Straight From Central Casting

I think you are being too hard on yourself. You can’t create game in a cultural vacuum, nor should you really want to. There are reasons for depicting enemies in stereotypical ways that goes much deeper than crassly commercial or morally bankrupt.

How is the player meant to stop these clear-cutting Beasts? If it’s a non-violent quest, do you really need to instill the image of them as evl?

If the solution does involve violence, who’s to say you’d be doing your users a favour by depicting them as “just like Joe across the street”? While I have little personal experience of doing violence, I imagine that the process of preparing yourself to seriously injure someone involves an automatic classification — at some fundamental level of your mind — of that person as Other, alien, evil.

Hell, we even have words for people who don’t need to go through that process before hurting people; words like psychopath. Your game might be better art if the Beasts are essentially innocent, but if the plot involves killing them in first-person perspective I’m not sure it’s more moral art, and definitely not better entertainment.

I also feel it is a little disingenuous of you to deliberately confuse the notion of racist content (like Tolkien’s, although he never personally bothered me) with psychologically complex, visceral understanding of human nature. We all sort through and categorize perceptions automatically and continuously at a deep level, and fiction that disregards this level feels shallow and weak.

A game may, and indeed should, tap into symbols that exist at the same level that racism lives. Archetypes vs stereotypes, right? The cure for racism is not to avoid this level. It’s to wade knee-deep in it and try really hard to figure out where all these images come from and which ones may be trusted and which should not.

Clearly this is a culturally sensitive process, which is part of the problem. The more we expand our horizons, the smaller is the common denominator of genuinely cross-cultural expression. To some degree that’s for you to worry about, but not so much that it keeps you from making a vivid game that appeals to the player at a visceral level. Some stereotypes are true enough.

Wow, err, I didn’t mean this to turn into an essay.

Quickie: have you considered using sound cues? Hearing an ominous tune when approaching Evil Dudes is a sure sign something’s about to happen.

I said something like this in a recent post. Are games art? Maybe. But it’s almost always bad art.

And as far as simplifying good and evil, that’s nearly necessary as well. Even when you’re talking about player factions, there are just too many benefits to having two clear cut factions and too many downsides to any other way you might want to define the factions to allow for things like changing alliances, etc.

Which is unfortunate, because that’s all very interesting. In theory, though. I’m not sure I’d count on the players to do enough with it to make it interesting… or even worth the programmer hours.

I don’t think I’ve ever really noticed “all” npc’s in WoW “looking” evil (sometimes they were evil and others we just didn’t agree). The main thing that saying “kill this person” is that they have a red name plate, rather than a green one. Yellow ones are reserved for “neutral” beings, but the ones that you can kill have a sword mouse icon when you hover over them. Basically they somewhat chicken out by making it absolute, in that you can’t kill things you shouldn’t kill and you can kill everything you should (I think there are some ambiguous cases, but not many).

I’d hope that EE is more dynamic than that. Though you could use mouse cursor cues rather than cues on the npc’s to should that they are enemies. It doesn’t work if you’re supposed to talk them out of cutting down the forest, but it may help.

Yeah, can you just imagine if said clear-cutting foresters were all little old grand-mothers wielding small handsaws wacking away at the woods. The resultant uproar about having to take out the grannies would be terrible. Sadly a quest to lead the wood-cutters to enlightment over the course of a semester on the true path towards greater forestry would be outside the scope of EE’s quests.

Stereotypes are a useful shortcut. Since you have actually been pretty good about incorporating other mythologies, you could also play with other “iconographies”.

A long time ago, I took a course on Shadowplay in SE Asia. The Asian, and, in particular, Javanese iconography was very different than ours. Small, characters with delicate features and slanted, small eyes were good and noble (regardless of skin color) while, big, round eyed characters were typically evil … hence the “round-eyed devil” term.

Sound was also used as certain types of music are associated with certain personality archetypes (something that is done in Western cultures as well).

You can probably do anything, so long as it is consistent. Wagner’s lietmotifes (?) were musical shorthand that continue to be an effective tool that allow those of us who aren’t expert in Norse mythology to know who the good and bad guys are quickly.

I posted something on my blog, linked as a pingback above. The big thing you need to do is to demonstrate that the Beasts are evil through their actions and choices. Why is clear-cutting the forest something evil people would do? Don’t rely on yet more stereotypes from our world (in this cases, that environmental destruction is bad), but show the effects of what they’re doing. Bonus points if you show how their actions harm the player characters.

Anyway, go read my post for more detail.

Well, you can always compensate by having “reformed” outcasts who can bestow the player-characters with temporary powers if you’ve never attacked them. Thus rewarding players who don’t attack, but only respond.

Not sure why you have to stick to the stereotypes though. You can have a dynamic system where creatures start out as nasty neutrals and follow their leaders, which you can control as part of your story-line… More expensive, but somewhat more interesting than “you are attacked by another swarm of angry insects from hell”.

@Steven, well, in Norse mythology the men in Jotunheimen are the bad guys. Their women are perhaps not, and frankly, Odin was a raping jackass… He was worshiped for his powers… The clean Good/Bad dichotomy is more prevalent in Jewish (clean/dirty), Christian (heaven/hell) and Hollywood (hero/enemies) thinking… So no, you don’t need those clean-cut stereotypes. And you don’t have to be 100% consistent if the users are to spend a lot of time in the system, the popular mythologies aren’t. They reflect real life and our struggles. Hollywood-movies are different, you have to go from no knowledge to full understanding in a few minutes. You might want this for newbie areas, but this is not a requirement for the deeper layers of a virtual world!

Races in RPGs, in imitation of Tolkien’s, are usually symbolic for cultures. It’s just part of the mythology (a story which simplifies real objects and situations in meaningful ways). Game races could promote racism, but I have yet to experience a game that does that.

The association of light skin with goodness and dark skin with evil isn’t connected to real races; it’s connected with the universal human imagery of goodness as light and evil as darkness. Bright colors are cheerful while dark colors are depressing. Light is illuminating and overt; darkness obscures and hides.

Whether or not you make NPCs in your game obviously good or evil just depends on the intended source of enjoyment in your gameplay. If part of a player’s enjoyment of your game is intended to be moral decision-making and deep thinking, then it might be fine for the NPCs killed to not obviously fit the role of enemies/monsters. But the whole game’s design would need to take that sort of gameplay into account: pacing, how information is relayed, color schemes, etc.

If, on the other hand, this moral concern is an afterthought, then don’t include it in the game. If previous experiences in the game haven’t set up an expectation of moral gameplay, then adding that moral element will probably feel like a gimmick, a burden, or undesirable in some other way.

I’ll apologize in advance for the “essay” as well, and I can cut some of it away by echoing a lot of what everyone else is saying; however, this statement by Zell made me think… well, like me:

While I have little personal experience of doing violence, I imagine that the process of preparing yourself to seriously injure someone involves an automatic classification — at some fundamental level of your mind — of that person as Other, alien, evil.

All it ever took for me was an entity’s “self-classification” as “ENEMY.” I had a kid attack me once - himself, otherwise, a good student and “upstanding” character in the eyes of others - because of some perceived slight: he surprised me, and my reaction was one of violence. It all cleared up after the fact, but it was that initial contact that made me respond with my combat training first. It had nothing to do with “alien” or “evil,” necessarily; just that an offensive gesture immediately conveyed ENEMY instead of simply THREAT.

Perhaps it’s not so much about visually “branding” someone as ENEMY as much as it is conveying intent. If I am approached by something which looks innocent (be it known, I’m generally paranoid by nature), I will, explicitly, treat it as THREAT until it proves out FRIEND or ENEMY (things for which I tend to have immutable designation). It’s part of the reason I move so slowly through some MUDs or other “interactive” fiction: I am reluctant to simply trust that the entity confronting me directly conveys his true intent.

I’ve examined this model as a project, lately (in my exploration of possible routes into the gaming industry), and it really is a tough challenge so far. Trying to make the base motivations of an entity match up with the storyteller’s desired outcome has proven a difficult path because of the unlimited scope of “intention.” Interesting challenge, to be sure.

As for whether or not it’s “art”; I think the first “game” (if you could still call it that) to perform such an abstraction of “personality” versus “presence” would redefine “art” in context of gaming.

The enemy is the enemy because their name is in red, you can attack them and if they see you first, their reaction is hostile. Whether or not they are stereotypically evil-looking is rather beside the point.

Does anyone else think that a creature’s visible choice is different from a racial characteristic?

Wearing certain military uniform, having ritual scarring, war paint or bristling with nasty weaponry may quickly teach me to classify someone as hostile while still treating other creatures of the same race/culture/origin as friendly. I’d consider this different from just making all creatures of that kind enemies.

Teaching players through observing a creature’s actions has a lot of potential to be explored but migth require too much work/resources, as said. If UI provides the absolute indication of good/evil (or friend/enemy), that part of the game is going to be a little shallower, but that might allow more focus on something else.