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bagged-a-bazooka:

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discovergames:

beaenkes:

Ken Levine can’t conceive of a ‘positive’ character being more than one-dimensional, also thinks making a character that isn’t a straight white man has to be their single defining trait

Ugh, this is so bad on so many levels. The first is that every time a white guy receives suggestions that maybe he could consider making a single protagonist who’s not a hetero white guy, he automatically hears it as “We are forcing you to shoehorn in a bunch of token diverse characters, who don’t fit the story, and whose only trait is their diversity, because you have to pander to us SJWs or you are an evil shitlord!” But of course, that’s complete bullshit. Nobody is asking for single-trait archetypes or tokenism. The people who want diverse characters want characters - fully developed, well-rounded, interesting characters. The fact that these guys see all non-hetero white guy characters as inherently “one-dimensional” says a hell of a lot more about them than it does about the people asking for better representation.

The other main thing that bothers me about this is the suggestion that “being strong and positive” is automatically uninteresting in characters, and the concomitant idea that one has to be dark/brooding/tortured in order to be an interesting character. I thought we, as a culture, abandoned all that 1990s/2000s brooding culture a while back now. Teenage boys often see nihilism, addiction, and asshole behavior as the height of maturity and interesting character development, but most of us grow out of that phase pretty quickly. Apparently Ken Levine is a late bloomer in that respect. Hopefully he’ll grow and mature enough at some point to understand that positivity is not automatically boring, and negativity is not automatically interesting. If you have a character who is “strong and positive” and you can’t find any way to make them anything except “one-dimensional” then maybe you’re just a really shitty writer.

Yeah, definitely. He’s most famous for the Bioshock games and those are famous for revolving around nihilism (which got him popular with aforementioned teenage boys who are now defending him to the teeth).

I think Bioshock The First had a good amount of vintage frivolity juxtaposed against an incredibly unfeeling culture. The overall outlook of the game was bleak - the fall of an overambitious society, riches falling into ruin, the oppressive helplessness of being at the bottom of the sea, almost every other person being insane and mutating themselves, the audio diaries of people being slowly taken advantage of and seeing their world fall apart, and the ultimate notion of ‘this never could have worked’ - but that was understandable because Rapture was the result of pride, hubris, and economics that eliminated human welfare. To me, it was presenting hopelessness, but that was okay because it was criticising a society that emphasised logic over morals. In short: it’s almost an SJW viewpoint.

And then there was Bioshock Infinite, which lost all track of narrative focus and just said ‘This world’s doomed. That world’s doomed. Every universe is doomed. Look how racist these people are. Revolutions make the oppressed as bad as the oppressors. I guess all we can do is murder lots of people’. It was ultra-nihilistic to the point of being boring. And there was Booker being all middle-of-the-road ‘there’s no right answer here, who can say where human rights come from’ and then suddenly angry downtrodden minorities were the bad guys. It had nothing to say and all it did was appeal to young men who want validation in their apathy towards social causes. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic, but that game could have been so much interesting if we were playing as a kicked-around minority in a White Utopia who actually had emotions and a goal, instead of another stubbly white man who had no interest in ANY of the stuff going on and followed some completely dissociated plot about how he was his own arch enemy (look how edgy and nihilistic that is!)

That seems to be what Levine wants to write. Detached white men who look at shocking bad things and then shrug and everyone is evil. We could’ve seen a positive, driven, interesting black character in Daisy, but then she had to turn on the protagonists, kill a guy, wipe his blood on her face and act like she was going to shoot a child. And then Elizabeth has to kill her to unlock the grit of adulthood reality and get a Personality Change Hair Cut. And then Booker gets to go ‘yep, see, everyone’s evil! Including me!’

He’s never been without positive / cool / uplifting representation for people that are like him, so he doesn’t understand why it’s important. But I also think he doesn’t understand the idea of positive representation because he’s increasingly becoming a Boring Edgelord who wants every character to be a nasty, horrible person because nothing matters.

Let’s not forget about System Shock here either, guys. The predecessor to the Bioshock games

The first one was a pretty typical cyberpunk setting, but what really set it off was it’s antagonist, the dastardly SHODAN. A malevolent AI with a severe goddess complex

She was essentially a modern age evil god; she wielded no physical power, but she had everything else. Contol over an entire station. She could see through security cameras, control robot guards and assassins, manipulate everything around her and it was you (You the player, as the hacker is a stand in for YOU) to outsmart her

System Shock 2 however is a little more prose. After the Citadel station disaster, the earth reverted into a semi-communist society full of red tape and bureaucracy in the hopes that something like SHODAN would never rise again. Humanity purposefully stunts itself through guards, but at the same time, they achieve greatness such as the world’s first FTL drive. But at the same time, there is a struggle for power between the private and public sector. It’s that desire which fuels the catalyst for conflict in the second game; a “safe” bureaucracy that holds you back vs unapologetic pragmatism and desire

Not to mention the juxtaposed theory of the collective as preached by the many and the dissolution of individuality and thought, only glory to the mass

And in that unity, is an ideal. An ideal of something better than both of those options. Something above all that, as if serving a higher power like a god, but as you, and everyone else is that god

But, in the end, is it worth it?

TL;DR: Ken Levine is good at writing about political allegories and dealing with abstract concepts, but he sucks major cock at characterization and giving people human qualities