gunsmoke on 7/12/2010 at 03:17

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The bots have trouble with you being smoked from a window/ledge because they won't simply melee you loose. They insist on killing the Special Infected.

Phatose on 7/12/2010 at 04:28

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Since I've totally avoided Counterstrike since it's infamous for being brutally unfun when you start, I can't much comment on that. That said, in games where rounds are very short - like presumably Counter-Strike - or where the consequences of death are minimal, players are far less cautious then in games where the consequences are more severe.

If I were to compare an Instant Respawn TF2-2fort server versus an arena server, the difference in player behavior is immediately noticable.


As for the continuum - well, it may only be specific to certain mindsets, but the very existence of this thread, and the decided lack of 'fail but proceed anyway' in narrative single player games fairly succinctly demonstrates that the mindset is so widespread as to be the rule, not the exception. Players are trained to reload, and in cases where failure is acceptable - but there is an underlying premise of punishment down the line - that's what they do.

BlackCapedManX on 8/12/2010 at 05:27

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Obvious the granddaddy king of games with flawed protagonists is digipets. Wherein the protagonist (8 year old players) is usually deeply flawed as a constant caregiver (owing to laziness and apathy that are probably somewhat common with 8 year olds who find fake pets more enticing than real ones) and lead to frequent failures (usually entailing your virtual pet starving to death in a paradoxically ever growing pile of its on feces.)

4 srs tho:
There are a couple of games I can think of that pull of a flawed protagonist (or at least failure in a final kind of sense,) those being Armored Core Nexus and Halo Reach. (Also I'm not going to bother using spoiler tags because no one plays Armored Core anyway and it you didn't know that Reach gets destroyed before Halo Reach even came out than you obviously haven't been playing the series for its story. If you haven't played Reach and think you're going to be blown away by any of the amazing story it might be guarding, you've been warned here not to go on.) At the end of both of those games (and many others likely, but these stood out, and are useful in serving a diametrically staggered view) the PC plays out their own inevitable death in an endless onslaught of enemies. In ACN this ending was particularly poignant because the last battle was HARD (or at least usually was the first time you got to it,) and you're essentially fighting for the sake of preventing an insane machine from unleashing an endless stream of self-destructing robots to bombard the entire world. Even after you win the fight, you still fail to complete this objective, and the last scene in the game has you piloting your 'mech while a hail of self guided bombs rains down in armageddon around you. Rather than play until your 'mech runs out health and you die, the game hits a slow fade-out starting around 30% health or so, so you never actually see you die, you're simply left with this unnerving sense of futility.

Now, this was before MW2 PC kill-off-fests and unlike MW2 and Reach, the important distinction here is that after playing so hard to complete the ostensive objective, the gameplay objective, you still lose, in the sense of the story objective, which you then play out in character. You don't win, and then die, which is what happens in Reach (Cortana is delivered, duh, thus starting Halo CE, hence Noble 6 is no longer necessary and can be safely executed,) you "win," find out you lost anyway, and then die, thus guaranteeing that you can't "win for real." This blew my mind, coming totally unexpectedly at the end of a game where most of the action is deciding which generator/radiator pairing can best power your array of energy weapons, and really grounded the character as being a pawn in a much larger scheme that at the end of the day they weren't able to "hero" their way out of. (FROM had to screw up this beautiful ending by making a sequel to Nexus, Last Raven, and mangling all of the mechanics to hell, so that's fun.)

Reach pulled this off in a different way, but with the player still ostensibly "winning the plot." Here again a flawed protagonist is portrayed by the loss of the PC's comrades, and eventual player death, putting that note of futility on everything the player does accomplish (especially since most players know from the get go that Reach gets glassed.) This isn't the kind of flawed-character-through-player-action that was the point of the OP, but obviously much of portraying "you" (the player/player-character) as flawed comes from the ways the story deals with you actions, and the hero-complex that is so often the crutch of the PC in most games is easily undermined by giving the player as sense of the futility of their in game actions.

It would be interesting to see an emotional response vs. in game reward kind of scenario as a thought project. For artists working in gaming media as a way of interacting with their audience you could seem some quick and dirty gaming scenarios that pit gut reaction against objective seeking. If you wanted to jump straight into the controversial deep end, imagine a game where you play as a director at Abu Ghraib (or any other kind of interrogation-torturer role,) and your objective is to obtain information, and obviously the player is expected to feel disgust at the actions they'd be entreated to used to obtain the maximum "score" (for lack of a better term.) It would be interesting to see how quickly players divorce the idea of suffering, in a virtual environment, from accomplishing success at all costs. It might be foreseeable that a typical gamer will think "it's just a game" and the idea of not-succeeding will be unacceptable. I'm probably straying a lot from the point here, but again, I think it would be a very interesting kind of experiment to try to create a game where success of the main character is considered not optimal by the player, hence driving them to intentional sabotage themselves (or operated in some grey area rather than ASTOUNDING VICTORY, because the game's standard of winning would be considered a phyrric victory to the player at best.)

The multiplayer realm of things offers a totally different set of interesting PC problems. If anyone here used to play America's Army, you'll know that you got dead right quick. Then you stayed dead for however long the round lasted, so you could end up spending a lot of time staring at your teammates screens if you ran around carelessly guns blazing. Obviously this inspired a lot of "sissy" tactics, and camping and very slow progression was so ingrained into the fabric of the game that to play otherwise was outside the norm. Here the simple thought process is "it's better to play real slow and cautious like I was an actual person with a standard resilience to bullets and the very realistic zero-number of respawns, than to be dead right off and not get to play at all." Essentially the PC was flawed by virtue of being realistic, which, all things considered, was kind of the goal of the game.

On the other side of things you have an MMO like EVE, where everything is so player run, from outlaw enemies to big business, that you essentially have a pretty realistic representation of the spread of human mentality. There's a saying, "character is what you do when no one's watching," through the lens of which the internet has shown that the character of most people is to be absolute jerkasses (see (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/) .) EVE shows this pretty well in that there are many people who revel in nothing more that playing the part of people who willingly fuck up other people's hard earned shit for no good reason (youtube has many amusing videos to this effect, and the amount of whining some people get about to doing afterward.) If ever there were a shining example of players being allowed to play whatever kind of character, from uber-heroic to absolute fuckwad, EVE would be this example. For instance, there's a player run service set up as a free charity to allow anyone in the game to use what was intended to be a sort of elitist transportation system. There are also people who will trick you into attacking them so they can get an aggro flag and have their infinitely more powerful buddy warp in and wreck your shit. Granted, the implications of character perfection or imperfection aren't reinforced by some kind of in game plot (most of the time anyway, one guy won an incredibly powerful unique ship as part of a storyline quest that actually impacted the totality of the EVE universe, but you know, EVE's different like that,) but the fact that your actions have an impact on real people hammers home the idea of what kind of character you're playing perhaps a little more soundly than in many other instances.

june gloom on 8/12/2010 at 08:24

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(http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/555181) AAAAAAAAGHGHGHGHGH

demagogue on 8/12/2010 at 20:12

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I think it's safe to say that's covered in the phrase "laughable attempt at manipulating".