Tragedy in crpgs

[Azrael the cat]

I'm reposting this from another thread, because I think it's worth it's own discussion and I'm interested in what people have to say. For me, this is a large part of what makes PS:T and MotB so special. If DU is pissed because this is largely a repost, feel free to delete it.

You know what I want to see from a Torment successor?

The most underused element in crpg settings: a game based on the tragedy archetype, rather than the epic hero archetype. I can think of precisely two games that were made using the tragedy (as opposed to the horror, or the 'ironic victory') archetype: Torment and Mask of the Betrayer. And both games were amazingly refreshing for it. It helped that in each case, the whole game embraced the tragedy archetype, from every NPC, every NPC relationship, most of the quests, the world in general...sure there bright parts and opportunities to be a hero along the way, but you knew pretty quickly that if you went into the hive and started acting the hero, taking the 'things are going to change while I'm around here', the enormity of it all (the sheer impossibility of setting anything but your personal failings to rights in the face of the godsmens' pollution-based disease, the sensates selfishness, the dusties disdain for the living, the utterly absent guardian of the Lady of Pain...) was going to make you eat your words.

I 'might' include Grim Fandango in that list as well. Another great game. Oh, and Silent Hill 2 of course.

The 'epic hero' storyline has been milked to death. In virtually every setting. There's simply nothing to be done with it right now - let it rest for a decade. Let it wait. In 10 years time a new group of writer/developers will come around who view it like we view spaghetti westerns and late 70s noir/cyberpunk - as something to be played with and teased out in interesting ways that would never have occurred to the people making it originally. Then we might actually get something interesting in that area once again.

That's not a problem if the game isn't going to be story-focussed. If it isn't story-focussed, then go epic-adventure-hero-saves-the-world all you like. But if they want to make a story-based adventure that genre is dead. Recognising that the genre is dead (and was already dead 10 years ago), and that tragedy has at least 10 years of solid game stories in it, without barely touching the surface of the genre (it WAS the dominant story-form for centuries during the golden age of English literature - Hamlet, Dr Faustus, Heart of Darkness, MacBeth, Frankenstein, Lear, The Revenger's Tragedy, Great Expectations, Moby Dick, The Last Man, The Great Gatsby, Nostromo...need I go on?).

And it's perfectly combinable with having a hero. Hamlet was a hero...by the last few scenes of the play anyway. The McDuff/English Prince/Scottish heir alliance were heroes in MacBeth (which makes it all the better when MacBeth meets the young idealistic English Prince on the battlefield and almost takes pity on him for being 'out of your depth...boy' before cutting him down (beats the shit of Aeris in FFVII)...and even more badass when McDuff (basically the mirror image of MacBeth) finds him and finally takes him down).

In many ways McDuff is an ideal hero for a tragedy crpg - he starts off opposing MacBeth because 'it's the right thing to do' - he has suspicions that MacBeth murdered the previous king and is already wary that MacBeth is going to become a tyrant. But once MacBeth slaughters McDuff's family, including his 8 year old kid and literally kills his newbown infant in his cot, McDuff becomes almost EXACTLY like MacBeth - a creature of pure rage willing to sacrifice everything, good or evil, in order to get his revenge. At the end you have a similar situation to the precarious situation that started it all - a young (more battle-hardened than his father, admittedly, but still weak compared to McDuff) Scottish prince-turned-king, relying on a morally ambiguous military leader for support (McDuff), and the one character who might have been able to negotiate a peace in the event of another bloodbath is dead (the English prince). A bit more interesting than 'you're the dragonborn, go save the world', huh?

Faustus was both hero and villain (like TNO). Same with Lear and the leads in the Revenger's Tragedy. Moby Dick is full of tragic heroes (Queeg-Queeg and Captain Ahab are as badass as crpg heros can get - arguably the same applies to the narrator; he does the 'Sam in ASoFaI thing of always insisting that he's no hero, but it's pretty clear by the end that the Moby Dick narrator is a badass by the sheer fact that he's survived - and not by luck - when so many other badasses have died).

Same with Victor Frankenstein. Starts off as the classic renaissance man and hero. Does everything for all the right reasons, and defends his creation (who in the book is highly intelligent, literate and artistic) against the ignorant cruelty of the peasants and tries in vain to stop a bloodbath...until his creation gives him a proposition: 'I can't live here, but I can't live alone - make me a mate and I'll head north where the land is empty, and I'll live in peace'. And Victor realises he can't do that, because as innocent as his creation is, he realises that creating an intelligent competitor to mankind THAT CAN BREED could lead to extinction.

And that's where the tragic-crpg-hero-element starts. Victor starts off reluctantly hunting down his creation because he has no choice. But then the creation (understandably) decides that if Victor is going to inflict a life of unbearable solitude on him, then he'll do the same to Victor, and starts killing off Victor's family, and eventually his wife. Then Victor makes the 'McDuff transition' from renaissance-man-hero to blinded by revenge, pursuing the monster to the north pole on a trip when he knows he won't be able to survive the return journey (echoes of TNO's sacrifice here) on a deliberate one-way suicide trip for revenge...Again, tell me that doesn't beat the shit of out 'hero saves the world...again'.

There's no rule saying you can't have an rpg-style hero - if done in the ambiguous style of TNO and MotB - in a tragedy.

 

[Excidium]

You know what I want to see from a Torment successor?

The most underused element in crpg settings: a game based on the tragedy archetype, rather than the epic hero archetype. I can think of precisely two games that were made using the tragedy (as opposed to the horror, or the 'ironic victory') archetype: Torment and Mask of the Betrayer. And both games were amazingly refreshing for it. It helped that in each case, the whole game embraced the tragedy archetype, from every NPC, every NPC relationship, most of the quests, the world in general...sure there bright parts and opportunities to be a hero along the way, but you knew pretty quickly that if you went into the hive and started acting the hero, taking the 'things are going to change while I'm around here', the enormity of it all (the sheer impossibility of setting anything but your personal failings to rights in the face of the godsmens' pollution-based disease, the sensates selfishness, the dusties disdain for the living, the utterly absent guardian of the Lady of Pain...) was going to make you eat your words.

There you go.

Yeah, well, I like tragedy too. Not necessarily tragedy but grittier stuff with flawed characters. It's more interesting to me.

 

[Jaesun]

The Black Hound was all centered about tragedy (IIRC from Anthony Davis). Not sure how much of that will remain in PE though. Or maybe all of it will.

 

[tuluse]

I actually just replied to you in the other thread

Do I have to restrict myself to RPGs? Because there are a couple adventure games that I feel do tragedies rather well.

There is Loom, which I talked about in the other thread. I have a great deal of nostalgia for this game, so my opinion might be biased, but I think it's one of the best stories ever told in a video game. I'll go into more depth here, and spoiler alert. The game starts with you being summoned by the elders of your village. So you go see what they want and it turns out they think your a portent of the end times, they banished your mother, and they want to banish you. Well then a swan comes out of no where and turns all of them into swans and they fly off. It turns out the entire village got turned into swans. So then you're stuck in an abandoned village, alone. So you decide to go find the flock. That's your primary motivation for almost the entire game is just to find your "flock" and join them.

Spoiler

You end up meeting up with an evil bishop who essentially summons a demon and you're forced to cut reality in half to save what you can.

There is also Blade Runner the game, where the best ending you can hope for is, depending on your views, killing a family of replicants, or escaping.


Also, what do you think about the ending of Fallout, yeah you save the world but you're still cast out from what you know and theoretically love.

 

[Volourn]

FO's ending wasn't tragedy.. unless you were retarted enoguh to agree tobeing dipped in goo. LMFAO

 

[oscar]

I quite liked the Game of Thrones RPG for this. Both character's have relatively neutral (or even in Alester's case, selfish) motivations and can be played out a bit differently depending on the choices you make (though neither really stray too far from the centre into Bioware's typical Goodguy McNice vs Puppykicker von Moustachetwirler dichotomy).

 

[Giauz Ragnacock]

Final Fantasy 6 was both epic hero-business and tragedy. You killed the bad guy and now the lack of toxic magic levels is allowing the planet to heal, but.... a lot of people still had their lives snuffed out a little over a year ago with many atrocities before and after (right up until just before the final battle in fact), the face of the earth is still drastically changed, one of the main heroine's just destroyed the last of her father's existence and a part of herself (though I think having her life finally not in the gutter is a big gain for her, but...), said heroine took on the job of helping raise an entire city's orphans of senselessly murdered parents (there's no way those kids won't have issues 'cause the flashback of the event was simply heartbreaking), the likelihood that you weren't able to save Cid (the closest one of the main heroines had to family... I mean she does attempt suicide by cliff if he dies), both of the main heroines are implied to have a lot of blood on their hands (one was mind controlled and the other conquered a city by herself when she still believed in her empire's cause- probably by freezing people to death as is her forte), and the last thing I can think of is that if your completely bad-ass kills for cash ninja is still alive at this point he faces the reality of his horrible life and kills himself leaving both his long-time dog companion and his ten-year-old daughter behind. The actual ending scene is light and full of relief that it's all over, but just a moment beforehand (again if your ninja was alive up to that point) you are reminded flatout that it didn't come without great cost.

 

[DalekFlay]

There is also Blade Runner the game, where the best ending you can hope for is, depending on your views, killing a family of replicants, or escaping.

Bonus points for pedophilia as well.

 

[Captain Shrek]

RTwP for DnD games.

 

[Karellen]

Delurking since this is the best thread I've seen in a while, so wall of text incoming. Basically, this is a cool proposition, but how are you going to do that in a CRPG?

The core of classical tragedy - as is the case in McBeth and Frankenstein - is in the inevitable fall or self-destruction of the hero, especially due to the inherent character flaws of the hero. Your hero may or may not start off as a classic archetypal hero, but the events that take place change him and eventually force him to face the consequences of his deeds and his flaws. Now tragedy doesn't have to be classical Greek tragedy, but my point is, one way or another meaningful tragedy requires character development. And not in the sense of getting a new level in asskicking, but in the sense of the character's personality changing in accordance to the events of the game.

The problem here is that I've never seen a CRPG that did this kind of character development well. And players don't like it when they try. CRPG players, as a general thing, treat any attempts to inflict emotional investment on the player as a challenge. "My home village was burned to the ground, my family got eaten by zombies and the main villain skinned my pet poodle and made a hat out of it? See if I care! I'm here to kill things and take their stuff!" There's a ton of people who think Fallout's central flaw was that you couldn't leave Vault 13 to die of thirst or get slaughtered by supermutants while the player screws around the wasteland doing subquests.

Or look at Dragon Age II. The game is supposed to be this big deconstruction of the standard RPG 'hero', with Hawke being this normal-ish guy who just wanted to a nice fancy mansion for his mom and get some elf/pirate/schitzophrenic/brooding JRPG elf booty, but actually ends up losing his whole family, gets betrayed by a bunch of his friends, loses his home all over again and becomes a fugitive. Well, Codex hates DAII for a number of reasons, but a big one is that you couldn't change anything about it, which includes not being able to randomly kill your party members before they could do the sort of stuff that actually made the game tragic-ish.

Now you cited Planescape: Torment, but well, when you look at Planescape: Torment, the game, it's mostly about following a trail of breadcrumbs between wandering around talking to everybody for no immediately obvious reason. There is a lot of tragedy there, resonating through the game, but it comes almost entirely from things that already happened in the backstory, from the desperate folly of the Good Incarnation and the magnificent cruelty of the Practical Incarnation (Paranoid can rot in a ditch) and how those things affected the world and the people you meet. I wouldn't even call the narrative of the game as a whole a tragedy, since the ending is strictly bittersweet. The Nameless One's fundamental tragic flaw is that he draws other people to himself with his charisma and destroys them. In the end he overcomes himself, literally, and then saves all his friends and goes off to repent for his sins.

tl;dr Making an actually tragic game poses a huge systemic design challenge for CPRGs. Tragedy is tragic because the hero is inevitably drawn to it - that's what makes it tragic. That's also why games with a fixed protagonist and more or less fixed narrative have been doing tragic or tragic-ish stories for years. Freedom, though, is pretty much anti-tragedy, so it's pretty hard to do tragedy in a genre where freedom is the key component.

 

[Gondolin]

tl;dr Making an actually tragic game poses a huge systemic design challenge for CPRGs. Tragedy is tragic because the hero is inevitably drawn to it - that's what makes it tragic. That's also why games with a fixed protagonist and more or less fixed narrative have been doing tragic or tragic-ish stories for years. Freedom, though, is pretty much anti-tragedy, so it's pretty hard to do tragedy in a genre where freedom is the key component.

Actually, this is a good point. I remember watching the ending of LA Noire and being pretty annoyed with the death of the main character. As a player, it's your number one job to keep that character alive throughout the game, no matter what. Having the game take control away from you and kill your character at the end looked like a shitty decision to me.

 

[Shadenuat]

I don't think we should accept tragedy, pain, suffering and immorality as more intellectual and fresh soil for cRPG stories (in my opion - for any stories at all, really). We just need better stories, with characters who are more real in their actions and thinking. It's just that tragedy happens to exist in our lives too, and writers should't avoid that. Planescape and MoTB were great because they asked questions and broke away from general way of telling stories today, which is: paint some evil, and let player resolve the conflict by destroying it.
I never thought about Planescape as tragedy. Deionarra's love certanly is, but whole game? I viewed death by accepting your mortality as a great victory of TNO over himself.

 

[tuluse]

tl;dr Making an actually tragic game poses a huge systemic design challenge for CPRGs. Tragedy is tragic because the hero is inevitably drawn to it - that's what makes it tragic. That's also why games with a fixed protagonist and more or less fixed narrative have been doing tragic or tragic-ish stories for years. Freedom, though, is pretty much anti-tragedy, so it's pretty hard to do tragedy in a genre where freedom is the key component.

Yes it's hard, but wouldn't the correct solution here to put the player in a position where either he is compelled to do the actions that will cause tragedy? and/or the situation is realistically created so he is unable to avoid it?

Let me explain the 2nd point further, with the caveat that I haven't played DAII. Isn't the problem here that in the course of the game you are a murder machine who goes around killing most of the things that get in your way, and thus murder should be your primary method of dealing with any problem? So the fact that your companions are un-murderable is verisimilitude breaking. It's lazy writing at it's worst. To make a tragedy work in such a universe it should be the murdering that leads to the tragedy. This is actually a flaw with KoTOR2 as well despite it having excellent writing in most ways.

On the other hand, you can create a situation where the PC is not the uber-powerful demi-God that most RPGs turn him into. Going back to my examples above with Blade Runner and Loom, you are always less powerful than the forces you struggle against, so it doesn't feel "wrong" that you can't just kill whatever stands in your way. If you give the player that power, you should let them use it in whatever way they feel is appropriate, but if you simply don't give them the power, then it's not a problem.

Blade Runner in particular has quite a bit of player agency. You are often free to kill people, but if you do, you have to face realistic consequences for it.

 

[tuluse]

Hamlet's character flaw is that he is a depressive and is unable to make choices or take action until it's too late. I don't know if this is "sinful", but it is a character flaw.

 

[Xavier0889]

More than an heroic of doomed approach to RPGs, I'd quite like to have another "normal" setting, like in Realms of Arkania. Your characters were justa nother pack of adventurers looking for some action, and people didn't treated you as the oh so glorious heroes because, basically, they didn't knew who the fuck you were. You could get randomly robbed, attacked of scammed on the streets, and most of the npcs just immediatly got you out of their houses because what the fuck were you doing there anyway. I also dig Darklands approach: you were adventuring because you just wanted some fame (as stated in the manual). I like the degree of realism that you got from those games.

 

[Azarkon]

tl;dr Making an actually tragic game poses a huge systemic design challenge for CPRGs. Tragedy is tragic because the hero is inevitably drawn to it - that's what makes it tragic. That's also why games with a fixed protagonist and more or less fixed narrative have been doing tragic or tragic-ish stories for years. Freedom, though, is pretty much anti-tragedy, so it's pretty hard to do tragedy in a genre where freedom is the key component.

Yes it's hard, but wouldn't the correct solution here to put the player in a position where either he is compelled to do the actions that will cause tragedy?

Lots of people meta game for the best ending.

and/or the situation is realistically created so he is unable to avoid it?

Then you get the rail roading effect and players complaining the devs didn't give them X Y Z option even though they only thought up those options in retrospect.

The issue is not the PC being too stronk but simply that tragedies require well developed characters and the characters players build aren't well developed.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Also, the (one of the) theme(s) of MoTB is tragedy.

The Shard Bearer is a victim of the fact that his fate is bound to the shard in his chest. Akachi is the victim of the vengeance of a sadist god. Safiya is plagued by the voices of her soul fragments. @Tofelli Kaelyn is doomed to the failure of never comprehending the reality and the permanency of the wall due to her nature. Gann is destined to the wall of faithless and forever curses his parents thinking they abandoned him. Okku is bound to a promise he may never be able to fulfill. etc.

The beauty of the game is that it gives you to actually seek redemption and reach catharsis for almost all the issues and there is a chance to even free yourself of the curse of predestination.

 

[tuluse]

tl;dr Making an actually tragic game poses a huge systemic design challenge for CPRGs. Tragedy is tragic because the hero is inevitably drawn to it - that's what makes it tragic. That's also why games with a fixed protagonist and more or less fixed narrative have been doing tragic or tragic-ish stories for years. Freedom, though, is pretty much anti-tragedy, so it's pretty hard to do tragedy in a genre where freedom is the key component.

Yes it's hard, but wouldn't the correct solution here to put the player in a position where either he is compelled to do the actions that will cause tragedy?

Lots of people meta game for the best ending.

People do lots of things, there doesn't have to be best ending or even a good one.

and/or the situation is realistically created so he is unable to avoid it?

Then you get the rail roading effect and players complaining the devs didn't give them X Y Z option even though they only thought up those options in retrospect.

Is the problem players complaining or players complaining with good cause? Because I assume trying to eliminate the latter is goal, and the former is just accepted because people will bitch about anything.

The issue is not the PC being too stronk but simply that tragedies require well developed characters and the characters players build aren't well developed.

I think the bigger issue is that devs don't consider how mechanics affect narrative in a video game. If you do consider that, then you can construct any narrative you want. You don't have to define the character, because the player will define the character in their own head. You just need to give reasonable options and a smart player will accept them and follow along. Again, one of the biggest problems with Bioware games is that the options aren't reasonable. They're usually completely divorced from the game mechanics, and it makes no sense.

 

[Dorateen]

Also, the (one of the) theme(s) of MoTB is tragedy.

The beauty of the game is that it gives you to actually seek redemption and reach catharsis for almost all the issues and there is a chance to even free yourself of the curse of predestination.

I wanted to provide a counterpoint to this thread, with regard to MotB, in that I did not find it tragic at all. There were dark moments in the adventure, to be sure. However, the path of the righteous hero was there, allowing the player to reject both the crusade and the curse and even get the big happy ending where the Knight Captain returns to Crossroads Keep. One of the "good ending" epilogues makes reference to the PC's actions as a triumph of will.

While MotB has earned a reputation for allowing one of the more bizarre and twisted story arcs in cRPG, that hardly invalidates that it still offered a very traditional path in which a good PC takes on some classically evil monsters: demons, a demilich, a blue dragon and a fallen angel.

Also, I do think tragedy in a cRPG has its place and is an important part of story telling. It's just the personal tragedy angle that I'm not so much into.

 

[Scruffy]

oh, i thought some famous programmer died or something, from the title.

 

[Karellen]

The issue is not the PC being too stronk but simply that tragedies require well developed characters and the characters players build aren't well developed.

I think the bigger issue is that devs don't consider how mechanics affect narrative in a video game. If you do consider that, then you can construct any narrative you want. You don't have to define the character, because the player will define the character in their own head. You just need to give reasonable options and a smart player will accept them and follow along. Again, one of the biggest problems with Bioware games is that the options aren't reasonable. They're usually completely divorced from the game mechanics, and it makes no sense.

Can you elaborate? Bioware choices these days are divorced from the game in several ways - the availability of choices has little or nothing to do with your character's stats, skills or previous demeanor, their impact on the gameworld is purely scripted or negligible, and they have no long-term impact on the player character's standing in the world. As a result, they're basically aesthetic. I do think it would be cool if decisions had actual strategic significance, so you'd have to weigh doing the right thing against your party's wellbeing and your ability to successfully complete other tasks in the future.

That said, I don't see how that sort of thing would be a magic bullet in terms of personal narrative, which I think tragedy necessarily is. At the bare minimum, you can't have a tragedy unless you have a character who actually cares about something. And if the players are given free rein over who their characters are, then at any time they can basically decide, "oh, I don't think my character cares that everyone he ever knew was captured by nazi aliens and taken to their fascist sausage factories to be turned to mincemeat. I'm going to go do random subquests." Of course some people will go along with a narrative when they see it, but I think CRPGs players in specific are predisposed towards going the opposite way just to see what will happen. I know I do that a lot, even when it hurts my immershun and actual enjoyment of the game.

When it comes to choice and consequence in CRPGs, people generally measure its success by the impact the PC can have on the world, along the lines of how you can choose who is left in charge of Junktown in Fallout. The thing is, these choices don't actually impact your character as a person in any way (unless you're heavily into LARPing), and I know I personally didn't care very much, so in practice, the PC is left as this sociopathic, vaguely obsessive-compulsive superhuman cleptomaniac who arbitrarily chooses what happens to the places he visits while he's busy killing and stealing stuff. To get an actual personal narrative out of this, you need fixed characters with pre-scripted reactions that develop as the narrative progresses. That, or some kind of mechanic for character personality development, which is a programming and scripting nightmare and would almost inevitably end up laughably buggy or just plain silly. To do this well wouldn't be just hard, it would require some kind of fundamental design shift in a CRPG.

 

[Jaesun]

BioWare.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Some good responses here. I can definitely see how it might encourage linearity, and that's possibly why adventure games did tragedy the most. Secondly, as I've acknowledged before, there's the Bioware problem. When good stories (or even just fun stories) first started appearing in games I expected it to be all System Shock 2, Torment and Deus Ex, and instead we got Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I wouldn't put it past Bioware to make any story genre unbearable, and if Bioware disappears there's an endless supply of hacks where they came from.

At the same time, I also want to point out an example of how, in the literary sense, tragedy doesn't have to mean 'bad ending'. Now this is NOT a crpg style plot by any means, but in my view it's one of the most (if not the only) uplifting book of the existentialist period (I also think it's the only truly great book the existentialists produced, so I'm a bit biased): 'The Plague'. I'm even more biased, because in many ways it's the 'anti-Sartre', and I consider Sartre to be the single biggest 'decline' in philosophy, both in terms of his personal work and his influence upon the subject (the first thing I did when I got my first chance to be unit coordinator for a course was cut Sartre and replace him with Nietzsche). The guy takes all his premises from Nietszche, claims them as his own, and then doesn't have the balls to follow through to their ultimate conclusion like Nietzsche does - he wants to shit on everyone else's morality, while still insisting that the morals that HE finds important (socialism, being true to oneself) still have 'real' importance.

Camus' book 'The Plague' does the opposite of that. It's about a bunch of 6 or 7 characters risking their lives (and in some cases, giving their lives) to try and stop a plague that is tearing through a city, where the city gates have been barred due to quarantine. Some do it for charity (the priest), some for duty (the doctor), some for romantic heroism (the lover), some for selfishness (the guy that agrees to help in return for info on where there's a secret exit to the city). As the story goes on, every single one of the characters starts to realise that their initial motivations are meaningless - the priest can't prove his faith in the face of that kind of suffering, the doctor realises that his duty is just a social construct and he'd be keeping his hippocratic oath if he had just stayed outside and helped the quarantine, the lover realises that he's no hero but either a random plague victim or a random guy who helped that nobody will remember, etc. But they continue ANYWAY. Now Sartre would have shat on those characters and called them all self-deceiving fools (he even said as much in one of his many essays bagging Camus once they fell out when Camus called out Stalin early as a murderer and dictator instead of a socialist hero). But Camus finds something BEAUTIFUL in the way the characters keep going - they don't know why they're doing it, they know their original reasons don't mean shit, they can't justify why they're risking their lives even to themselves - but they know that for some reason, something about being human, that they have to do it, and for Camus that wasn't moronic self-delusion, it was beauty.

Yet in literary terms, it's still considered a tragedy. Not because of any ultra-downer ending - some of the characters die during the book as one would expect, but even those that do tend to go out in style (e.g. going 'fuck it, I'm going to head straight to the heart of the plague and ease the suffering of as many people as possible before the bastard takes me down'). It's a tragedy because it's about the human condition - it's about how our everyday petty motivations don't add up to anything - but not in any kind of way that implies a sad ending.

The same happens in lots of tragedies - Marlowe (Heart of Darkness) almost steps over the edge into madness, but takes a step back at the last moment by realising that there IS a difference between him and Kurtz: unlike Kurtz, who had nothing human to cling to once his idealism was shattered, Marlowe had the simple commitment to the work of being a captain and running a boat and hence when all HIS idealism was stripped away he still had something left to hold onto and preserve his humanity. Hamlet gets his revenge (and arguably more importantly, he regains his moral centre - by the time he and Horatio are talking before the duel, and Hamlet acknowledges that it's going to be a trap but that he needs to walk into it after everything that he's caused, he's already won). The ending of Great Expectations is actually really sweet - Pip reconciles with the love of his life, and while they both know that they're too damaged by now to get together, the book ends with them acknowledging what should have been and leaving as friends - arguably far more romantic than if they had got together and married etc. The protagonists in the Revenger's Tragedy get their revenge on the bastards who killed their families and raped their women - they don't care that they're going to hang because they expected to do so from the very start, and for them it's worth it.

Similarly, I don't see Torment as being a 'bad ending' - like the other stories I've mentioned, it's a tragedy in the literary sense because it explores the human condition and finds uncomfortable truths in the process. The actual ending isn't sad - he achieves everything he sets out to do - he finds who he is, and finally overturns the curse by saving those he cares about instead of damning them. The tragedy aspect is the idea that no matter how much you change, there's a point where if you've done something sufficiently wrong, it becomes a part of you that you can't shake off.

It would take a better writer than most of those around in the business - but game studios are hiring dedicated writers now, so surely they could try and hire someone with actual taste rather than Hepler fantasy-fulfillment fan-fiction writers? Anyone who takes the 'formal route' into becoming a professional writer, and studies it at uni etc, should have learnt a variety of genres and be capable of taking tragedy archetypes while still giving the story a hero and the option of a 'good' ending. Arguably, if they focus on the 'explore what it is to be human' aspect of tragedy, it should even avoid the linearity problem, as it would be more of a pervasive theme throughout the story and setting, rather than a railroad leading to an unavoidable train crash that you're supposed to be upset over.

 

[Kirtai]

You could probably get several published papers out of this. It's a pity there's so few games that could be used as a basis though. Are there any others that qualify besides MotB, PS:T and Grim Fandango?

Have you asked inXile if they're using these themes in the new Torment?

 

[Jasede]

Yes, there is.
It is called Nier and is a console action RPG with console combat.

It is the most tragic game I have played since MotB, which was the most tragic game I have played since PS:T.

Don't be fooled. It's a masterpiece. Imagine Soul Reaver and Legend of Zelda- but tragic and adult. Again, don't be fooled by first impressions.

He doesn't need to ask inXile. I have a great affinity for this sort of thing. Listen to the sample music. It spells tragedy, abandonment, doubt. Tragedy will pervade the game in some fashion or another; you may count on it. Should I be wrong, bump and quote this post and I will gladly be permabanned.