The shadow archetype is best defined by Joseph Campbell in his look at the hero’s journey , as a character going on his/her own hero’s journey parallel to the hero. Basically to the bad guy of the tale, he’s the hero and the hero is the villain. Creating characters with motivations strong and complex enough is an amazing challenge.
Many video games feature villains who are one dimensional, they want to capture the princess, or steal from orphans no doubt with an evil mustache . The challenge is to create a villain who the player can root for along with the hero. Going back to the anime series “Death Note”, it features one of the best defined “shadows” I’ve seen with the main character Light Yagami.
Light is set up as an amazing protagonist or antagonist depending on your point of view. Light has one goal, to bring ever lasting peace to the world ,unfortunately his method is to kill anyone who commits a crime using the death note. The character clings to his goal and puts everything else on the side to accomplish this goal. It’s amazing to watch this character grow over the course of the series and always adheres to the belief that he’s the good guy and the detectives out to get him are the evil ones, which leaves him with no remorse when he kills officers and agents that are searching for him. The story works as the characters are never defined as good or evil , just that their beliefs are completely opposite of each other. The majority of the time is viewed from Light’s perspective with cuts to the detectives, making the story revolve around Light as the protagonist even though he is a murderer.
I’ve been trying to come up with villains featured in gaming that are developed enough that they’re not just doing something evil just because, but have a realistic motive to it, in essence, bad guys you love to hate. The other side of it , is making the character the player controls the bad guy and developing them to the point that you can rationalize what they’re doing. Once again I’ve been playing around in my head a game idea, the player controls someone who goes from being a guy stuck at a dead end job, to a serial killer set in an open world with game play some what similar to Hit Man . The challenge is that I’m trying to make it so that people will root for a character who is killing everyone around him. I’m thinking about making the event that starts this so traumatizing that the audience will feel for what he’s going through. i can’t remember the last time I saw a game with the main character as the bad guy, not counting games when halfway through the game he/she becomes good or he may be bad but he does good deeds.
Moving away from black and white situations to shades of grey is a great step up for game writing. I think we need to start seeing game stories developed around the shadow of the game world, not an anti hero story line. While not the best example for game writing, the game Soul Nomad for the PS2 did have an interesting story campaign where you play as the bad guy and basically try to take over all the people you saved in the regular story campaign. Stories following the bad guy to me are a sign that game stories are maturing .
Josh
