Level Up.pdf

Creating Characters
or, even worse, the game ’ s manual — which no one ever reads 10 ! This is a
mistake. The first act is where the player is given an opportunity to find out
about and care about the character. However, I believe you need that first
act to get the player to bond with the character, even if you kill that
character off repeatedly (common in video games) or radically change
them into a killing machine. Case in point, you don ’ t need to look any
further than the movie Robocop.
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In the film Robocop, the audience is introduced to police officer Alex
Murphy. He ’ s an honest cop and a decent guy fighting crime in futuristic
Detroit. By page 25 of the script, you actually care about the guy and feel
bad when he ’ s gunned down by criminal scumbags. The second act kicks
off when Murphy is rebuilt as the cyborg Robocop. Now this movie had
several video game adaptations made, and in all of them, Murphy ’ s death
was only shown as a cutscene. The player would start the game as
Robocop and the killing of bad guys would commence immediately 11 .
But in our hypothetical Robocop game, why not start with Murphy as a cop?
The first level of the game would have Murphy tracking down the bad guys
and end with his death. The player would have time to bond with him,
making his death and resurrection have much more of an impact.
10 Maybe I am exaggerating a little, but c ’ mon. When was the last time you really read a game
manual? Then again, when was a game manual worth reading?
11 Just so you realize that I ’ m not a complete idiot, I do know why the developers of
Robocop began the player as Robocop. (1) It ’ s more appealing to play as a criminal - blasting
cyborg than as a fragile human; (2) game carts in 1988 didn ’ t have the memory to store
two completely different player character models, and why would you go through all of the
work to create them, especially if you were only going to be the human player character for
one level; and (3) the game is called Robocop , not “ Guy who gets shot and eventually
becomes Robocop . ”