Too serious or too goofy?

This is going to be something of a soliloquy on the duality of taking a story far too seriously and not taking it seriously at all, as well as the various states in-between. I apologise if I do ramble.

I recently re-watched an old Yahtzee review of... Something I forget, where he says the line "The writing's OK, I guess. It's DARK. Just like every other Fantasy game recently." I may be paraphrasing, but the realisation struck me that... Yeah, a lot of the more recent so-called "serious" games have been growing more and more dark and unpleasant to play through. But then I started to wonder what would happen if we went in completely the other direction and remembered how many of the recent NON-serious games were complete goofy parodies of themselves where no dramatic tension can exist because nothing ever matters. That's... Not better. At all.

Now, as with most idle contemplations I do at 3 in the morning just as I'm going to sleep, this eventually turns to City of Heroes and how it reflects on the various aspects of it I'm dissatisfied with. I've been very vocal of how depressing I find recent City of Heroes content, largely because of how serious it takes itself. At the same time, I've been even more vocal about how unamusing I find City of Heroes' attempts at forced humour, most recently having gone Scrooge on that one lampshade, as well as Dillo... Again. In order to find an explanation which does not make a hypocrite (even if that's entirely possible), I tried to figure out exactly what kind of middle ground I'd like to see between serious and goofy as a happy medium for a story to strike. Mind you, that's not a universal happy medium, just one I would personally like to see.

What I discovered was that this happy medium is probably exactly the opposite of what City of Heroes seems to be going for these days. Rather than a medium of any sort, the game seems to be going for both extremes of the spectrum and then lumps them together as a means of evening things out. On the one hand, you have places like First Ward that conclude with a downer ending and signature characters dropping like flies to much angsty drama. On the other hand, you have slapstick comedy like McHackerSmith and comic relief characters like Dillo. Sometimes within the same story, even. But rather than produce a story with both drama AND comedy, it produces a story with neither because both are so extreme and both serve to undermine each other.

Personally, my happy medium would be a sort of story where the "relief" results from the drama in a much more direct fashion. Take, for instance, the original Portal game. Yes, yes, I know. Cake, companion cube, I'm still alive, the memes, etc. But at the same time, you have a game which is inherently dramatic, with humour stemming from how the drama interacts with the fictional setting.

Or, if you want a more local example, look at the Miss Francine arc from Westin Phipps. Yes, seeing the Freakshow try to go to school is funny, but it's funny in the "take my mind off the grim situation" kind of fashion. It's funny less because the game has built them up to be stupid and more because the game has built them up to be both anti-establishment and anti-intellect, so for them to try so hard at going to school is just so unusual it's funny. The subsequent myriad of "Freakshow doing odd jobs" missions, however, just ran that joke into the ground because they played it for slapstick. About the only "funny Freakshow" mission I enjoyed beyond Miss Francine is that tip mission to save the Freakshow school in Paragon City, and the only reason I enjoyed that one was that it showed me what an actually self-aware member of the group would represent. Having that Freak student tell the gang member how "You guys claim to fight the status quo but you've BECOME the status quo!" was both enlightening and actually "funny because it's true."

I usually have an instinctive urge to see the world as a collection of binary choices, but I don't think either binary option really works here. I don't believe that either depressing images or funny pages caricatures can, in and of themselves, make a truly compelling story, and that it takes a careful melding of the two to really intrigue. And I say "melding" intentionally, because I don't feel just tossing dramatic elements next to goofy elements really works well. It creates a sense of dissonance, yes, but that's not always a good thing. It's when humour stems from drama and then sets up further drama down the road for further humour to stem from that I feel a story has struck a good balance.

That's just my tipping point, though. Where's yours? Where do you fall on the scale of drama vs. comedy? Can you even enjoy a story if it doesn't depict the crushing hopelessnes of real life, or do you really need silly and uninvested slapstick to enjoy yourself? If you fall somewhere in the middle, how do you most like to see those elements combined?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Dean Mac.
That's it, just Dean Mac. He's fun because, come on, it's this guy trying to be best buds with a powerful villain ("Dean....I am NOT high fiving you. Stop it. It's addressing.") and not being put down by anything....and then you get the rest of the arc, which is fairly straight faced.

That arc, for me, juxtaposed light and 'dark'/serious perfectly. YYMV, but we need more Dean Mac in the game, and less...Shining Stars and....Dr Graves....
Pardon me while I go clean my fingers after typing about those THINGS >_<

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

... you killed your clone? I let mine go both times I played that arc. (The first time I even created the clone as a separate blueside character)

Anyway, I don't really care about how much mid-story drama there is, I just want to see a happy ending, for the good guys at least. (For villains, since they're not out to make things happier, I'd prefer to call it "satisfactory endings", where the villain's situation is improved in some manner)

Happy endings are becoming painfully rare in the game (and dramatic fiction in general, actually) these days as "shades of gray" becomes the norm, and I don't like that one bit.

One thing I remember from the Dean MacArthur arc was also the thing that Villains desperately needed for their kind of alignment, plans for power and taking over the world. CoV was a lot of beating on other villain groups and following the orders of others. Dean was written in a way that if you villainous character ever thought of going ahead with a plan to create clones, that arc would be your way of actually running that plan yourself.

You're Dean's superior, not the other way around. He's more of the call guy who gives you the tip off something and you're the one who gets the action and the glory. He tries to get on your good side and suck up a little bit for your ego. Flattery basically.

Dean worked because it mixed drama and comedy but also made villains feel like they're in control, running their own nefarious schemes. Not even Heroes get that kind of option because it's about helping others, not yourself.

I have to agree with you on this one Sam....but I think it's more indemic of what's happening in superhero and entertainment culture generally more than anything else. Look at the Avengers trailer, for example. It can't be this group of cool heroes coming together to fight evil, it has to be the impending end of humankind and the team straining under the weight of their collective egos.

The last writing outside of this game that inspired me, and I mean really inspired me was the old Justice League (and Unlimited) cartoons. They weren't afraid to be adult, but unfailingly reminded you of just why these heroes were heroes.

The Shining Stars arc almost does that but then undercuts it bitterly with its ending, and I think the last arc I came away feeling really positive about was probably the RWZ arcs where you stop Nemesis and the mission being called 'Save the World!' seems not only to bring that storyline to a head where peace can be reached with the Rikti, but you actually stop the villian of the piece.

I've missed that feeling of achievement a lot, even in this last Who Will Die? chapter because so much of your supposed success happens with direct NPC intervention. Even when the text says otherwise, you're invariably in a group of powerful NPC's who you could not (especially in Penny Yin's case) do the missions without.

The notion that you are a positive catalyst in the world gets constantly undermined by outside forces that stop your best efforts, or you become the unwilling pawn of other forces.

The writers at Paragon Studios need to realise it's not the 1990's anymore and we don't want the darkity-dark moral quagmires that the storyline is forcing upon us. The ideal of this game is a homage to the late Silver Age, and if the direction is more of what Matt Miller described as 'growing out from under the shadow of Cryptic Studios', then they will lose me as a customer. This game has already become my #2 game and I'd hate to see it drop off the radar entirely.



S.

Sam you needed a tl;dr summary...

But uh, I don't really follow the stories so..*shrugs* I don't mind 'em all.


I actually dislike the Twinshot arc more than I dislike the Dr. Graves' arc. Super jumpy, happy NPCs/people are annoying

Dillo (in the arc) is nice/cute though

In general, I agree with you: the Praetorian War in general, the Dark Astoria arcs, and oh holy cats in particular the awful Dr. Graves arcs, are almost too depressing to play.

Comparison, against the broader industry: I was over at a friend's house the other night, a hardcore console games addict. He was showing off some newish game, I didn't catch the name, where the game goes the same way each time you play it through, but it's worth playing four times because each time through, you, the player, can understand more of the other side's language. By the end of the 4th run-through, you find out that you're not one of the last remaining human beings, you're a malfunctioning mechanical construct, and that over the course of the game you've killed off the whole human race, including several fights where you butchered whole schools full of children that you mistook for hostile ghosts. That's the direction the industry is going, right now.

But there are still times that City of Heroes gets it right. I've long been fond of Marshall Brass's original arcs. All four Faultline arcs rock. Dean MacArthur, for all of his horrible chummy sexism towards female player characters, hits the balance quite nicely, as other people have said. Operative Vargas is broad parody done right, in my opinion. Television is awesome; it's a deadly serious Nemesis plot, and your contact can't help the fact that the only way it has to communicate with you, hypnotically, is by invoking TV show cliches in sidesplittingly funny ways.

The one I'm raving about lately is Bane Spider Ruben, the new level 15-20 contact in Cap au Diable. I'm having a hard time figuring out everything that I like about this one, but among the things I've noticed is that there are lovely grace notes where it's obvious that both your character and he are aware of the absurdity of the situation we have to work with; even more than Marshall Brass's arcs, even more than Arbiter Daos' bits during the Vernor von Grun arc, I feel like it really nails what it's like for villain minions to find themselves in government.

But there's a TV Tropes page that I don't think I can reference by name here without bowdlerizing it, ____sack World? A story setting or game world where everybody is reprehensible in some way or the other, where even the so-called "good guys" are bigoted or clueless or vicious or callous in some way? City of Heroes feels like that, not all the time, but way too often lately.

I think that the humor/serious balance is just right - there's something for everyone in the game.

...I will admit that all of Red Side feels similar.

Not because it is, because it has far more archtectural and thematic variation than Paragon City's older zones.

It's just that it's depressing. It's a perpetually overcast chain of islands. Every zone has some district in a varying state of destruction. The citizens are begging for money so they can leave.

It's a brilliant example of an oppressive, overt dictatorship. But the thing is, you're in an oppressive, overt dictatorship.

When I made my first villain, I longed to reach Grandville. Surely the home of Lord Recluse would be a palace.

Then I saw a big (impressive) oppressing tower surrounded by slums.

That's not to say they don't have villas, Or fancy cities. St. Martial is wonderful when you explore it, but every tine I ouro in, it dumps me near some powerlines. After a while, I just wanted to go to a park.

So, that's my reasoning. I just don't like be atmosphere.

I actually found the Shining Stars arc to be extremely entertaining - start to finish - and enjoyed the characters immensely (yes, even the much-reviled Flambeaux). I thought it had a deftly-handled mix of light and dark elements.

I also find that like many comics, the game wanders between the poles of goofy and serious dependent upon the story and the discrete goals therein. How it affects us individually is likely less a matter of the telling being competent or incompetent and more a matter of our own biases and expectations casting shadows of meaning over each element. After all, some people find any humor in a serious story to be off-putting, while others may feel that the Michael Mann approach borders on the ridiculous in its pursuit of drama. It's not always the story; sometimes it's us.

edit: This isn't to say that stories can't be stupid or jarring, just that even when we perceive them to be, it might be more us than them.

- Ash