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This wasn't a dreamlike medieval world where the peasants became knights and farmer boys married princesses, it was instead one where class and gender roles are enforced through brutality and law. One of the things that made Game Of Thrones stand out so much in the fantasy genre is that it felt historically plausible. These events only happen in Crusader Kings II, and only because it attempts to model the complexity of human relationships at a level that almost no other game attempts. A regent desperately arranges a princesses' marriage to ensure an alliance. A king's brother decides that he would make a better ruler than his dead brother's nephew. Every emerging narrative comes from those relationships, and they end up looking a lot like Game Of Thrones. It creates a world of thousands of humans in medieval Europe, all of whom have different motivations and relationships with one another. That's why the best Game Of Thrones game, and the best strategy game of recent times, is Crusader Kings II. But for deeper stories, games have to plumb human emotions and motivations. They're good if you want a simple conflict, and for many games, that's fine. Godlike evil spaceships, magical beings fighting against literal personifications of Fate, zombies, or warmongering madmen who believe in inane forms of Social Darwinism? Those are inhuman. A story is difficult to treat seriously if it depends on totally inhuman forces for all of its tension. Speaking of those mad wizards, enough is enough. Video games spend too long on genocidal AIs and mad mages, when it turns out sociopathic brats are far more affecting. and he's not even the worst character in the series. He orders all rival claimants to the throne dead, including babies. He tells an insulting bard that the bard can keep either his tongue or his hands, not both. Joffrey's villainy exists on a national scale-the good guys and girls, all of them, want to dethrone Joff-but it's also venal and personal. What kind of bad guy never does anything but posture and laugh maniacally? Video game bad guys, that's who.Ĭompare that to Joffrey, the royal bastard of Game Of Thrones. And, since your goal is to stop that enemy, it means that success in your mission leads to the villain never accomplishing any of their goals. They almost always want to blow up something big, so big in fact, that it's impossible for that to happen and the game to maintain any narrative integrity. So here's the core problem with most video game bad guys: they have big important plots to destroy. Tone down and prove your villains villainy That's death-for potentially anyone, not just nameless grunts and heroes engaging in sacrifice. If you're going to depict war and violence, video games, then you have depict the consequences of war and violence. And why does Final Fantasy VII have perhaps the most famous game story of all time? Because a major character is taken away, against all the rules. Want to know why XCOM was so well-received? Because death was sudden, brutal, and meaningless. You play as supremely competent soldiers, who will regenerate, respawn, or reload their way out of any danger. Video games lie about that danger all the time. It was a stunning moment, which suggested that there were no rules, that nobody was safe, and that death could be sudden and meaningless. That's what Game Of Thrones did toward the end of its first season, when one of the characters who appeared to be plot-critical was simply, brutally beheaded. Got a bunch of main characters getting in each others' way? Kill a few of them off. Certain games, like a few Resident Evil titles, the Game Of Thrones RPG, and the cult hit Might & Magic: Clash Of Heroes have used multiple perspectives, but we think they'd be most useful in epic RPGs like Dragon Age. With multiple characters, players can get the best of all worlds: more story, more setting, more difficulty, more variety. Video games tend to stick with the one hero-one story model, when many of them, especially role-playing games, might actually benefit from multiple perspective. It also allows characters to die without the story ending and makes cliffhangers a breeze. This gives the story several immediate advantages: there are multiple main characters, letting us see and understand different parts of the world at different times. In the novels, there are roughly 10 point-of-view characters per book, while in the show, the viewers will see even more scenes. The narrative of structure of Game Of Thrones depends on its multiple perspectives. Multiple perspectives allows for better storytelling