Concept: NPC Chatter

I promise I'll do a non-concept update someday.

Possibly one of the most ubiquitous elements of modern single-player games is what I'll term NPC chatter, but might be better known as that annoying bastard who refuses to stop telling the player where to go. The phenomenon's most common in FPS games but it's not unheard of outside of the genre. Real-time strategy games can be bad for this too, and the Legend of Zelda series is infamous for, in its more recent incarnations, sidekicks who refuse to stop nagging the player.
The most obvious problem with this sort of player interaction is that it's, to put it lightly, somewhat irritating. In the above clip from the recent and utterly awful Homefront, the audio feedback just won't stop. The male sidekick shouts that he's reloading twice in a row without firing a shot. The player is complimented every time they make a shot. It's distracting, and in a genre like the war shooter that relies on being able to properly focus in a chaotic environment, it's annoyingly unhelpful. Even games that aren't quite as bad as Homefront about this still tend to get annoying quickly, as in the video of Call of Duty I posted earlier.
The primary reason this phenomenon is so annoying is because much of the information is useless. Call of Duty and its offshoots, for instance, will often have NPCs shouting the very same words that are showing up in the player's list of objectives even as the map waypoint changes to show the player exactly where they need to go, and this is probably the least absurd chatter in the game. NPCs will shout every time an enemy dies, every time they need to reload, every time they start to move from cover to cover, which is all useful in an actual combat situation and completely irrelevant within the game. Similarly, in Legend of Zelda there was an audio cue each and every time the sidekick character had something to tell the player about an enemy. This was at least forgivable, despite how annoying it was, simply because it was alerting the player to something they could do. Call of Duty and Homefront's constant stream of combat jargon, however, are just set dressing. The player really has no reason to care if a disposable AI ally is reloading, but it helps to maintain the illusion of a combat situation, at least at first.
The illusion is an important aspect of NPC chatter, not only in the sense of sidekick characters shouting combat dialogue, but also in the case of characters giving the player objectives. This plays back to the concept of the power fantasy; the power fantasy is necessary because the player has no actual agency. In Call of Duty, the player may be the only one taking action, but he's taking action at the behest of an NPC. Therefore, the player has to feel like he's the most important person in the game world, because otherwise he'll wise up to the fact that he's being led by the nose through a series of mildly attractive setpieces. It's not limited to war shooters, either; the Halo series was marked by the presence of Cortana, an AI who constantly talked the player through the game. This sort of NPC chatter is different from simple sound bites in that it is generally the sum total of character interaction the player is going to get from the game. There's not conversation, there's a guy yelling at you to do something.
The issue of NPC chatter is essentially linked to the problem of the player not working as part of a team. In strategy games like Jagged Alliance or Silent Storm, having characters say a line when they run out of ammo, for instance, reduces the need to keep an obsessive eye on the interface. The early Rainbow Six games placed a great deal of emphasis on radio chatter, as the game was about coordinating a strike force that was larger than could be feasibly micromanaged by just the player, making the other characters' radio messages the only way of keeping track of their progress. The power fantasy inherent in most games ruins this, though. The game wants the player to feel like part of a team, so the NPCs constantly update the player on their status, but it also wants the player to feel powerful, so there's no reason to listen to the NPCs, and at the same time it has to keep the player on track, so no matter how powerful the player is one NPC will always have absolute authority over them. It's this sort of schizophrenia in design that's emblematic of many of the more obvious problems of modern game design. An element of the game can either be important or it can be useless. If it's both in turns, then it fails to be either and just ends up being annoying.

Concept: Side Characters

Anime postin', so skip this if you don't like it. I'll do a similar one for video games later on, though.

A common phenomenon in anime and manga is the sudden, unexpected popularity of a side character. At first glance, it seems like an odd phenomenon. There's all these perfectly good characters right here, why start some weird fanclub for a character that has a two-minute speaking role? Oftentimes these characters are nothing more than archetypes, a collection of a few mildly amusing character traits with no real depth, and yet they still end up wildly popular among the fanbase.

In fact, one of the reasons that these characters are so popular is because of their lack of character depth, an example of this being the series Angel Beats, from the notoriously melodramatic studio Key. When a popularity poll of the characters was held, the most popular character (by an order of magnitude) was the joke character TK, whose entire purpose in the show had seemingly been to say funny things in bad English, whereas everyone else's purpose was seemingly to say funny things and then say something horribly depressing and die. So why was TK so popular? Simply the fact that he was excluded from this paradigm. Angel Beats was such a mess of pacing that having even one character who could be relied upon to do one thing with reasonable certainty was comforting. While Angel Beats was uncommonly bad in terms of mood consistency, even for an anime, there are a variety of other shows with similarly popular one-note characters: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's Taniguchi or Tsuruya, or most of Black Lagoon's irregular cast, for example. The less focus there is on a particular character, especially in terms of characterization, the less chance for a mistake. A good, though admittedly not quite anime example of this is the difference between the side characters of the first and second Valkyria Chronicles games; where the first one had shamelessly shallow one note characters and the second gave a fair amount of characterization to each soldier, the first was by far superior because all the extra characterization did was show that they were still one-note characters, only now it was over the course of three annoying cutscenes.
Another important aspect of the side character is their ability to rely on a single joke; even if the joke gets tiresome after a while, the character's far enough from the main narrative that it's unlikely to affect enjoyment of the show as a whole (This is far from certain, though.), the ur-example of this being the aforementioned Taniguchi from Haruhi Suzumiya, who managed to make his voice actor, Minoru Shiraishi, playing himself in another show, one of the most popular male characters at the time. This was accomplished with about half an hour of combined screentime over the course of Haruhi's 28 episodes. And yet his popularity can be traced back to a single scene which, in retrospect, isn't even that funny. There's probably a good argument to be made here about memetics that I'm not equipped to make, but in the end there is an element of luck to it: can we sell this character to the fanbase? More importantly, it's not hard to tell when a character is being "sold" to the viewers, which they'll generally find offensive on an unconscious level.
So, then, what can be learned about characterization from side characters? Why are they popular? Is it because they're more easily identifiable, or the opposite? Just as much meta-effort, in the form of merchandising, is often put into these side characters as is the main characters, so why does it feel like less effort is put in within the boundaries of the show? Ultimately, a lot of this depends on the show in question, and its individual quality. A good show, obviously, is going to have just as good main characters as auxiliary. See for example Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and the popularity of its leading cast. But there is a purpose for the auxiliary cast, and it's more than to just fill out the world and make it seem populated, though that is a part of it. In a sense, side characters are one-dimensional purely for the purpose of interacting with the heroes. Why, then, do they become so popular?

Concept: The Power Fantasy

Boredpostin'

Most games today (and, indeed, to date) have fallen into one seemingly unavoidable pitfall: the power fantasy. I'll do another post later analyzing the male power fantasy in other media, particularly Japanese anime and manga, because it's quite a similar case there, but right now I'll just cover the power fantasy in video games.
So what is the power fantasy? It's a pretty simple concept: the protagonist always wins. This sort of thinking is ubiquitous in games, most obviously in mainstream action games. Take the Call of Duty series, for instance. If the player does what he's supposed to, he wins. If he doesn't, he dies, and gets to try again. This is the power fantasy in its most basic form. There are two outcomes, victory or death, and the correct one is the former. Linked to this are a few other similar concepts, many of which can be seen, again, in Call of Duty. Firstly, the protagonist is the most important character. Call of Duty is infamous for its tendency to force the player to do literally everything. There's a reason that this isn't considered widely objectionable, namely that it makes the player feel like the most important character in the storyline (which he is, but only because no one else is allowed to be). Secondly, the protagonist's superior ability. Naturally, a human player will usually be better than an AI at thinking outside of the box, but oftentimes the AI is artificially worthless to make the player more powerful. This can be seen in Call of Duty, both in the static enemy AI, and in the nigh-useless friendly units; if left to their own devices, the AI could probably skirmish for a nearly indefinite amount of time without doing significant damage to each other, whereas the player can take on a ludicrous amount of enemies with minimal effort. Thirdly, the moral certainty of the protagonist. Again, the issue of morality, particularly in war games like Call of Duty, deserves its own post, so I won't go too deeply into it here. Suffice it to say that there are a hell of a lot of armed soldiers in the favelas of Brazil, to the point where it seems almost like some sort of absurd clown car. The favelas are one of the few levels in the entire Call of Duty series that even have civilians, too. Most of the time, it's a simple dichotomy between the Bad Guys With Guns and Our Boys.
There's another level to the power fantasy that's more often explored in role-playing games, namely that the world exists for the protagonist. Take, for example, any single Bioware game. You, the player, are The Hero. Your allies are all either devoted to you from the start or there is Something Very Wrong with them that must be Solved. Anyone who doesn't like you, in short, is either Bad or Wrong; if they're Bad they are killed or redeemed, and if they are Wrong, they are Fixed. There's not a lot of room for moral uncertainty, because that would mean that the player might not be the one true hero any more. Possibly the most damning factor of this in modern RPGs is the concept of the NPC romance. While this bears further investigation in a later post, it's worth mentioning here that modern "romances" in games are generally closer in structure to an encounter; that is to say, a fight or a puzzle. The player says what the developers have decided is "right" and is rewarded with a profoundly immature and embarassing conclusion. While Bioware games are probably the worst about this, even (especially?) games like Atlus' Persona series fall prey to this. Every female character is attracted to the protagonist, because otherwise the player might not feel like he's the most important person in the world anymore, and game designers have decided that is the most important illusion to perpetuate.
Why is the power fantasy so important? It's one of the most visible fetters holding gaming back and perpetuating the image of games as an immature medium, so why do designers keep it around? There's definitely an aspect of customer satisfaction to it. In the earliest previews for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it was proposed that the AI might be able to finish the game before the player did. While this was obviously untrue, imagine the effect it would have on a player if a message box just suddenly popped up: "Some guy beat you to the punch. You lose." Most gamers would have a fit, and rightly so. Nobody wants the game to win itself; it's vaguely perverse. But at the same time, there has to be a method to keep the player from inevitably becoming the only vector of any change in the game world. Essentially, the question becomes this: How can the player be presented with a world where he is an actor, a person, and not a god?

Concept: Ownership

Just a quick one to start this sucker off.

One of the concepts that games often have trouble with is properly making something feel like it belongs to the player. FPS games are probably the worst for this, with practically all the equipment feeling like it's essentially on loan to the protagonist. RPGs with equipment also often fall prey to this, as worse equipment is thrown aside as soon as something superior is found. Recently, some games have tried to subvert this by allowing the player to upgrade their equipment as an incentive to keep it around, an example of this being GSC's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series, at least in its later incarnations. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. allowed the player, with the help of a mechanic, to upgrade the statistics of their weapon, such as fire rate, or to give the weapon more obvious upgrades, like a thermal scope. This was made a viable option because of the semi-RPG nature of the game limiting the weapon choices of the player. Even so, a fully upgraded weapon could quite often simply be inferior to the next weapon in its respective class, and so the upgrades simply slowed the process of obsessive upgrading. Many modern RPGs have a crafting system, for instance, that allows the player to custom-build their own weapon, but when it takes an unreasonable amount of time to make a superior weapon, as it often does, what's the point? The recent re-release of Tactics Ogre, for instance, requires the player to grapple with a chance-based, arbitrarily unfair crafting system to create superior equipment.
That said, there's a lot of little things that a game can do to make a set of equipment feel like it truly belongs to the player. In Mount & Blade, for instance, the game's medieval setting and devotion to plausibility, if not strict realism, means that various weapons in the same class will have different merits, such as speed or length. The mediocre shooter Army of Two's main strength was the robust weapon customization system that allowed for a fairly unique weapon, particularly in the sequel.
So why is it so important for a weapon to feel like it belongs to the player? It's a way of creating emotional attachment. Odd as it may seem, equipment is one of the player's main ways of interacting with the world, particularly in combat-based genres such as shooters. If a weapon fails to become something that the player is attached to, it's just a verb, or a way to interact with the game world. If it's something the player becomes familiar with as an object, the feeling of interactivity is deepened; the weapon becomes something to use, rather than an action in and of itself, which creates a greater unconscious connection to the game world.

Right, more to come. Feel free to put thoughts, comments, criticisms in the comment pool, that's what it's there for.