Fantasy Heartbreaker, by Russell Bailey

Cortana, Intercom Girlfriend

You’re in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. The enemy’s right behind you. Looks bad. But then you hear her.

“I’m reading a weak wall up ahead. If you can hit it with a rocket, you might be able to get through to the generator room.”

Say hi. You’ve just met our generation of videogames’ most important stock character: the intercom girlfriend.

Her voice is pleasant, light, feminine. Occasionally she’ll have an accent, and if she does it’s probably British. One part the operator from The Matrix, one part Majel Barrett’s computer voice from Star Trek. She’s there to guide you through every convoluted mission objective, relay plot we don’t have a cutscene budget for, and in general make sense of your crazy life of demons and shotguns.

There are dozens of her by now, if not hundreds. Cortana from Halo, Anya from Gears of War, Tannenbaum from BioShock, Juno from The Force Unleashed.

But who is she, and why do we need her?

She’s often a scientist or military type, but, then again, in a lot of games everybody is a military type. Generally geeky, or just a touch sarcastic. Every once in a while she’ll laugh with you at your shared predicament, before she goes back to crystal clear guidance. She might even flirt… but for the most part, your love must remain not only chaste, but unstated.

If you’re betrayed, then some way or another she’ll go rogue with you, hacking security systems and forwarding intel. She’s clarity and purity in a world of gritty browns, blinding bloom and flying bullets. She’s part character, part UI function, a voice you can always trust.

Almost always. One of the earliest intercom girlfriends actually subverts the trope. System Shock 2 paired you with Dr. Janice Polito. At first, she does everything right: saves you from a hull rupture, runs you through the tutorial, tells you what checkpoints to hit. But partway through, she turns out to be a mask for the villain, SHODAN.

This is such a classic twist that it’s reused almost beat for beat in BioShock, which takes the unusual step of giving you an intercom boyfriend: Atlas, later revealed as Fontaine.

Most of the time, though, your girl’s faithful through thick and thin. Sure, she’ll static out a couple times, and in some games her advice is more annoying than helpful, but her heart’s in the right place and her voice is in your ear.

Truth is, we need her. As game set pieces become faster paced and more visually complex, we need that voice from the heavens to help us find the next switch to flip, the next wall to blow up.  I said it before: she’s half character, half interface, and that’s a necessary role.

In the process, though, she’s become the most common female character in video games, more ubiquitous than the battle babe or the damsel in distress. She’s not a “strong” female character, really, but she gets excused from most of the bullshit strong or weak characters get subjected to.

So tonight, wherever you are, raise your glass and set a drink aside. Let’s celebrate the intercom girlfriend in all our lives.

Splinter Cell: Conviction

So, my housemate, Orrin, played through the demo of Rich Dansky‘s Tom Clancy‘s Splinter Cell: Conviction. For the moment, her observations hold more water than mine, but just watching her, I could see the writing on the wall. For her, it was all stuff like “INFILTRATE THE MANSION,” but for me, it was “POST MORE ON ENVIRONMENTAL NARRATIVE.”

Because this is something that’s worth talking about. You’ve got all this crap that’s going on inside the head of the character, and all this crap going on inside the UI (or on the character sheet) of the player. Generally, though, the environment doesn’t reflect any of this. If you’re lucky, you get some post-processing shaders to put everything in stoner blur (or the GM narration equivalent) when you’re dazed.

If you’re really lucky, you get one of those entire maps where you’re crazy, like in BioShock 2 or Velvet Assassin.¹

Heads, HUDs, and types of action

Video games have been trying to push character and game state information into the 3d environment for a while. Dead Space and Ghostbusters both replace classic interface elements with animations on your character.[3. Arguably, World of Warcraft does this with its various floating punctuation marks. I think that's an in-between case, myself. I'd love to see an MMO push character-mind stuff into the environment, though.] The reduced screen clutter is supposed to immerse you more in our friend the environment.

Does it? I think it worked a little in Dead Space, but thought it was almost irrelevant in Ghostbusters. Seeing the character state on the character looked great, but it didn’t make me feel like there was any kind of focus on him or his world. It wasn’t his story, it belonged to the actual Ghostbusters, and that was okay. The game also did a good job of conjuring the environments from the first film, but didn’t share that film’s gift for evoking 1980s New York.²

And the environment in Dead Space was an impressively rendered rehash of other games, kinda like every half-decent remake of Aliens. Focusing on it more didn’t really do anything for me.

Splinter Cell, though, is taking one of my own personal demons (quest text) and marrying it to one of my personal fascinations (the dungeon, or, if you must, the level). Your environment doesn’t just tell you what you have to do… the tooltips for climbing and sneaking and peaking and all are projected into the environment, too.

In other words, the game takes a somewhat new approach to two things:

• Required action (Infiltrate the Mansion)
• Potential action (Jump on this crate)

You find yourself looking into the environment for your goals and opportunities. Will Hindmarch says:

Conviction is all about putting you into the head of Sam Fisher, more so than his body. The game projects his thoughts onto the walls and surfaces of the game world, turning literal space into a figurative, psychological terrain at the same time.

That’s particularly interesting to me, because I think that the dungeon (electronic or imagined) is a landscape of psychological terrain.

The Dungeon as Psychological Projection

Conan beneath the Scarlet Citadel

Sometimes, that terrain is the designer’s headspace.³

Sometimes, it’s the hero’s. If you look at Quarmall, ⁴ or the Scarlet Citadel,⁵ you see environments that reveal the essential qualities of the characters therein.

The Scarlet Citadel reveals almost only what Conan brings in: old grudges, bold action, murderous ferocity, and a canny mind ready to exploit any weakness. And, yes, he fights a giant snake. Says it all, really.

Quarmall is more your “ecosystem” dungeon, with its giant slaves bred to pump the ventillation system, its halves controlled by warring princes, and ruling over all, its withered wizard-king. Here the Gray Mouser encounters charlatan wizards, and Fafhrd muscle-brained fools — both things they’ve been accused of being themselves.

Each also finds opportunities to showcase his most conspicuous qualities. The Mouser abducts a girl and attempts a spell, Fafhrd finds his romantic inclinations overwhelming his better judgment.⁶ And, of course, traversing the dungeons levels leads the two to reunite and perpetrate one of their own greatest scams.

So, if the dungeon is, in part, a projection of the hero who enters it⁷, is that something to consciously model in roleplaying games? It’s not hard to envision a mechanism for doing so, something like 3:16‘s flashbacks, only projecting into the environment, rather than exclusively the hero’s own past.

If I’m a little suspicious of the idea in a roleplaying game, I’m even more suspicious when it comes to MMOs. Do designers even have the right to tell a player what’s going on in their character’s heads? I’ve been told that an exclamation point is already a bridge too far. Should the character even be acknowledged as someone psychologically separate from the player, or is that just a legacy inherited from other sorts of games?

And if we’re facing the death of the character⁸, then is it acceptable to make psychological assumptions at all?

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