Unfold Your Game III - Classical and Existential World

#GameDesign #Persona5 #Zelda #Existentialism

In the previous two articles, I talked about two ways to give your game a depth while it is unfolding to the player--the way of Persona 5, and the way of Zelda. Persona 5 goes with progression and Zelda goes with an organic world.

Now, we can consider the two masterpieces at a higher level. Persona 5 is a world that changes over time, but the original structure and connection between each subsystem remain unchanged. So Persona 5 is dynamically organic. Zelda is more classical: it maintains that organic world for the player to explore. So Zelda is statically organic. Clearly, Persona 5 is the trend of the future. To be more precise, Zelda is a classical world, Persona 5 is an existential world.

Before diving into the concept of existentialism, let's recall the first paragraph of this series: what is temporal art? Those who need a certain period to unfold itself over the time axis. Very well, now you are to create such a piece, let's say a story. Is the world in your story going to be static, or dynamic? A world contains natural environment and human characters. The natural environment may change dramatically in the story--like a fierce earthquake, an asteroid hitting the earth--but that won't move us. It is the actions of human characters in a story that always move us, touching our hearts. Therefore, by saying "static world" or "dynamic world", we mean whether the human characters in the story are supposed to change, or not.

In classical stories, a hero is born to be a hero, and a villain is born to be a villain. The villain won't change: he won't be stronger, he won't respond much to the hero's actions, and he'd rather sit in his evil ostentatious palace doing nothing meaningful other than waiting to be defeated by the hero. That's Zelda, a classical world. This kind of stories had been popular over thousands of years, among all peoples' lore. I think it is because of the hereditary system: the son of a goldsmith always grew up to be a goldsmith, the son of a barber always grew up to be a barber, and the son of a king always grew up to be a new king (or at least in the nobility).

After World War II, existentialism came to be prevalent: according to Jean-Paul Sartre, we can say "this piece of wood is born to be part of a piano", but we can not say "this person is born to be a XXX". Because a human's existence is of the highest priority. You can not, and you should not "make" a child into an adult according to some blueprint, just like you make a tree into a piano. Then, since there is no way to define a person using any existing stereotypes (like "a goldsmith", "a barber"), how to define "human"?

Jean-Paul Sartre answered, the only way to define "human" is by her series of actions throughout her entire life. With that comes great responsibility: as an individual, you must take the burden to define what a "human" is by living your own life and making reasonable choices (at important moments) that could also be an exemplar of what a true human being should do in a similar situation. In that sense, a personal choice is endowed with significant meaning: it is not only for yourself, but also to reshape the humanity.

That said, let's go back to Persona 5. In Persona 5, the protagonist is a normal high school student. The evil boss, Shido, is a normal yet aggressive politician. However, as the game proceeds, as the player gains abilities, Shido also becomes more and more powerful, as well as more and more evil. Please note that Shido is NOT born to be a villain--his series of actions (in the game) perfectly defines what a villain is, and he is thus defined as the arch-villain of this game.

On the other hands, the protagonist is not born to be a hero, either. Yes, he has the superpower. But in this game, there are many people who also have that superpower. Goro Akechi (the high school detective) is a perfect mirror of the protagonist: Goro Akechi's superpower is much stronger than the protagonist, but Goro Akechi is evil, not a hero. So clearly, "having superpower" does not make the protagonist a hero. Then what does? His choices (or the player's choices) in the game. If the player chooses to sell his teammates, it will reach a bad ending, and the player will be nothing but a clown. Therefore, we can say, the player's series of actions (in the game) defines what a hero is.

Understanding all of those, we can look into recent Hollywood movies: a very stereotypical process is that before the final fight, the protagonist somehow realized something and becomes a better person. With the power endowed by such change, the protagonist defeats the final enemy.Why is such type of movie so popular? Because it establishes a procedural rhetoric of our desired life, as well as getting rid of the disadvantages (e.g. the risk of being killed)--you may have found that statement very familiar, and yes, please take a look at the second article (Zelda) of this series.

To wrap up--now we can stand in a higher ground to look at different game worlds: does this game make use of the fourth dimension (namely, time) to make the world (namely, characters) dynamic? Or, to use some terms in philosophy, is this game world existential, or classical?

Okay, that's the end of this series. You are very welcome to discuss/disagree/argue with me. My email address can be found at the bottom of this page.

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