I want to hug her, but there’s a shotgun in the way.
There she is, finally standing right in front of me. The spring in my life, the apple of my eden, the alpha and omega of my tortured love-lost metaphor. I’ve journeyed so long and so far to reach her, and now that it’s over, now that she’s right in front of me… I just…
I can’t bring myself to touch her. So close, now, and I can’t kiss her. I can’t put my hand on her face. I can’t even say anything to her.
I could kill her, though.
I could blow her head of at close range with the shotgun, or at long range with the sniper rifle. I could explode her into tiny bloody giblets with the rocket launcher, and if she began ducking and weaving too fast for an accurate shot I could switch to the machine gun. It would still be innacurate, but the fire-rate’s fast enough to compensate over medium range. I could nail her to the wall with a crossbow. I could laser-slice her in half. I could laser-slice her into quarters. I could laser-slice her into eighths.
Maybe if she was a door, I could open her. Or a health-pack.
If she hid behind cover, I could throw a grenade to force her out or blast her fragile body to into bloody splinters. I could hit her with explosive grenades, sticky grenades, timed mines, homing mines, bouncers, swirlers, rollers, twirlers. I could launch a rocket, a javelin, a sattelite deployed orbital missile bombardment. I could build sentries to guard against her approach, and spy drones to detect her location. I could call down a helicopter to attack her position. I could call down a nuclear strike to end the match. I could run her over in a jeep. I could run her over in a hovercraft. I could run her over in a spaceship.
I could stand over her and crouch, over and over again.
If I run out of ammo, or if she starts to pose too big a threat, I could bring out the big guns. I could blast her with an energy beam. I could punch a voodoo doll to blind her. I could slow down time to make her easier to hit, or speed up time to disintegrate her into a pile of ancient smoking dust. I could warp the ground before her into mighty hands to tear her in twain. I could bid the spirits of Field and Sky and Flame and Life give me the strength to burn her with a fireball or strangle her with weeds or blow her away with a tornado. I could ressurect my long-dead allies to my side for one last glorious stand against her. I could summon the Cold Dark Old ones that come for us all in our time to rise out from their eternal grave to stalk the surface of this forgotten earth once more and hit her weak point for massive fucking damage.
But sometimes… sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes I see people who aren’t shooting, or weaving, or going into an attack pattern. People like her, who just stand there, kind of smiling at me.
And sometimes I wish I could interact with them in a way that didn’t make them a corpse.
-This was written by jack, by the way, who wishes he knew how to make a real byline on this website doodad.
I am reminded of Breen’s stinging accusation towards Gordon Freeman as he clambers up The Citadel, which perfectly sums up the limited game vocabulary you have been saddled with:
“Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can: you have destroyed so much — what is it exactly that you have created? Can you name even one thing? … I thought not.”
The best villains draw on the audiences own insecurity, and Dr. Breen has to be one of my favourite video-game villains. Leave it to him to jab the player right in their buried psychosis.
Then again, it’s not as though Gordon can make a witty comeback.
Games with supposed total freedom don’t really have it if the end-all verb of your options is “kill.”
Brilliant. Though I must say, the majority of the industry is reticent to even give us that many ways to kill something. I’d want to write it off as baby steps, but Deus Ex already exists. Or to take it even further, Nethack already exists.
I could already foresee the circular argument regard to this in the designing rooms.
“But people don’t want anything beside shooting down the NPCs!”
“How do you know?”
“Because no one have bought a game that is not about shooting down NPCs!”
“Hard to do if we haven’t made one yet.”
“Not going to make a game that no one wants!”
To be fair, dating sims existed for quite a while now. Not really what I personally enjoy but I’m glad for their existence. The excuse of complexity would’ve worked 20 years ago, but just like BeamSplashX have stated if Nethack could do it, I don’t see why the powerhouses can’t beside “don’t want to”.
Funny how with far less technological breakthroughs and far less budgeting, interactive fictions have done much better at providing diversity than video games. It is possible. It really is.
It’s not just that we’re taking baby steps towards full human interaction, we’re actually going backwards. We’ve got so good at designing killing that no-one wants to go off the path and have a crack at loving.
You know what I really want? A button- just a single, context-sensitive button- set aside for human interaction. It would hi-five the guys or hug the ladies. That’s all. Just a way to, you know, connect with them a little, in a way that isn’t over the barrel of a gun. No-one in video games ever touches each other. Even cinematic human-packed Bioware epics have everyone stand at exactly five yards away from each other. No contact. You can never even hold hands. I feel so lonely.
Things only feel real in a game if you can interact with them. When I can’t even touch anyone, and especially when I’m not even allowed to talk to them, they just feel hollow. Making interactions that deal with people, in all their stunning complexity and intricacy is hard, I know, but it seems like we should have made some progress on it by now. We’ve got dialogue trees, yeah, but that cuts it down to just choosing what pre-made speech to hear at certain intervals.
Dating Sims might be the best we’ve got, but- well, they seem to turn the whole thing into a one-dimensional “Get into her pants” simulator. Which is definetly a certain type of human interaction, I suppose. Maybe people feel you have to dangle the promise of sex in front of everyone to get them interested in mushy-feely talking. Personally, I’m just creeped out that the best examples of human interaction in games might come from porn. That would be a terrible thought.
There’s just so many game design ideas to explore that don’t even involve killing at all- and Human Interaction has to be the most important and most overlooked type of interaction ever. How weird is it that the absolute foundation of every other type of media is almost completely overlooked in games?
Well, anyway. If you guys are interested in this kinda thing, I really can’t recommend Galatea enough:
http://parchment.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/parchment.html?story=http://parchment.toolness.com/if-archive/games/zcode/Galatea.zblorb.js
It’s an attempt to fully capture a single conversation. With a single person. In text. If nothing else, it proves how hard this stuff is.
What about 7 Sins on the PS2 and PC?
It was ugly, jerky and badly programmed, but there’s a fair few ways of lovin’ and there’s fighting too if you want it.
Personally, I’m waiting for an adventure game that uses a conversation model like the intelligent chatbots for their NPCs…