You may think these two things have nothing to do with each other. You would be right, they don't. Not at first, anyway. But they do tie in to a concept that is very dear to my heart: good game characters.
Now, I didn't play all the way through Duke Nukem Forever, but I did watch enough people play to figure out two things. Its not very playable, and if any of my friends told me they thought it was good our friendship would seriously be on the rocks. Why is that? Wall tits. Poo flinging. This is exactly the kind of thing that's holding our industry back. Yes, I understand that Duke is a fixture of our culture and crudity is kind of his thing, but even crude humor needs restraint. Lifting weights and looking the mirror to improve your "health" bar - clever. Slapping a pair of tits embedded in a wall - too much. So please, developers, stop this. There's a fine line between humor and cringe. Find it, I beg you.
Setting aside the wall tits for a moment, what if there was some reason behind Duke's puerile behavior? What if the bad jokes were covering up a fear of being forgotten? Or maybe he treats women like a pair of tits that might as well be attached to a wall because he is petrified of their femininity. There's nothing wrong with adding a few layers to a character over the years. Remember when William Shatner started being known as a cheesy scene-chewing has-been? He shrugged and ran with it, and the next thing you know he's sticking cigars in his ear and referring to Alzheimer's as "Mad Cow" on Boston Legal. It worked - he embraced the parody that everyone assumed he was and came out the better for it. And Duke is nothing if not a parody of himself. That gives us two ways the character could go - one that appears like a complete moron but is actually hiding vulnerabilities, or one that just accepts that he's a has-been and works that angle for all its worth. Either one would have been an improvement.
"But wait!" say the nostalgia freaks. "You can't change Duke! He's an icon! He's immortal!" Here's an extreme argument: what if game developers refused to experiment with new technologies and gameplay because 2D platforming and the Quake engine were so iconic? You might say its not the same thing, but I disagree. Things have to evolve, or they die. Its pretty obvious with technology, but it also applies to storytelling and characterization. Writers don't use the same techniques they did in Ancient Greece, or even the 19th century. We need more deeply written characters.
And this is where random party banter comes in. (Voila! A connection.) Games are different from other mediums like movies and books. Characters aren't only defined by their dialogue or their look, but also their gameplay mechanics. And there are a multitude of ways to embellish their personalities. Dialogue in games can get a little ponderous at times, with tons of conversation trees. That isn't the only way to flesh out a character. One day, some wonderful genius looked at all the time one spends in some games running around a map and thought "What can we put there?" I would like to find that person and give them a big wet smack on the mouth because that moment birthed the radiance that is random party banter.
To me the most obvious example of this is the Dragon Age series. And I admit, that's in no small part due to the fact that I would jump into those games in a heartbeat and live there forever. So, full disclosure. Walk around a city and your characters will just start talking to each other. Mostly the dialogue is just random, but it does follow the arc of the story somewhat. Its a great way to use time that is a necessary but uninteresting part of games - going from point A to point B. First of all, it makes running from one place to another interesting, as you anticipate which characters will strike up a conversation and what they will say to each other. But more importantly, it expands a game's ability to make the characters come to life without adding unnecessary bits to the game. Without the party banter, you wouldn't know that Morrigan develops a bit of a thing for Sten and thus is not the cold bitch she appears to be at first. Fenris seems to have no sense of humor whatsoever, but he gamely puts up with Isabela trying to guess the color of his underpants. Also, giving NPCs relationships with each other makes them seem more developed. Without that element, NPCs are just static pieces of software whose only interaction is with the player. But scripting a few dialogues and sprinkling them randomly throughout the game gives us more incentive to forget that they're just pieces of software. There are several characters in the Dragon Age series that I consider to be more real that even some of my favorite movie characters, and that is in no small way because of the party banter. Its a powerful tool, one that should be used more often.
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