Mini Design Challenge I: Who’s That?
So, I was going to make this a post, but I’ve decided that, instead, I’m going to ask it as a mini design challenge, something like what Eric Zimmerman does at GDC, but for everyone that reads my blog, and more focused on themes or techniques that are common in traditional media, but haven’t found a real home yet in games. I’m hoping to be able to do one of these every Monday, so make sure to check back for new mini design challenges!
This first mini design challenge is about anonymity. In plays and movies, directors can sometimes make a great artistic impact by creating anonymous actors: the “every man” so to speak. Specifically, I’m thinking about the play and movies based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, both directed by Julie Taymor (of Lion King on Broadway fame). In the play, there’s a scene where Titus is pleading with a group of town’s people to spare the lives of his sons as they are carted off to be executed. When Taymor directed this, in the stage version she made all of the people stone statues that were rolled across stage, and in the movie version the camera never faces the town’s people’s faces, and ends with Anthony Hopkins on the ground as their feet walk around him. Because of this anonymity, we don’t feel any connection with the town’s people, and in fact see them as cold and uncaring toward the old man’s plight.
Anonymity is also used frequently in the movie Brazil. Director Terry Gilliam directs everyone very similarly and in similar costumes, including the main character, though most of the time the extra’s faces are hidden behind darker lighting. This makes them seam like industrial robots, uncaring and unfeeling toward everyone, much less a crazy main character. In my mind, it is very similar to how a 1984 or Brave New World movie would be directed: everyone the same, going through the motions of daily life, uncaring and unfeeling.
So the question (or challenge) is, how can we use anonymity in games to similar artistic advantage? In what ways are we already using anonymity (either purposefully or not) in ways other than creating cannon fodder? Can we make characters in games that are just anonymous enough in a situation that the player wants their help, but find them uncaring an unmovable? \How would you make a game made up almost completely of anonymous NPCs, and what artistic purpose would you want it to serve?
