Blog - "Give your villains a face"
Monday, February 11, 2008"Give your villains a face"
That's a great line from a lecture on game writing I heard at AGDC this year (although maybe I'm slightly misquoting it. It might have been "Give your antagonists a face".)
It means that a single iconic antagonist is more powerful on an emotional level than just a generic evil hoard. So, if you have an evil hoard as an antagonist: give them a leader to be the face of the organization. An evil mascot, if you will.
This was done pretty well in the new film I am Legend. The film is not quite a zombie film, but pretty similar to one. In any case, this one stood out as unique to me in the fact that it did "give a face" to the zombie-like creatures with (spoiler alert?) the big, strong, "leader" one that was cunning and almost human-like. It was a really interesting twist on the zombie genre that seemed to prove the "Give your villains a face" rule as true.
(although, to play devil's advocate: that character had extra appeal for providing an ethical dilemma, as it makes you wonder if these creatures are developing their own culture, and to what degree they are still human. The film didn't really explore any of those topics directly, though, which is a shame.)
In any case, I bring up this up because I'm currently struggling with giving my villains a face in one of the games I'm working on, and may well borrow the way it's handled in the film. My game is set in the early Paleolithic era, and as the characters are therefore fairly primitive creatures, they're not too far off from the zombie-like creatures in the film. Making one iconic, cunning and scary "leader" of the enemy caveman tribe is something I feel would benefit the story greatly. I just have to figure out exactly how to implement that... and soon, as the docs for it are due shortly.
Labels: writing
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:20 PM
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