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).

The Role of the Player

Again, Extra Credits raise good points in emphasizing the uniqueness of games as an interactive medium. The closest we get really in things like literature, as far as I'm aware without doing too much extensive research into interactivity, is choose your own endings. Remember those goosebumps books? : 

Yeah, these were all written in the second person, the narrator leading you along your story, and you got to choose which way it arched, and whether you led yourself to your own demise or not. When it comes to passive media like books, then this seems to be the closest comparison we get to the 'choice' - or illusion thereof in some cases - we have in games, notably games with multiple endings. Yet in these kinds of books we still don't lay down our own path. We follow them, and then simply get given the choice of taking one or the other when we find a junction. So, ultimately, true interactivity only really exists in games. 

One thing that is immediately pointed out is that 'a game without a player is nothing'. Which is entirely true; a game does not and cannot progress without the input of a player. As the narrator, Daniel Floyd says, we're 'setting out a canvas' that the player fills in, albeit a predefined one.

He also discusses games as expression, not only escapism, with which I can agree to an extent given that playing games of different genres will reveal different people's thinking patterns i.e. strategies in puzzle games or of course strategy games, or the choices players make in RPG's even down to whether they choose clothes for the character because of their bonus stats or just because they look nice. However right now a lot of games still only offer this as an illusion.

Floyd basically reinforces the idea that you should always remember that you are not making a game for yourself, you're making it for the player and have to cater to creating an experience for them. 

This leads me to believe that the discussion of ergodic video games, as I've brought up several times before, is more relevant than initially thought. For argument's sake, if the player is both the bard and the listener, as is suggested by Portnow, then perhaps there is no need to fill out a predefined character for the player to fill. Perhaps the most important characters within a world are the non-player characters with whom the character - you - interact.

With this in mind, it could explain certain design aspects in other games, such as why Link has never once spoken in any Legend of Zelda game.

Again, addressing this could be interesting. 

Why do we Roleplay?

It's funny what sparks your inspiration. I was on the bus from Southport to Preston with a friend and, having been discussing what I'd done for my short Borderlands/Wind Waker project, we moved onto talking about game experiences and consequently RPG's.

We asked ourselves, what exactly is it that makes us Roleplay? My friend, Tom, remarked that less and less people are engaging with RPG's the way that we should be. Extra Credits addressed the very same issue he'd mentioned, which I found very interesting. In fact, they've come up with a few issues that make you stop and think, however they have a tendency to concluded their discussions as if they have the solution, without much in the way of evidence to back it up.

Extra Credits is written by an experienced games designer, James Portnow, so they are obviously reliable in terms of trusting what they do question, and the experience the team has.

These are a couple of episodes that piqued my interest in particular. If I was to investigate this, however, I'm not sure how I would go about approaching it in terms of exploratory design. This seems a little more theoretical.

Extra Credits talk a lot about the game-play and making the game 'real'. Of course, this would involve creating an entire, cohesive world that is believable to you, or at least that's what logic says. However I might argue, that it is largely down to how a player relates to a character that makes us want to role-play as that particular character. I agree with their argument of consequence, but if you and the character whose role you are taking don't share the same reactions to certain consequences then of course you won't really care about those consequences. Something about the character has to engage you enough to then respond to the urgency and repercussions that happen in game-play. 

Again, I'm not quite sure how to address this one yet, so I'll let it simmer for a little while.

Project #4 - Conclusion

This was a very fun project to do, and I also learned a bit about concepting an environment, as well as establishing a solid space in which I could create solid characters that were ultimately believable as a result. Focusing on non-human characters gave me a good insight into what appeals to audiences about certain characters.

To summarize, each candidate surveyed about the non-human and creature characters I created responded positively in that the characters were both intriguing and exciting in a way. They had their own individual story, all of which slotted well together since they all shared a common connection to their given space.

In other words I was successful in creating a cohesive world, and so the hypothesis that  a cohesive environment and character correlation improves player identification with both character and the world. This has also been supported by an interview I conducted with Peter Field whilst I was completing this project.

Additionally, I learned that people responded much better to my non-human characters and creature characters than anyone has done to any human character I have designed. This leads me to believe that the theory of non-human characters being more relatable has some grounding., since these characters aren’t riddled with certain behavioral expectations.