Extra Credits

The Antihero - Can Games Create Antiheroes? (2015x45)

: 25, 2015

An antihero is someone whom you want to see succeed, even though it almost feels like you shouldn't. They're not villains, whom we can love but whose plans (like world destruction) we can't support. The antihero has an objective we agree with, but a personality that just grates on us. In Western literature, the predecessors of the antihero include Shakespeare's Hamlet or John Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost: they had grating, yet attractive, personalities, but their goals were not really those of a hero. Lord Byron introduced the first real antihero in his poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which became so well known that "Byronic hero" is another way to describe the antihero. Since then, we have seen antiheroes in everything from Kafka's Metamorphosis to detective noir and pulp sci-fi novels. They tend to appear when a new generation of writers in a genre wants to escape the stale cliches of their predecessors. Games may be due for an antihero movement, but since they are interactive, it's difficult to make an actual antihero rather than just a character who acts like a jerk in between action sequences. Brooding is not very engaging for the player, for example, so how do you create brooding moments for an antihero when the player is in control? How do you make players feel that angst?