Watch_Dogs

Isn't that new age hippy, not hipsters? Or is hipsters derived from that.

I always thought hipsters were those annoying guys that did something before it was cool or mainstream.

Honestly I'm not sure.

I think the two tend to be conflated together.

Edited by slimcoder on Jun 15th 2019 at 3:58:12 AM

Just watch the video if you want to hear what Yahtzee had to say about WD2. He feels that the characters are shallow archetypes given the corporate workshop treatment so they are as attractive to the target audience as possible, without any human warmth or relatable emotion.

Now, you may not agree with this, but I absolutely see his point. Marcus is an attractive, twenty-something, nerdy black dude who is a brilliant hacker, ace driver, and skilled gunman, able to spout pop culture references while plotting to overthrow The Man in his friends' basement. Then the whole Scooby Gang goes off and commits multiple first degree murders without missing a beat.

Nor do they suffer any meaningful consequences during the game that drive character development, other than the death of the token member of their group who has so little characterization that he might as well be wearing a bullseye on his shirt from the moment you meet him. Honestly, I find myself relating more to Josh and Wrench than to Marcus or Sitara because they have very real and consequential character flaws.

I'm not saying I don't enjoy the game; I do. But Yahtzee is dead on about the problems with DedSec.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 15th 2019 at 10:03:55 AM

Technically, Marcus and company don't have to commit a single murder. Part of what I like about it is that they're not grimdark psychopaths like Aidan. Indeed, it was a frequent complaint that giving the lovable rogues lethal weapons felt like a major mistake when they should have stuck with the yo-yo and taser.

Marcus is also the most single normal protagonist in the history of video gaming with the possible exception of Max Caulfield and the Mario Brothers plumbers. He's a college-age guy from the Bay Area and his level of fighting skill as well as driving is dependent on the player. He has the dark and brooding history of....being racially profiled as a potential criminal because he's black and owns a gun.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 8:48:13 AM

THANK YOU.

Whether you meant it that way or not, Fighteer, the fact that you identified more with the two white guys than the black protagonist and the Indian girl kinda makes my point for me.

Tell me what character development Marcus goes through, and what his flaws are. Ditto Sitara. Not that Wrench or Josh go through much development either, but at least they have flaws. What are their arcs? Does anything about their desires or motivations get set up and then paid off?

If you're going to accuse me of being racist because I didn't identify with the black protagonist, at least address my points instead of using strawmen in an attempt to poison the debate.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 15th 2019 at 5:33:05 AM

I'm not accusing you of being a racist. I do point out that being a Static Character doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad one. Geralt of Rivia is more or less the exact same person he was at the start of the games that he was at the ending of them because Jerk with a Heart of Gold is where a character ends versus starts. That doesn't mean he's not entertaining and fascinating to explore.

In the case of Marcus, the story of his journey is going from being an ordinary citizen to becoming co-leader of Dead Sec. He's not an expert fighter, driver, or hero but grows into his role as a cyberpunk superhero. People dismiss the story of losing their friend to the Zeta Cartel but that's a big moment for him being told that this isn't a game no matter how many Star Wars jokes his friends make with him.

Plus, I appreciate that Marcus is also The Heart of the team and its an interesting time to see that versus Sitara who is the brains. Marcus provides emotional support for his Ragtag Band of Misfits and it's not portrayed as a bad thing.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 3:28:15 AM

Ok... This kind of got messy. I feel like there's a big difference between likable and interesting or at least dynamic.

Marcus is a likable protagonist (least compared to Aiden and forgiving the gameplay dissonance of being able to mow down people with guns) while Aiden is a completely unlikable protagonist.

Meanwhile, I wouldn't say either are particularly interesting. Aiden has a conventional and direct story arc, even if it's super shitty and badly put together and really doesn't force him to... actually confront his awfulness. Aiden doesn't grow in his story. He REGRESSES and becomes hardened in not learning his lesson.

It's actually why I think the first game would have been all the better if Nikki were the protagonist instead. She's the more interesting character if she were thrown into Aiden's role. Aiden won't learn his lesson and gets pulled deeper and deeper into his criminal and shady world of hacking, well, the world. He gets in trouble, probably kidnapped, and Nikki gets his phone and starts trying to track her brother down, maybe discovering his role in her daughter's death, and tries to rescue him. How she might even be sucked down the same hole he was which eventually lead to Lena's death in the first place. But Nikki knows when to stop and to pull out while Aiden just doesn't and gets hardened further into believing he's doing the right thing.

Aiden is more compelling as a villain.

Anyway, back to comparing them, Marcus is likable but I think they skimped out on giving him more flaws and a defined character arc. It's kind of the opposite of Aiden. There they had a protagonist no one liked, so I think they over-corrected into a protagonist that they were too afraid of making unlikable. Which, to be fair, is a problem A LOT of media now days has that exact problem. The protagonists are often the weakest link while the side cast will be the far more liked because they can be flawed, engaging, and vulnerable in ways the protagonist just isn't.

Admittedly, I can't talk about Marcus too much because I didn't play WD 2, just watched it via You Tube so there's only so much I remember specifically, but I do remember kind of just being bored that he didn't feel as engaged as I would have liked him to be. He didn't feel challenged as a character.

Actually, I wrote a fairly interesting article that Aiden's most interesting quality is that he's a Villain Protagonist. This became Word of God accepted by the writers when they told me it was what they were going for and retweeted it around. I shit you not.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-subversiveness-of-aiden-pearce.html

They were told to dial back many times but their original idea was that Aiden is The Sociopath.

He does what he does because he likes it and his excuses are meant to be shit.

Marcus' character flaw is that this is all just fun and games for Dead Sec. They're doing this For the Lulz as well as internet fame. They're The Prankster and while they're fighting for social justice, it's just because It Amused Me. Then they discover that they've been an Unwitting Pawn by Blume in order to roll out their new product as well as get their friend killed. It's equivalent to the Boss losing his friend during the Brotherhood mission except less horrifying.

It's meant to be a Lighter and Softer game but that doesn't mean it's not an actual plot.

There's a reason they have to get Raymond Kenny because he's the guy who informs them that this isn't a game and asks them to step up and Hack the WorldTM for the greater good.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 3:40:42 AM

Huh so their original intent was that Aiden truly is a terrible person but too much Executive Meddling neutered the idea & made the final product shite.

Which going by the other issue of how Marcus & Deadsec as a whole are too flawless, it actually adds up.

Yeah, someone said, "Aiden was meant to be Travis Bickle and somehow we got Batman."

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 3:38:38 AM

Aiden winds up being the final boss in WD 3.

So essentially this is just a wider Ubisoft problem which has been going on for a long while.

I mean the character writing for the Assassin's Creed franchise has been kinda in the dumps for nearly a decade now.

Edited by slimcoder on Jun 15th 2019 at 3:45:21 AM

Yes, Aidan not only gets his niece killed but also continues undaunted to doing the exact same thing that endangers his sister and nephew every bit as badly (and traumatizes the latter by showing him the dozens of people he kills), forcing them to move.

But it's okay because he is killing Human Traffickers.

Not a terrible argument but not a great one.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MDTK18Z/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

I recommend this book by Walt Williams (Spec Ops: The Line) where he talks about how difficult it is to write a meaningful story for video games. He talked about how he was set on to write a story for Mafia III and they fired him after a week because they wanted "righteous violence" not "scary murdereous criminal."

(Mind you, that would have been Unfortunate Implications for reasons Walt seems blind to)

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 3:48:11 AM

Which was something I pointed out in other communities back when WD first game out and I was told to shut it. Oh how the turn tables.

I get that the writers intended him to be a villain. And I get that there was a lot of executive medling at play and they really want us to realize Aiden is the bad guy and not 'cool' like the advertising makes us want to see him as.

But that's just flat out not how the game treats him. The game never puts the narrative weight in the right places to make that feel like a valid interpretation. There's just enough that I can validly say, no, Aiden is a self-ignorant monster person who is too selfish to realize he's not only destroying himself but everyone around him, but clearly the game isn't self-aware enough to acknowledge that valid interpretation.

Like, there's a big difference between Villain Protagonist and having a Protagonist who does shitty awful things and never realizes it. You can tell a compelling story with a Protagonist's Descent into Villainy and crossing Moral Event Horizons. But you have to be aware that the Moral Event Horizon was there at all.

Oh my god. I feel so much relief. I feel so... validated in this. Thank you! I actually feel great right now.

It also leans into my theory that 90% of the writing or game issues we notice, yes, the developers are aware of ALL of them AND the ones we never notice and they know the problems are there, but couldn't do anything about them.

What unfortunate implications? Can't say I've played Mafia.

Edited by InkDagger on Jun 15th 2019 at 4:00:15 AM

IIRC Aiden was daunted by it actually. He tried to quit after the hotel job and just lived peacefully with his niece for a while. It's only later after her death that he gets back into it again. And hell, his old partner popping back in and threatening his sister is not actually connected to Aiden starting hacking again - he just comes and would've done so even if Aiden stayed retired.

But even with that there's still a ton of cognitive dissonance in the narrative. In a way the two are kinds of a feather - they both can't let go and drag more misery out of that.

Also
"I'm not accusing you of being a racist"
Yeah you're not the one playing it off as if race checkbox on the characters is the ultimate deciding factor.

Edited by Adannor on Jun 15th 2019 at 2:05:47 PM

Here's the problem.

Nikki outright tells Aiden multiple times to get out of the game. She has accepted Aiden's role in her daughter's death, moved on, and wants him to move on too. She begs him multiple times to stop. To let the fuck go. And that's... incredibly mature of her. It's incredibly kind of her. But the point is Nikki has long since told him to stop and he either stayed in the game or got back in after Lena's death and ignored the big flashing sign of "LENA'S DEATH WAS BECAUSE YOU GOT INTO THIS HACKING MESS IN THE FIRST PLACE". Its an ignore epiphany.

He's still clearly in the game when his old hacker big bad shows up to pull the kidnapping and 'one last con' deal. Hacker Buddy isn't coarsening him back, he's already BEEN back with his chaos map hotel room that gets blown up.

If the narrative had him unwilling to get back in the game. KNOWING that the game was what got Lena killed in the first place and Hacker Buddy has to kidnap Nikki and Jackson to force Aiden, MAYBE I'd see that. Aiden being anxious and unwilling to play but knowing he has to do the thing that he knows is doomed to fuck them over later could actually be compelling. A bit basic but you could do stuff there.

But that's not the story that was told, Aiden is a hacker pos from the first level, and he is completely ignorant of himself.

The developers of Mafia III wanted a revenge story about a poor black man taking righteous vengeance against rich white racists in segregation-era New Orleans; making the main character a straight Villain Protagonist rather than a Sympathetic Criminal would send some, uh... unfortunate signals.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jun 15th 2019 at 4:25:34 AM

I see. Sounds like a Morton's Fork writing problem. The story they wanted to tell wasn't meshing with the frame work they were given.

Yeah, Walt Williams is awesome but he was completely narratively tone deaf about the racial implications and clearly just sick of revenge stories.

Edit:

And yes, Aiden is already on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge by the time the game starts. He can't let his niece's death go and is hunting them down with the help of his Hitman friend.

(You know, in case there was any doubt he's a monster)

Aiden also steals cars and helps criminals escape the cops as a driver too while FIGHTING CRIME!

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 4:38:56 AM

Here's the passage from the novel thanks to Kindle Highlight:

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 4:37:04 AM

I think the difference there is also tone and narrative weight. There's a difference between a weighty examination of characters and a power fantasy. Mafia 3 sounds like it wants to be a power fantasy.

I do kind of feel for his hatred and boredom of revenge stories, even if something like that very late in Mafia 3's development is not the right time to do that. That would require a complete re-do of the rest of the game with that tone in mind. So, yeah, do that, just not with that game. Wrong game for that.

I would also point out that I'm kind of tired of 'games as power fantasies'. I find them less compelling. And I like what video games can offer on exploring flawed characters, for example Soma, Edith Finch, or, heck, think of what Watch_Dogs would look like if the game knew from the start that Aiden was a rotten bastard and explored that?

Edited by InkDagger on Jun 15th 2019 at 4:41:39 AM

Well that's the perspective of SPEC OPS: THE LINE and basically the story about deconstructing a Power Fantasy.

The question is, of course, is will players actually want to play a piece of crap for 40 hours? It works in movies but I've played games where I found the character so reprehensible I've had to stop.

I think the biggest issue is not whether Aidan if a villain or not but the refusal of the game to commit to either side. But if they did commit to a villain, well, then what is the climax of the story?

To use a strange example, "Hancock" is all about a flawed shitty superhero. A lot of people who saw the movie went, "Well, I think I'd like this movie if it was Will Smith playing a normal superhero."

I mean, sometimes you just want a Big Mac and not a special.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 15th 2019 at 4:46:04 AM

"But that's not the story that was told, Aiden is a hacker pos from the first level, and he is completely ignorant of himself. "

Yep, there are only some vague tones of narrative maybe trying to go into the "you brought this upon yourself, Aiden".

But then it also just falls flat with Nikki actually getting endangered. It doesn't actually happen as a result of his current actions. It's like a double fail.

As far as his current attempts to investigate Merlot and CTOS, nothing bad happens because of those. The old fart doesn't track him down, he doesn't notice that hey it's the same guy from the last time, looks like our lesson didn't stick. Damien shows up as basically Giant Space Flea from Nowhere and ends up justifying Aiden's return to hacking business.