The catch is that instigating actions is a much harder thing to script, and a less freeform thing to actually play.
Comic books especially have demonstrated that when this is flipped, bad things tend to happen - the greatest heroes quite easily slipping into fascism and abuse of their powers. One provides a reason to save the world, the other handles it. The standard story structure tends to be that villains act, heroes react. More pragmatically though, villainy is a hard path to offer. Your own people are precious not because of the sanctity of life or anything like that, but because they're yours, and nobody fucks with your shit. In these situations, the powerful wage their war and simply don't care about the collateral damage as anything other than point-scoring. This may not be the road to hell paved with good intentions, but neither is it one to just merrily skip down. Very few in history have simply done what they did for the lulz, as it were what makes them scary is that they thought they were right. You're not punching down in the same way, and there's the element of self-righteousness that tends to be core to actual villains. My god, avert your eyes from his wickedness!Įvil vs. I later finished it on PC, but could never get past how bad it made me feel, despite having loved Vice City and its whimsical missions like selling drugs from an ice-cream truck. A later one where you bury a guy alive in concrete because his employees whistled at your sister was the end of my time with it. I've no moral objection to Grand Theft Auto, but San Andreas routinely made me very uncomfortable, and not in a good way - the mission where you have to drown a music producer because he offended a friend you don't even like almost had me put down the controller. Crushing spirits, inflicting needless pain, even something as mild as making children cry as you steal their lollipops doesn't feel good because it's not supposed to feel good. It's one thing to torture a Sim or bulldoze a house in SimCity, but the more invested you are in characters, the harder it usually is to hurt them. The first is that for most people, the idea of being bad relies on being distant. Black Friday deals: see all the best offers right now!īut even in the games that try, it rarely turns out as good as it sounds.(Go back to, say, Greek myths and it's actually nothing else - much of the Iliad for instance rests on Achilles' entirely justified backing out of the fight until he gets what's his, with his later 'crime' not being sulking in his tent, but not accepting the proper compensation when finally offered.)
It's much the same as heroism not conventionally being seen as doing good deeds in exchange for something, at least in the modern era. Evil can be done by accident, as Spec Ops: The Line repeatedly proves with its lead character Walker's slide from would-be saviour to destroyer of Dubai, but villainy has to be active.
The protagonist of, say, Amnesia or Planescape Torment, gets to discover all manner of horrific things they did, but since the player isn't actually complicit in it, they don't feel 'real'. When they do, it's usually a question of backstory. A later game with a similar vibe, Overlord, had you as an up and coming demonic presence fighting the forces of good, yes, but the forces of good who had long since been corrupted anyway, before revealing that the actual villain of the game was your predecessor who had been using you as nothing but a pawn. Dungeon Keeper had the map and nominal heroes, but really the focus was on fighting other Dungeon Keepers. Rarely do they dare to take anything but the Grand Theft Auto or Dungeon Keeper or Varicella (there's your obscure shout-out of the week) approach, where the main character is evil fighting against a bigger evil. Very, very few games have offered anything close to that, and those that have got closest either hide behind a shield of chaos (Saints Row, Postal 2, though believe me, those games are NOT on the same level) or play it off as tragedy (Spec Ops: The Line, Traffic Department 2192).
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