Extra Lives by Tom Bissell Page B

characters, in fact, though in different ways, destroy themselves. For the vast majority of both games, Ryan is present only as a presiding force and GLaDOS only as a voice. These are characters that essentially control the world through which the gamer moves while raining down taunts upon him. In GLaDOS’s case, this is done with no small amount of wit. In her affectless, robotic voice, GLaDOS attempts, whenever possible, to destroy the gamer’s self-esteem and subvert all hope of survival. “GLaDOS is so entertaining,” Boon said, “I enjoy spending time with her—but I also want to kill her.” The death of Andrew Ryan, on the other hand, is one of the most shocking, unsettling moments in video-game history. It has such weird, dramatic richness not because of how well Andrew Ryan’s hair has been rendered (not very) but because of what he is saying while he dies, which manages to take the game’s themes of control and manipulation and throw them back into the gamer’s face. These two characters have something else in common, which Boon did not mention: They are written well. They are funny, strange, cruel, and alive. It is also surely significant that the controlled characters in
BioShock
and
Portal
are both nameless ciphers of whom almost nothing is learned. They are, instead, means of exploration.
    Patrick Murphy jumped in here to say, “It’s not whether the character is realistic or stylized; it’s that he’s authentic.” In illustration he brought up Kratos of his company’s own
God of War
series. Kratos is a former Spartan captain who, after being slain in combat by Ares, manages to escape Hades and declare war on the gods. Among the most amoral and brutal video-game protagonists of all time, Kratos, in Murphy’s words, “doesn’t just stab someone; he tears him in half. That helps sell him. Veins bulge out when he grabs things. It gives him an animal feeling that’s really necessary.” The narrative of the
God of War
games is set on what game designers refer to as “rails,” meaning that Kratos’s story is fixed and the narrative world is closed. The gamer fights through various levels, with occasional bursts of delivered narrative to indicate that the story has been furthered. It probably goes without saying that no one plays the
God of War
games to marvel at the subtlety of their storytelling, which is pitched no higher than that of a fantasy film. It is a game that one plays to feel oneself absorbed into a malignant cell of virtual savagery. Kratos’s believability is served by the design and effect of the gameplay rather than the story. In short, he has to look great, which provides a fizzy sort of believability. If Kratos does not look great in purely creaturely ways, the negligible story will be dumped into the emotional equivalent of a dead-letter office. This is one of the most suspect things about the game form: A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades—and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong.
    Steve Preeg, by now wearing a slightly worried expression,opened by admitting that he was not a gamer and professed to know very little about games. But he knew a bit about believability and character. To explain the difficulty he had with animation in
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
, he showed us “draft” shots from the digital process by which Brad Pitt’s character was aged. In the earliest attempts Pitt looked undead—utterly terrifying. Just shifting the width of his eyes a tiny bit, Preeg said, made the difference between “psycho killer” and “a little boy who just got home.” He showed us how he did this, and the difference was indeed apparent. Preeg then turned philosophical. In Hollywood, he said, “we have very clear goals.” He worked under a director, for instance, had a clear idea of the