Overthink sometimes

As I sit staring at a blank page that will one day be a novella, I am reminded of a terse conversation I had with my roommate in October around the release of Assassin's Creed Odyssey. We had just acquired AC Odyssey; well, to be honest, our other roommate just acquired it; we were watching, and as I sat there, backseat gaming, the game continued to disappoint me. At first, it was in the fact that stealth was no longer a viable option now that your backstabs are tried to RPG mechanics and can seldom do enough damage to take out an unalerted enemy. The second came when my roommate began running from heated battles only to return when his health recovered; killing all the tension in the fight, reducing it to an elaborate series of hit and runs wherein the hitters were driving by in go-karts swinging whiffle bats around. Third, came when an early decision that the game played up having significant consequences fizzled out into nothing. And fourth came when I discovered that the exciting Minotaur fight that was hyped up before release that I found early on in the game is locked until a much, much, much later portion.

However, all those reasons above pale compared to the disappointment that sparked said conversation. For the entirety of the prologue, I had been making the above points as they came up, but I was mainly harping on how much of a non-character Alexios is. If I had to be cynical, Ubisoft is trying to make the Ezio lightning strike twice, with both protagonists being young, hot-blooded asshats. The difference between the two is that Ezio had an arc where Ubisoft showed the player the full range of his character. He starts as a hot-headed, skirt-casing troublemaker but ends the game as a grown man who understands the world and the responsibilities he inherited from his dead father.

On the other hand, Alexius barely gets a base personality defined, starting and ending with serious dry-witted remarks, which is good characterization but poor character. For those confused, let me quickly define some terms. Characterization is traits you give characters like mannerisms and ticks to make them seem more real. In contrast, Character is the sum of their personal events and philosophy, making them unique and relatable.

However, to get back on track, while making these comments, my roommate chimes in and says, "You're just overthinking things."

And for a moment, I was speechless, which killed the conversation right there and then, but it gave me a chance to think about it. Was I sucking the inherent fun out of the game by needlessly picking at minute details?

I have an answer now: no, I was not.

While I accept that certain things can be just dumb fun and don't warrant deep discussion, they should still be analyzed to try and determine why they work in a dumb, fun game. If we continue to let things like that slip by without, at the very least, talking about them, they're only going to keep cropping up in later games and keep gaming back. So please tell me what you rather have, a game wherein you play as a human being with vices, virtues, and skills they use to overcome personal and real-life obstacles or a game where you play as just a big old hunk of good-looking meat who melodramas their way through 15 hours of game.

I want that former, and we won't get there unless we point shit like this out and talk about it, but just remember, not everyone will feel the same way, and not everyone will be persuaded. So try to convince people, but if they're not budging trying something else, move on. However, even if you can't convince people, keep true to wanting more profound stories because if we lose that, we end up with hollower experiences.

Take the comparison between the original and American Godzilla franchises. Born out of the pre-war fear of nuclear devastation the Japanese struggled with after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla was the stand-in for the Atomic bomb; powerful, destructive, and alien. However, as nuclear tensions cooled, Godzilla took on a more positive role as guardian of Japan as he became a cultural symbol of Japan, protecting the island from foreign threats such as the American-made Destoroyah or the literal space aliens who created Mechagodzilla. Then, in recent years, the Nuclear meltdown at Fukushima sparked fear of nuclear mutation, and the rise of Shin Godzilla mirrors these fears.

Now take the American Godzilla movies, where none of the previous ideas were taken into account and Godzilla was distilled down to a simple monster movie focused on bland human characters. These films lack the same fear and cultural pride the originals were based around, making them hollow imitations of the originals. Now imagine if those ideas of nuclear paranoia were taken from the original and put through an American understanding of Nuclear power, where we are more in the role of Dr. Frankenstein. Here the Americans are desperately trying to push the understanding of a powerful and destructive concept but are equally delighted and terrified with the results. What if Godzilla was an American creation in the movie and escaped rampaging first across the Midwest to California, then entered the ocean and began their journey to Japan and world war three? Here the original themes of Godzilla are present but taken from a different angle, one more about controlling rather than cowering in fear of the King of Monsters.

Or taking a post-9/11 stance, Godzilla could take the role of large-scale terror attacks. Imagine if occasionally, as Godzilla battled and rampaged across the states, the movie pans down to a pod of survivors trying to get by without being crushed by Godzilla. Making the threat of Godzilla always looming in the background and giving us the viewer a better understanding of the devastation Godzilla brings with him. These are the kinds of ideas we get when we dig past the surface, the types of ideas that will long outlive us and inspire and enrich a new generation of artists, filmmakers, and if we begin to look deeper, gamer designers.

Hope you found something interesting

Peace