrayal that the character is inevitably feeling, only possibly anger than the last few hours have been for naught.

So it got me thinking about situations where the game wasn't so much attacking the character as it was the player with a betrayal, something that was designed to make the player themselves feel uncomfortable with their position in the story. My first thought went to the infamous plot twist of Final Fantasy VII, when we learn Cloud's REAL backstory and his relationship with Zack. Cloud is set up as the ultimate escapist character in the opening acts of the game: he's tough, badass, gets all the ladies and is handsome to boot. A role model of sorts for players to idolize and enjoy being. But as we continue, its revealed that Cloud is hardly any of the above: he's actually an emotionally-insecure wreck who craves the attention of others, and has spent the last few months living out the life of his own dead idol (but he is still handsome, I suppose).


Girls go crazy for overcompensation. And blue turtlenecks.

This puts an uncomfortable mirror in front of the player, all but saying "You see what Cloud is to Zack? This is what you are to Cloud". While Cloud eventually comes into his own by the end of the game, that "what the hell, game?" feeling never quite goes away. Its one of the better instances of this trope in video gaming (which is a shame is so overshadowed by the much more popular, and obvious, Aeris dies spoiler).

Another example, this one slightly darker, comes from Metal Gear Solid 2, which is already enough of a mindfuck in itself that it becomes almost lost in the quagmire of twists near the end of the game. The character in question is Raiden, the VR-trained, flaxon-haired pretty boy who the game pushes on the player as the PC after the opening act. Its a very deliberate and carefully planned move, with the intention of pissing off the player by replacing fan-favorite grizzled veteran Solid Snake with newbie Raiden. The game knows full well that the player wants to be Solid Snake, to get that feeling of badass, and turns it on its head. Rather than immediate gratification, the game takes a longer, subtler route, showing exactly the kind of shit it would take to turn a person into Snake. Raiden is physically abused, emotionally toyed with by nearly everyone, lied to constantly, and by the end of the game when his "badass" credentials are finally starting to settle in he is revealed that the whole mission was just a live-fire training exercise; nothing he did really mattered in the slightest.
It has a delightfully sinister "be careful what you wish more" message underlying all the crazy crap about memes and genetic/cyber memory and stuff like that. And unlike Cloud, Raiden doesn't get better. When we see him again, he's become a shell-shocked robot man (thanks to even more unnecessary emotional damage, natch) who is only good for killing people.


A face only a mother could love. And we wonder why they write such bad poetry...

It takes losing most of his limbs and a brush close enough to death that he is hearing the Caps Lock to finally "get it" and snap out of his depression. And the delightfully ironic part is: many players admitted to preferring Raiden like this, because he wasn't vulnerable anymore. He'd stopped being a "person" whom they could relate to and feel sorry for, and more of a "character" like Snake.

Not many games can really do this effectively. For instance, the recent shooter Haze tries to play it almost comically straight, featuring an war where one side is hopped up on special combat enhancing drugs that make everything colorful, pain non-existent, and the horrors of war downplayed to a nice T rating. But the other side isn't so lucky, and sees combat in all its violence and terror. Your character starts out with the druggies, but soon switches to the other guys and realizes that, gasp, war isn't a GAME dun dun dun!. You can almost imagine the guy who wrote it sitting back, lighting a cigar, and looking at a picture of himself (I presume also smoking a cigar) and saying "this is why they pay me the big bucks". It would have been a fine twist, I suppose, if the execution wasn't so entirely ham-fisted (plus, making the big twist of the game one of the selling points in the advertising probably isn't the best formula for dramatic storytelling).