Sophie Sampson

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently – how things that happen change us as people, how plots affect characters as stories progress.

This starts with character. I’m playing Mass Effect 2, and loving that I get to play a female character who really seems capable of the things the plot asks her to do. She looks and sounds tough, hardened and battlescarred. Unlike, say, Lara Croft, whose main emotional resonance is a grunt as she hits the wall, Commander Shepherd feels like a real character outside of me playing her.

I’m still going to do that videogame thing of asking her to get into firefights with undifferentiated aliens and progress the story by shooting them in the face, but I’m not going to ask her to remain untouched while doing so. The sense of a person who is used to command comes across very strongly, and that she can take what the universe dishes out.

Perhaps it’s an unfair comparison, but think about a pair of comic book movies, Fantastic 4 and Iron Man. Both have quite smart, funny scripts if you read them in isolation. Jessica Alba plays Sue Storm in the Fantastic 4 movie. Her job title is chief genetics researcher, but science is only there as a metaphor for power, nothing more nuanced. I actually think Legally Blonde takes a rather closer look at how knowledge changes you. This Sue Storm is there to fill out a costume and act as a plot point so that chaps can fight over her. There’s no light behind her eyes that says ‘I worked bloody hard for that PhD so please don’t patronise me’.

Whereas Robert Downey Jr really sells the idea of being a design engineer. To be fair, the Iron Man script does him the great service of having him have to build himself a new heart in a cave in Afghanistan, thus having to make imperfect things and fettle them to fit. That feeling gets slightly lost later in his super-engineer pad where apparently nothing needs filing when  it comes back from the rapid prototyping machine. But he still manages to exude a kind of mad joy at making things, a fundamental character trait in the way that having nice breasts is not.

Does this kind of realism have any place in fantasy stories? It depends, I suppose, on whether you want emotional truth or not – there are whole genres where it isn’t really the point.  But let’s say for the sake of argument that you, like me, do prefer it in your fictional worlds, then we need to consider the consequences of what happens. This doesn’t mean interminable cut scenes ‘to get across the character’ or imposing narrative externally on game structure, it’s just an argument for considering character to be more than just dialogue or a list of events that have happened.