Project #5 - Case Study 4 - Samus Aran

Case Study 4 - Samus Aran - Metroid. 

The last example of a misleading character which I looked at, was of course Samus Aran, a short and sweet case study.

In fact, this character is infamous for fooling pretty much everyone in the demographic when it was revealed that the 6 foot 3 inches tall, 198 lb bounty hair clad in full space armour was actually a woman and not a man, as everyone had believed.  

On Kotaku, Brian Ashcraft even writes that he was 'floored by the game's big reveal' -

http://kotaku.com/5634616/how-did-metroids-samus-aran-become-a-female-character

- and includes a quote stating that during development a staff member had suggested that she be female as a surprise for the player.

This is a perfect example of physicality misleading a player. This big, heavily armoured character was assumed by pretty much everyone to be male.

Project #5 - Case Study 3 - Gentle Giants

Case Study 3 - Gentle Giant


By Gentle Giant, I mean a character which is large in stature and looks intimidating, but is in contrast very gentle at heart in some way, even if it takes them a while to show that side of them.

It's pretty self explanatory, so I was brief with my example of this. In fact, this whole image is almost an archetype in itself, ironically, since so many people have used it as a way of breaking stereotype.


Mordecai  - Fire Emblem

In Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, Mordecai is a member of the Laguz race, a race of shape-shifting people (including Tigers, Cats, Hawks, Ravens and Dragons), with a fairly large prejudice towards humans.

Even in the illustration above, you can see that as fearsome and formidable he looks in his Tiger form, even being a particularly large Tiger, he is an incredibly gentle soul. Perhaps another Tiger would eat that squirrel in his hand - you generally don't know much about the generic characters other than that they are fierce warriors. Don't get me wrong, Mordecai is a very strong warrior, but ultimately he dislikes combat and hates even more to bring suffering or displeasure to those he considers friends. 

He is a perfect example of a gentle giant who would rather avoid conflict than engage in it, unlike his almost polar-opposite superior officer, Lethe:

 

She is a smaller member of the Beast Tribe and far quicker to judge and to anger, whereas Mordecai is much more mellow, not at all what his physicality seems to suggest upon first impressions. 

Project #5 - Case Study 2 - Dishonoured

Case Study 2 -Corvo Attano - Dishonoured

So I was too busy with doing the project, that I totally forgot about updating what I'd done in researching for it, etc. Silly me. I've finished the project anyway, so I'll shortly be writing an entry reflecting upon that.

In the case of Corvo Attano in Dishonoured the 'misleading' here isn't quite so dramatic as with Mirajane Strauss (Fairy Tail), which is why I chose to use it as an example. When I use the word 'misleading', I don't mean in a bad way - I just mean that the player is misdirected to believe that the character is one thing through the way they look and then proven wrong in uncovering information about the character. This seemed to work in Mira's case, and I'm going to analyze this example as well.

Again, there will be some spoilers in this analysis.

Anyway; Corvo is an assassin. There he is:

That information, in itself, springs certain images to mind. Assassin's are expected to be pretty cold and calculated, and remorseless killers. That's what Corvo is, right? Not exactly. He's not an assassin by choice, and that, here is paramount.

The general archetype of assassin's is that they tend to be hardened killers who prefer not to hold ties with anyone, however Corvo wasn't brought up as one and he certainly seems to care about Emily, with whom he seems to share an affectionate bond, whether she is or isn't related to him by blood.

Long story short, he was originally Lord Protector to the Empress, having surprisingly grown up in a lower class family, fighting on the streets as a teen. These turns of events would make one assume that Corvo is a less compassionate man than he is. Even based on physicality i.e. his body language, expressions, dark colour palette, you'd assume that this man isn't all that approachable.

 

So to learn of his affections with Emily is almost a surprising turn, and a misleading characteristic in a way. While it might not be an enormously outrageous break of archetype, it is still what I like to call a 'quirk' - in that it's a trait you wouldn't expect of a character; in this case one which goes around inciting jailbreaks.

But it is also potentially pivotal. Perhaps this is one reason I focused on Corvo as an example. His compassion towards Emily can influence the choice the player could end up making, based on how they interpret Corvo as a man through this. There are two choices that the player can make after [spoiler] Corvo rescues Emily. Funnily enough, this choice ties in with what I'd been looking at regarding consequences and role-playing.

So yeah, this was the second one I'd looked into. It might arguably not be considered misleading in any way, since it's fairly ambiguous, although the general archetype of assassins is that they are emotionally hardened and don't tend to keep strong ties.

Project #5 - Case Study 1 - Fairy Tail

Case Study 1 - Fairy Tail

Not a game, obviously, but I always find it useful to delve into examples from other media too.

Fairy Tail is an anime about a guild of wizards of various magic types, who take on different jobs and tasks to earn money.
Fairy Tail is one of my favourite anime, largely because of the huge cast of unique characters which appear in the show. Of course, some are somewhat stereotypical and others are just plain wacky. However this is one of the reasons I find this to be a good example, because there are characters who, by plain sight, make you think one thing about them, whereas various story arcs reveal characteristics you may or may not expect from some of the characters.

In fact, there are several characters I can call upon from Fairy Tail, however I want to discuss Mirajane Strauss, the 'poster girl' of the Fairy Tail guild:

 

She is a very feminine, attractive character, and her clothes, body language and voice all seem to back that up. Immediately one would think of Mira as a typical girl. She is even a model for the Sorcerer Magazine, and she appears to fit that 'girly' stereotype.

*SPOILER*

And yet, as the anime goes on , you learn that she is one of the guild's five S-Class wizards (S-Class being the most powerfully classed wizards in the guild, of which there obviously only five). That, for me personally, was surprising and struck me with curiosity since it wasn't what I was expecting of her. 

Then, even more surprisingly, you learn that she is known as the 'She-Devil'. What could constitute that name for a girl like Mira? Well, this:

 

 

Mira uses a type of magic called 'Take-over Magic', using which she can physically take over the form of a demon, earning her the nickname 'She-devil'. In fact, she's regarded as the most fearsome of the wizards of Fairy Tail, something that you would definitely not automatically assume from her ordinary demeanor.

From her appearance, you also wouldn't expect to learn that she was particularly rebellious, almost bully-like, child and rather horrible to some of the others since she comes across as one of the nicest of the lot. This comes as part of character development, and interesting development at that since you are surprised by what is revealed about her as a character and the reason for her to become the airy woman she is when she is first introduced: family, a very familiar circumstance to almost anyone. 

I think, because of her misleading physicality, that this offers more substance to Mirajane. She's a surprisingly 3D dimensional character in a medium that's prone to having little or poor character development. In this case, surprising the audience with an unexpected reveal works in her favour.

Project #5 - The Brief

So, following the interviews and discussions I had with practitioners with regards to my report, the point Chris Phillips made about misleading players through the physicality of a character got me thinking.
This approach to designing characters could potentially work fairly well. However I wanted to explore this a little bit, to investigate people's reactions to a character when they don't turn out to be that which they would have expected. Obviously there's the risk of this kind of thing becoming satire, a mockery of archetypes in a way.

A quick experiment, I want to simply gauge how people perceive characters from their appearances alone i.e. their physicality, clothes, body language etc. 

THE BRIEF

My intention for this small project is to: 

• Create three characters with rather different and unlikely stories/personalities/characteristics
• Design them with notably different physicality 
• I will then survey a group of volunteers to investigate the kind of character they percieve each one to be, based on visual appearance alone.
• To provide them with the character information and let them see which characters they think each background info belongs to.

If they are successfully mislead, I then want to know whether these candidates were pleasantly surprised by this or not, whether it aids good character development or is a hindrance. 

And of course, a few case studies is where I begin.

Race in Games

Yet another topic that Extra Credits discussed which caught my interest regarding culture was 'race in games'. Obviously, when you think of 'race' when it comes to games, plenty of things come to mind, particularly in the fantasy genre where you have highly distinct, fictitious races and by extension cultures by which they live. I don't really need to go into the obvious there, however what Extra Credits discussed was a game that addresses REAL cultures; L.A. Noir.

 

They discuss the fact that race ISN'T used to define a character. Instead, Floyd suggests that L.A Noir expressed various racial issues that we all universally face, and gives us a perspective of the main, non-minority character through his encounters with other, minority characters within the game. I found it interesting what they pointed out, that the main character's actions later on in the game are contextualized by his reactions to a racial killing. In other words, the presence of other races and the events that happen throughout reveal aspects of his character that might not otherwise be shown.

They claim that just trying to design a minority main character can lead to stereotypes, whereas if you consider the role of having different races in a game you can provide more depth to any character through the interactions between those different races as opposed to assuming because of what they look like, or what race they belong to.

For me, this was a really interesting point regarding avoiding stereotypes and how to use 'race' non-offensively, since race is correlated with culture, obviously. As such, perhaps this approach is a good way to implement culture without it shouting in your face and being there for the sake of it. Culture and race can be used to help provide deeper characters with whom players could relate. This also ties back to some research I did back in Semester 1 where, in Better Game Characters By Design, it is stated that familiar plot points/issues/character morals can help a player to relate to that character, even one wildly unrealistic in appearance for example.

And, on a side note, I can see the connection between this and cohesive characters. Having a random character of a different race without any context cold potentially break that cohesiveness. Or rather, this is a hypothesis that I could potentially explore.

Stereotypes - Is Punch-out Racist?

I don't know a great deal about Gaijin Goombah, only that he is a Game Analyst on Youtube, and I haven't really seen much of their channel, so in terms of credibility I'm not sure how much standing this has. However a friend pointed out this video as a point of discussion regarding stereotypes - which I didn't wholly go into explore back when. However, I couldn't honestly give you a better example of a game with such glaring stereotypes as Punch-out!!, to the point that it has been called out for being racist. 

Interestingly, Gaijin Goombah challenges this and raises some very good questions about the extent Punch-out!! goes to in creating stereotypes. 

Gaijin does rightly point out the negativity in the stereotypes reflected in the original versions of the game, such as the Russian character known as 'Vodka Drunkenski', which was changed to 'Soda Popinski'. And the other mentioned is Pizza Pasta - an Italian character who was actually removed altogether. Basically the stereotypes in the original games were entirely negative, which obviously points somewhere in the region of being racist. 

However what I honed in on was his analysis of the Wii remake of Punch-Out!!. The discussion here actually makes you stop and think that perhaps it was racism, but more ignorance and insensitivity, because in the remake things were a lot different. The stereotypes of the characters were used to add personality, but in a good way. Gaijin demonstrates this in the reactions various characters of the remake incited in the Let's Players, Game Grumps. This essentially constitutes positive reinforcement of stereotypes, as long as the stereotype helps to promote the character as something or someone enjoyable to see rather than portraying them as inferior. 

In the Wii version, these characters are almost parodies of their own cultures, which is not a racist move in any way. In fact, this approach can make stereotypes fun and, ultimately, acceptable. Bottom line: stereotype and racism ARE NOT the same thing whatsoever.


So, how else can stereotypes positively add to a game experience? Especially in scenarios like Punch-out, wherein the opposing characters are actually the most characterized and most focused upon (note that little Mac is far more generic comparatively and is also translucent to allow the player to concentrated on the opponent before them).