For me, the ultimate hero is the one you begin to identify with, to really route for. I don’t know if you have played Call of Duty 4’s campaign, but the development of Captain Price is a great example. Mostly in CoD and in shooters in general you just blast away to stay alive, but at the end when the villian shoots Captain Price and all your friends and Price slides you a handgun as he dies, you shoot with that handgun for a different reason. I know when I played how much I felt like shooting those 3 enemies. It was revenge, it almost seems silly that you could feel revenge for a video game character, but I know I did. You could shoot the 3 enemies anywhere, but anyone I have asked subconsciously aimed for the head of the main villian in particular, as though just killing him wasn’t enough. Price had saved me so many times in that 6-7 hours I played the story mode, and I honestly had become attached to him. He was the ultimate hero.

Enjoyed the article as always.

Since reading your first article, I have been in a deep personal inquiry about what makes a great story. My story started simply. There were two warring peoples, each with their own God (think of the game Populous by EA) and leader, then there was the traitor that left the good people taking an ancient forbidden tome to the evil leader in exchange for the power he was denied from his people. The tome showed how to summon a god into the physical world – something the good people would never do, but in evil hands, it was the trick to taking over the entire land.

I believe part of making a good story is that everything should be logical and characters should be true to themselves. When writing the story, I imagined that the characters were real people and kept asking myself: Would they really do that? Would they say those words?

The hero leader is a young man that is loved and respected by his people, because he loves and respects them. He chooses his two warriors to fight the final battle carefully. First he chooses a personal friend that has fought side by side with him in many battles. This friend was a battle lord for the enemy leader for many years until he changed his ways and left to join the ‘good’ side. I feel that the fact that our hero has trusted and taken in an enemy leader who was commited to changing his ways shows his respect and belief in mankind. I am hoping that just a small mention of this backstory leads the viewer to imagine the details themselves (just like I did when Princess Leia told Obi Wan: years ago you served my father in the clone wars). This also serves my story as his friend knows the enemy land well and will guide them safely to the shrine deep in enemy territory where the enemy god will be summoned. The other warrior he chooses is a female friend who has studied the religion/magic of the land and will help in how to figure out how to unsummon this god – a situation that no one living has ever dealt with before. She will also serve to be the more compassionate character when my story needed it later on.

For an example of the rules of the story, I will point out my relationship between gods and the people. Both gods live in their own realm that is separate from the physical world. The can’t just visit the world and go stomping through the land like godzilla. They can affect the weather (the good god has lightning, rain and storms, the evil god fire and meteors), but they can only use their powers in the areas where their believers are (again, rules of Populous). This keeps the gods and their power in check. In order to summon the god to the physical world you need to know how (the stolen book), you need to sacrifice people as a sort of payment in blood and souls and you need to have a human host that the god can possess (the enemy leader). This served a few purposes in my story: One was to show how ambitious and dark the evil leader is. Next is to show why the good people haven’t just done this themselves a long time ago and thirdly, when you arrive at the enemy shrine, you not only have the shock of seeing bodies strewn out in an open field, but the enemy leader appears and by using the forbidden rituals from the stolen book, he re-animates his victims before your eyes which sets up the first battle of the game.

Now I will get back to the point of this article: The moment you never forget. With all this attention and respect to my world, my story and my characters over the course of two months, I found myself very personally connected to this world I created and on the day I wrote the ending of the story, I felt a sadness. This was a sadness I liken to when actors finish shooting a movie and will leave their characters and fellow actors behind and move on with their lives, so I guess I have already had my ‘moment’ and when I finish my scenario and release it on Age of Mythology Heaven, I will let you know here right away how it went.

I am very glad that you have decided to go in the direction you had for your next article. I’m also curious. Would it be possible for me to send my scenario to you (right now it’s an 8+ minute cinematic – no game play yet). I would be curious to hear what you think of my story and cinematics so far. It’s in an Age of Mythology Titans expansion .SCX scenario file.

Again, thanks for your continued articles, I also will try to keep more on top of new responses.

ELRICH -
I owe you an apology as well, for not responding sooner. I have to say I completely agree with your goals for your Beat the Boss entry. How did that work out? Let me also say that your comments on the importance of story have altered my plans for my next two or three columns. I want to start talking about more than just underlying theory and start getting into actual techniques for creating good stories. Anything you can share with us about your experiences with your Beat the Boss project would be much appreciated!

Oh, and Park — did you ever play the SP campaigns for Empires:Dawn of the Modern World?

Ingo always delivered a masterpiece. I demoed Ulio a long time ago. Then 1-2 years later, I re-installed AOK to play the full campaign. Only that campaign. You really felt for the guy’s misfortunes.

But RTS games are usually macro-level where you aren’t suppose to identify with any single unit, traditionally. I think a lot of FPS and RPG games from the very beginning have done an amazing job. Emotional appeal was never the focus of any RTS game except perhaps Warcraft 3.

Without a good story, good storytelling and interesting characters a game would be basically:
Unit A who has 120 hit points and does 12 damage hits unit B and after calculating 45% chance to hit rate, hits the opponent. The damage would be 9 points minus Unit B’s armor of 3 defense points so the resulting loss of hit points to unit B is 6.
Very exciting
Sounds more like a math word problem rather than a living, breathing story. At its core, every game has similar math for unit to unit battle, so what makes it touch your soul? Graphics help, but are not necessary. Haven’t we all read a book and FELT the characters as if they were real people even though we have never seen them? Why were the first-made Star Wars movies more loved and the newer prequel movies (I think most people’s opinion)? The newer ones of course had much better special effects (graphics), but it lacked great characters like Han Solo and a farm kid you got to see grow into a wise, but still mistake-making Jedi.

The Age of Mythology Heaven Scenario and Design forum is hosting a Beat the Boss contest where you create a scenario and have to make an interesting way to defeat a boss (a unique and unusually strong unit for those who dont know). I’m putting most of my focus into the story rather than the mechanics of the game. I am hoping that if I can touch the judges soul with my very real characters that they will have this ‘experiential moment’ which will set my entry apart from the typical hack and slash entry.

In the original Age of Empires, the typical mission briefing reads like this:

The elimination of the Izumo leader brought a temporary peace to that part of your border, but the Izumo are getting aggressive again. Izumo raiders from islands in the Inland Sea have attacked a number of your coastal villages. They have carried off important treasures from several shrines. You are ordered to attack the Izumo islands and recover the six treasures they have stolen.

For all of its ground-breaking advancement of the RTS genre, the original Age of Empires always struck me as a game that never fully exploited the story-telling potential of the medium. There’s a lot lacking in a mission briefing like this one. Why are the Izumo getting aggressive? The more real the writer makes their motives, the more compelled I will feel to counterattack because the more real their threat will seem to me. What are the treasures that were stolen? Why are they important to my people? And more significantly, are they important to me personally?

And who exactly am I playing? The Yamato, obviously, but who is my character, the man assigned to undertake this mission? The more real you make him, the more emotionally invested I become in the game.

Three modders really jumped on this and used a new approach to character creation in their custom AoE levels. I was one of them in my Persian Wars series, along with Chris Theriault and a mysterious modder named Imhotep who did some of the best AoE custom work we had ever seen, then disappeared one day after some melodrama on the site. Both of these guys did a lot of tremendous groundbreaking work here.

In fact, Chris, aka Eggman, created a wonderful scenario about Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in which the character of Caesar figures prominently as a real protagonist. Well guess what? When the ES put out the Rise of Rome expansion pack, they had a four-scenario mini-campaign in which we follow one character, Julius Caesar, through key events in his life. When I was working for Stainless Steel Studios, we called this a “focused campaign” as opposed to an “epic campaign.” But it was a direct route from here to WarCraft 3!

First off, let me thank you all for joining in my discussion about art and games. I deeply appreciate the time each of you has taken to make well-thought-out, substantive and articulate responses. It’s also pretty thrilling for me to discover that other people are having these thoughts and feel strongly enough about them to set pen to paper… er, finger to keyboard… mouse to icon… whatever…

It’s always interesting to me that for many gamers the moment we recognize we’re involved in something more than a mere diversion boils down to a specific moment in a specific game when suddenly we realize we’ve been changed somehow — whether it’s Bioshock, Privateer or a text adventure. I hope to get more of these moments in the mix as SOLO unfolds and develops.

The whole question of whether games do, or even can, measure up to the great masterpieces of classical art frankly never even occurred to me to consider before now. Although, I can’t say as I share EdyPegasus’ apparent disappointment with modern art (if I understood you correctly, EP). Recently I had the unforgettable pleasure to experience the Parthenon frieze at the British Museum for the first time. It was one of the great transformative moments of my life. But I have to say I feel equally transported when I sit in front of Jackson Pollack’s Autumn Rhythm at the Metropolitan Museum here in New York, in the same way that I find the poetry of ee cummings as unforgettable as Sappho.

In any event, art doesn’t have to be great in order to be art. And I’m not saying all games are art. Some games are, well… games. Whether puzzle games will ever be art is something for some one else to tackle, though I suspect the answer is no. Crossword puzzles may look like Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” but no one is going to suggest they’re art.

In the same way, I wouldn’t say all movies are art, either. Most of them in fact are just diversions. The term “movie” was, in fact, coined to suggest a side-show novelty, “pictures that move!” — like a magic show, suitable only for carnival entertainment. It turned out to be a bit of misnomer, in the way that “game” turns out to be too small a name to describe the experiences many people have had “playing” them. And of course the term “play” and “player” are still used to describe drama presented on the stage, whether it’s “Oh, Calcutta!” or “Hamlet.”

However not all art requires us to be passive onlookers, Oliver, not even classical art. The Parthenon is intended to be entered, to be walked through — in fact, after walking through the Propylae and across the open plaza of the Acropolis. And if I hadn’t walked the length of the Parthenon frieze at the British museum, I would have missed the whole point.

For example, many of you may have heard of the game Line Rider-you draw lines (digitally) with your mouse, and the stick person on the sled rides on them. This game stands among few others, in it’s own genre, gart. The simple-yet-raw power of this editor can truly bring about the artist in anyone. Even if you can’t read, the interface is so incredibly simple that anyone can do it. Which brings me back to why I consider it gart.

We may compare gart to other monuments, as said in the aforementioned article, and I agree to this. Why, if a person draws a picture of the colloseum or the Parthenon, isn’t this too art? We could probably call it imitation art-it takes less time to make, and yet it resembles the momuments wholly.

I suppose that one of the things I wish to say about this is, is time neccesarily relevant to the art itself? You could spend years painting a picture of your grandmother, but it may come out terrible or sloppy. But what if you took only one day to paint the same picture, and it came out perfectly, exactly the way you wanted it to?

What I mean to say is, I do not believe that time is a factor, or at least not a main one, in creating good art. The true way to create good art is through a person’s skill, not through time or effort. I realize that this amy sound hypocritical, but I believe that it is true. In short, a game could be art, but only if it is designed that way (You could even venture that the designing itself is also art). As a small sidenote, I would like to post a link to a certain Youtube video, which will conclude what I am saying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW44BpXpjYw

Peace be with you all.

-Shraze