On this show, we've talked a great deal about heroes,
about the different roles they play in games,
and about all the ways to flesh a hero out
in the context of a game.
But today, I'd like to talk about a entirely different conception of the protagonist's role.
Today, I'd like to talk about the Antihero.
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The idea of the Antihero was itself a rebellion against the notion that a protagonist had to be a paragon of virtue,
that the main characters in the story should serve as role models for the reader,
and there's a lot to this idea.
After all, a great deal of the human experience would go unexplored if we just restricted ourselves to portraying pure, white hat heroes.
But too often in games we see this idea of the antihero reduced to simply having your characters be jerks.
And this is too bad because there's so many exciting possibilities for playing this sort of hero in a game.
But to talk about how to use this hero
we've got to talk about the evolution of the antihero,
and also what the antihero is not.
What the antihero is not is the villain.
Now don't get me wrong.
I think the idea of playing the villain in a game has a ton of great, unexplored potential too,
but that's radically different than the idea of the antihero that we're going to be talking about today.
The antihero is the hero you hope succeeds
even though you shouldn't.
That's different from a straight-up villain.
Now, there are villains you may like just for their charisma alone.
You might even root for them to an extent
but you're not really rooting for them to achieve their goal.
Like, okay, for an example:
Hannibal Lecter is an awesome character.
He's fun to watch and you and I may both hope that he doesn't get caught, but,
at the same time, we're not really sitting there watching and thinking to ourselves,
"Oh, I just hope he succeeds in killing and eating all those people.
Oh, I hope, I hope, I hope!"
So, how did the conception of the Antihero come to evolve?
Well, the modern version really started with Shakespeare and Milton back in the 1600s.
Hamlet stands as one of the pillars of the idea of the Antihero.
Dark, brooding, violent.
A man whose only quest is revenge.
And Milton's version of Satan,
a figure many have argued as the embodiment of pure unrestrained free will, is the other.
Then, Lord Byron, the famous Romantic poet,
took this concept and ran with it;
and it's from him that the antihero really took hold of the popular consciousness.
His poem, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," was so popular that it's hero,
with his self-destructive, rebellious nature,
his intelligence, tinged with arrogance,
his desperate inner struggles,
and mysterious charm,
gave us the form of the antihero.
A type of hero we, to this day, call the Byronic Hero.
A form that has influenced literature ever since.
But the reason we're talking about the antihero, and not just the Byronic Hero,
is because, in the 20th century, the concept of the antihero morphed and changed in radical ways.
On one side, you had the existentialists,
who saw the concept as a way to have a main character who could be totally overwhelmed by the absurdities of the world.
Characters like Gregor in the Metamorphosis
are bumbling and irresolute and utterly impossible to admire but, as a reader,
you find yourself rooting for them because, if they can succeed,
then maybe there's some hope for you in this seemingly arbitrary world that many existentialists felt they lived in.
Then on the other hand, you had the pulp writers in America.
They latched onto the rebellious nature of the antihero.
The independent spirit who would do things their own way
even if they were damned for it.
The most prominent example of this type of rebellious outsider character
comes from noir detective fiction;
but much of early sci-fi and pulp horror latched onto the idea of the scientist or the seeker of truth,
shunned by society, pursuing knowledge regardless of the cost.
This rebellious hero transformed into the outsider hero of the Beat Generation.
The character for whom freedom was more important than society,
who traded the comforts of 50s America
for the down-and-out liberty of the road.
The banner was then picked up by new Hollywood when films like
"Bonnie and Clyde,"
"Midnight Cowboy,"
"Easy Rider,"
and "Cool Hand Luke" overturned the old Hollywood tradition of
white hat cowboys and heroic GIs.
The comic book Renaissance too was founded in the idea of the antihero
as a way to escape the superpowers and spandex clichés that the medium had become mired in.
As was the escape from syndicated TV in the 2000s.
So why did I drag you through all that history?
Well, to show a pattern.
Whenever things get stale in a medium,
the antihero has frequently been the tool a new generation of artists use to escape the traps the medium has fallen into.
And it makes sense in a really reductionist way,
the antihero is simply a rebellion against whatever the medium has established as a norm.
But there is a problem with the antihero in games,
a problem that none of these other media have.
The antihero isn't often someone you want to be.
You might be fascinated by their story.
You may want to observe an aspect of the human experience
that only that sort of flawed, and perhaps selfish character
gives you a window into, but, you don't really want to be them.
-and there in lies the rub-
In a game, it's hard to sell people on playing this sort of character.
It's hard to get you as a player to live out this sort of
"brooding"
"consuming"
self-conflicted throws of angst
which are so essential to these characters
if that's not how you, yourself, feel.
It's often difficult to provide the level of freedom it would require to allow a character in a game to turn their back on society and its rules,
as games are constructs defined by their rules.
So how do you have Hamlet play out in a game?
How do you instill that moment of self-doubt?
That moment that makes Hamlet ponder throwing away everything,
because it's the one clear choice he has left
when you, the player, are in total control.
Can the classic antihero be achieved in a simulated environment?
That's the question we face now.
But one thing that is certain, is that the answer isn't simply to lift from other media and
make characters who throw out coarse dialogue
or act like jerks in cutscenes.
The answer is to find out how to make players
feel that angst in the interactivity.
And like most uses of the antihero, I think it's going to be a new generation of
designers rebelling against what's been established, rebelling against the definitions that we've built to this point.
These are the people I think are gonna crack this problem
and deliver not the surface trappings of the antihero, but the real emotional core.
See you next week.
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