Prototype 2 and Serious Silliness

As I said when talking about SR3, I enjoyed Prototype 2. It feels enormously free and empowering the way you can run and glide across the city, shapeshift and get the drop on people, and even knock tanks around. You really feel superhuman compared to most people in the game (though there are still enough challenges you don't completely overpower to keep it interesting). Its a blast.

Ok, thats not what I meant, but also like that.

Exploring the freedom and possibilities of that powerset was interesting enough, it even formed the inspiration for my character in a tabletop RPG campaign.

Now, I stopped playing Prototype 2 and can't right now for technical reasons, but thinking on it I was struck by the disconnect between the fun it is to run around and tear up the world, and gruff, angriness of Heller, your avatar doing these things. No, this isn't about "ludo-narrative dissonance" or at least not entirely; its about a more specific issue that applies to other media that the disconnect highlights here. Its about the way Prototype 2 suggests that its makers thought that to tell a "serious" story with "real drama" things have to be dark and negative all the time. Or perhaps its better to say that the story they wanted to tell involved a character who's angry all the time.

"This is my happy face": if you google "happy james heller", even the fan art is always angry.

The flaw in that thinking is especially apparent here because they knew how to make a fun open, game: the game knows players sometimes want to be serious and sneaky and objective focused and sometimes want to screw around and do things just because they can (like rampage or jump as far as they can off buildings) and allows them to do it. However, the story says the character is serious business all the time, and thats why you get this dissonance.

I'm actually less interested in the dissonance between play and story here than I am in the larger ideas that produced that story, namely that to be serious drama, you can't have fun or be funny. Which we can agree is wrong...

...right?

Right??

Silliness and fun are not mutually exclusive with deep, resonant emotional drama. At minimum it can break tension and add variety so the punches hit harder due to contrast. At best it makes everything more real and affecting. Things can be both fun and deeply moving. There are all kinds of examples from film and literature (not the least of which being Up! with its balloon house and talking dogs), but since I got here thinking about Prototype 2, the examples to bring up seem to be Trigun and Cowboy Bebop. After all, I've  hit comics, video games, and TTRPGs previously, so anime rounds out the nerdity nicely.

Anyone who's seen those and compares Heller to Spike or Vash should know exactly where I'm going with this. For those not familiar, Vash is the central character of Trigun, one of the  best gunfighters on a planet of  wild west, and can level city by himself. When not arguing about the value of life with specific villains, he spends much of the series acting like a complete goof.

Well, maybe not complete; Who doesn't like donuts?

Spike is a similarly super-capable bounty hunter in Bebop, but unless in mortal peril or dealing with his past, treats almost everything as a joke. I bring them up as a possible way a game could reconcile the type of grim revenge story Prototype 2 apparently wants to tell with a main character going on easter eggs hunts between missions; characters that present a fun, interesting face and set of behaviors to the world while still being dramatic when appropriate.

"This is my serious face"

Actually its easier for Heller, even if he does start as a revenge obsessed Angry Black Man; this is a guy whose body just got transformed, and is ingesting a jillion other people's memories over the course of the game, so it would make sense to deal with it by behaving oddly. Playing off Heller doing whatever (in non-specific terms, of course) between missions as part of dealing with the massive changes hes dealing with would both be a more believable character than taking it in stride, more in line with how he is being played (by most people, I suspect), and because of those it would have more impact when he does put his game face on for a mission that means something to him.

As it is, all of Heller's lines kind of blur together; his main characterization is "I am angry", sometimes ranging to "I am confused about who to be angry at", so he becomes very predictable and uninteresting, particularly compared to Mercer and Blackwatch's maneuvering. With a little more variety of tone, the dramatic moments would hit harder since there was more contrast and we identified with him more.

I mean c'mon, even Batman knows you have to have a little fun sometimes.

So do you think that kind of characterization would've made the game more of less enjoyable? Let me know in comments.

PS, when it comes to seriousness, I've always liked the quote:
When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. -CS Lewis


photo credit: prototype.wikia.com, ~ahmedshadow.deviantart.com, imgur.com, lidafilmmaker.wordpress.com