Make Way For The Bad Guy! - Making Evil Fun Again

Hello there friend,

I was reading an article about the game Dungeon Keeper.  Created by Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog Productions, it was a Real Time Strategy (RTS) game where you played as 'The Keeper', a rotten-to-the-core no-good bastard who lorded over his dungeon and slapped the hell out of the worker imps for not working fast enough.  With torture chambers, graveyards, a few lairs, and other horrible monstrosities, you could eventually dig out a labyrinth of evil that spanded far and wide, ready to mince-meat any champion that dare brave it's dark passages.

This kind of game is designed to bring out the Mr.Burns out in all of us.  It's where you wont just unleash the hounds, you will laugh maniacally, and quite possible put your fingertips together in front of your face while saying 'Excellent'.  Considering the way the louder portions of the gaming community tend to act towards one another, you would think there would be more of a market for this cartoonish super-villainy.

Well, you'd be wrong. 

One of the first games that proved to me that we've lost touch with how to do 'comicly evil' is Overlord (and it's sequel).  To be fair, I played Overlord for maybe 2 hours, hoping it would pick up.  It didnt.  The reality of the situation was you were running a liniar corridor crawls and any evil acts you commited were not by your choosing, but by the games narrative. 

Overlord's biggest mis-step is that the player is rarely taking an active part in the evils they commit, instead you are more forced to watch the game tell you the evils you commit, but often times they feel bland and forced.  For the player to really get any kick out of it, the action has to be chosen and activly done by the player.

Let's take some more of the 'hardcore' varriety games as an example.  We're going to talk about Grand Theft Auto 4 (GTA in general, but 4 for specifics), and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2(COD:MW2).

In GTA4, the absolute bane of your existence was your cell phone, and who ever was calling for a pick-up, drop-off, mini-game, and return-home grind.  Even in story progression, it really does feel like many missions are designed to drag on and on.  The FUN in GTA, comes not in following the game and it's story, but in simply running around causing mayhem.  Drop a few moltovs on the freeway and watch your star rating go up, and then trying to either fight off or get away from the oncoming chase, would often force some split-second decisions that would give some horrendous yet hilarious outcomes as you accidently hit granny and see her tumbling through the air, and the police ride over her body without a care trying to catch you.

Looking at COD:MW2, it'd probably be no surprize that I am bringing up 'No Russian'.  'No Russian' puts you in a situation that for many was a little extreme (Go into an airport, shoot up civillians, escape), and though I feel the chapter itself is a great example of games being able to evoke strong emotion through story telling, it's at this point you are given a choice, you can walk along and witness the carnage, or you can create it.  I know there are many people who claimed to never pulled the trigger during the first half of that chapter where you are walking among civilians, but consider what you would be envoking in yourself to do so.

And that is the key point I think we should really discuss.  In Dungeon Keeper, to play it effectively you had to choose to be a douche, and the game would reward this kind of behavior, but at not point were you FORCED to do so.  In fact, it would be quite amusing to throw your own minions into the torture chambers (Or in case of the Dark Mistresses, just leave them be and they'll find their own way to the chamber). 

Pulling back to a less serious tone, the same reaction can be given in The Sims.  If you ever listened to someone who has played this game for a few hours, inevitably they will build a house that is a death trap.  They will take the ladder out of the pool so their Sims cant escape, build rooms around them with no doors, not place a bathroom, and eventually this malevolence in the player emerges where they actively are destroying their Sims lives.  Dispite this is NOT something enforced by the game, some of the most entertaining moments from The Sims comes from these horrific stories of what people would put the Sims through.

For players to really enjoy being 'Evil', it needs to be a choice.  In Dungeon Keeper, yes there was a benefit to slapping your Imps around, but the reality was you'd do it anyway just because you could.  Much like repeatedly clicking on a unit in Star/Warcraft just to make them mad and spew forth comedic dialog, the player does not need much provocation. 

I am sure you can think of several instances where a game that was not intended to be 'cruel' just became so through the players use of the tool sets.  I still play Prototype so I can pick up a random person and bring him to the tallest tower I find, just to throw him as far as I can and see if I can keep up with the body to watch the landing and distance before the flailing corpse despawns for going too far away from me. 

The second part is levity. 

Levity can be created simply in the absurdity of the action you take.  This is the big difference between that car-chase with granny getting ran over by the police, and walking through an airport with an machine gun.  In GTA Chase and the Prototype Shot-Put the levity comes from the rag-doll physics, and gravity physics.  The bodies are being flown through the air like they are weightless, yet land hard enough to make an audible 'thump' in the Wile-Coyote fashion. 

This is a far cry from 'No Russian', where the design of the level is ment to make this horrific act all too real.

In the actions in Dungeon Keeper, aside from the dialog which was fantastic even for todays standards, it's comical to imagine you, 'The Keeper' trying to stop your Dark Mistresses from wandering into the torture chambers and lashing themselves (those saucy wenches), or watching an imp slacking off in need of gentile back-hand-motivation.  It's these odd little interactions with the player and the game that bring the levity. 

Though it does enforce the idea that you have to play as an evil bastard, it leaves it up to you in the How, and because of that choice, to just play the game or to channel your inner Mr.Burns.

I really do hope that we get another series that tries this take on role-reversal.  It's a great situational comedy in game and I think under-explored and under-appreciated.

Until next time,

- D-Pad Duke