Universe of Possibilities

Captain America: Definition of a Hero

2007-03-09T00:41:00.000-08:00

I'm tentatively planning to keep to a format of analyzing a different Marvel Comics property (hero, villain, team, race, event, or even location) each week to explore the drama, excitement, and questions it raises and examine how those features might be put into the context of Marvel Universe, the game.

If anyone does end up reading this, I'd love suggestions on who or what to cover next. To begin though, I think it's only fitting to focus on one of the biggest things that may be missing (and missed) in the MUOnline, Captain America himself.

From start to finish, Captain America's life serves as the model for heroism in the Marvel Universe and is the standard against which heroes will forever be judged. Steve Rogers manages to be a perfectly good guy without being a perfect good guy like Superman, for instance. In the Superman continuity, everything from why he can fly to why the sky is blue is a direct cause of the fact that Superman is perfect (I don't mean this as a criticism, this adds a degree of security knowing a hero is almost God-like that is evident in the most recent Superman film). In contrast, Cap is made perfect through everything he does. Even his failures at saving people and his mistakes (such as in Civil War) are made with the best of intentions.

Communicating this into game form may be a tremendous task, as intentions can't be dissected easily into variables a computer can interpret. The simplest way to facilitate this is to simply make sure there are no shortage of tough decisions and that some missions have multiple endings, all or none of which may be considered "success". If a quest leads to a villain needing one member of the team as a hostage, the correct decision may be to give them either the weakest or strongest member of the team (depending on your strategy), but the leader who sees no other option than themselves being in danger ahead of their comrades sends a real message to those who rely on him (and it doesn't require much work on the programmer's part either!). This is the perfect example of letting what makes your character a hero be more than just their powers and abilities.

Speaking of powers, do we really need them? OK, yes obviously for a super hero game you need super powers, but let's remember that the Super Soldier Serum only enhanced Cap to the peek of human ability, so technically he couldn't the hit super-human levels that were so common amongst his peers. Captain Was all about skill, courage, and enough determination to overcome any obstacle (Read Cap vs Korvac to see what I mean, Captain America vol. 3 #18 if I remember correctly). In him is the essence of a true hero: the soldier who goes to war so others may live in peace, the firefighter that runs into a burning building despite the dangers they face, the thankless police officer dealing with the darker sides of our cities and lives when no one else will.

Because of this, Cryptic may need to put more thought into what to do with under-powered heroes than over-powered ones. In clarifying what types of heroes can have what abilities, there needs to be adequate room for someone who's only human to reach the peek of human potential and to really be able to make a difference without powers. They may want to use another hero as a model: the Night Nurse (for those of you who don't know, she's a doctor that patches up heroes that need their identity kept secret and therefore can't go into a regular hospital). She's totally human and still plays one of the most important rolls in Marvel's New York. If Cryptic can make a game that can include a character like her, then it has earned my complete respect for it is in these characters' frailties that we truly see their strengths

There may be no better example of this principal than that of the hero's sacrifice. Captain America serves as an example of sacrifice on every level. From giving the only thing he could to his country by donating himself to a science experiment, to leading soldiers into battle in WWII, to giving up any hope for obscurity upon entering an unfamiliar age to lead the avengers, to sacrificing his personal love multiple times for his responsibilities, to even sacrificing the title of Captain America when he was forced to part ways with the government. And of course he was always willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. He's a perfect example of being willing to die for your beliefs, but moreover, living for them until they reach fruition.

This is a similar issue to making intentions matter, as I've touched on above, buy it's much more simple to implement. It just takes a very difficult choice. To be able to sacrifice, you must be able to loose. So where, then, are we to draw the line at what can be lost. And when I say lost I mean permanently (heroically falling in battle doesn't mean much in a game where you'll just respawn in 30 seconds). The question of sacrifice stems from the question of mortality that all MMORPGs must face, tasked with punishing you adequately for failure/death but still not making it so harsh as to deter players from taking any risk. To fit our Captain America (and indeed our Marvel Comics) model, we must look at this differently. A binary outcome of success or failure poorly fits most action in the marvel universe. Simple robberies can be handled this way, but more complex missions need to have multiple outcomes and not all of them favorable. What should happen when a hostage is killed? A psychological debuff? And what limits do you put on what a character can sacrifice to save the day? A favored weapon being permanently lost, loss of powers for long periods of time, and intense physical damage requiring hours (in game) of therapy to recover to full strength are all examples we can find in Captain America's life.

And Cap's life is all about examples. The instant you see the shield, you know who he is. From armies of Nazis, to omnipotent enemies, to rouge heroes and impostors, if you see the red, white and blue, you're already lost. Because Cap stands for the other red, white, and blue, he represents something unbeatable. Even in his recent demise, the fallout and people who will follow in his footsteps are vast, and it's only a matter of time before someone else takes up the mantle. This is what every comic reader really dreams of. Not so much the ultimate powers and freedom of a superhuman, but the power and freedom that come with the respect of an entire world of friends and foes alike.

Congratulations Cryptic, you have an easy one on your hands! Since respect has nothing to do with code or stats, you just have to go slightly beyond the average game (which only uses level and bureaucracy to determine status). In fact, you don't even have to be original, steal a promise from the Matrix Online, and encourage not only fanpages, but in-character blogs, newspapers, and webcast radio stations. When a hero or group is doing particularly well, send a notable character to ask them for help or even just chat and leak some screenshots to those groups. The next big conflict in the Marvel Universe give early notice to key players or major team leaders from a big time hero that would appeal to them, encouraging them to become a source of information in the game world. The real king-maker is for mega-events (say, the next time Galactus rolls into town) the player or team that delivers the final blow, collects the most whatever, or otherwise is the MVP, gets featured along side prominent heroes/villains in the next cinematic. If a player gets that coveted role, they're sure to receive notoriety of a kind no other MMORPG can really offer (MxO never fully delivered on their promise to do this).

That kind of fame is what has allowed Captain America to be so recognizable in the Marvel Universe. Where as Superman is the biggest power player in DC due to his strength and role in near everything, Captain America is the most influential hero in Marvel due to what he represents. Wolverine fought beside him in the second world war and learned true honor from a western force for the first time. Spider-Man's reason for becoming a modest, symbolic guardian instead of a jaded, ruthless avenger was at least in part from his modeling himself after Captain America. Countless others from the temporary Captain Americas to U.S. Agent to Jack Flag to the Winter Soldier have sought to emulate him in one form or another. And the Captain rarely disappoints, proving every bit as legendary as heroes and villains expect when they fight with or beside him. These facts have allowed Cap to become a staple and a leader of any group he joins, be it disparate opposites such as the Invaders, criminal minds like those of The Redeemers, or immediately commanding the respect and loyalty of earth's mightiest heroes, the Avengers.

We've talked about how to facilitate gaining fame amongst ones peers, but what about after you're the person heroes tell stories about on stakeouts? Well then it's time to live up to your name! To do this, heroes should have easy ways to team up and switch teams and organizations if necessary. If you're the new equivalent of the Young Avengers and your hero walks through the door to lead you, you're not going to want to say no due to some game technicality.

All of this comes down to understanding who this world will be made up of. Even if there are characters with small rolls such as a police officer or a fire fighter, they'll be made of the stuff of heroes (see Punisher: War Journal v2 #5 on sale now to see what I mean). In Civil War: Frontline #11, reporter Sally Floyd pointed out that Captain America and the ideal of the United States was outdated because the real America was about high cholesterol, stupid videos on Youtube, and scheming your way to the top; that it "treats its celebrities like royalty and its teachers like dirt"; in short, that it was nowhere near the paradise the heroes claimed to be defending and she resented them because they held so much power over her.

In a sense she was right, we live in a world where we are all, in some ways, relatively powerless and in others so comfortable as to be complacent. Most of our lives are not threatened frequently in ways we're aware of. We go to war and the majority of us can just as easily forget by changing the channel on the TV as if the outside world was only there for our amusement. Because of this, most media are simply recreation, like the movies that kill at the box office because they spent all their money on enough effects to forget that it could have been written by a second grader. But once in a while, there's something special, a book or movie or even a comic book or game that touches something in us. It separates us from our insecurities and complacency and allows us to see ourselves as we would choose to be in our wildest dreams and darkest fantasies. This game must be more than a city of heroes and villains, it must allow for individuals to express the complexities of themselves as icons, willing to fight and die at a moments notice for their beliefs and desires and loyalties. If it hopes to hold the interest and hearts of Marvel fans, this can not be of Sally Floyd's America, nor our own. If this game is to be more than just an escape, but truly worth spending time and money on, it has to be something more.

It has to be the Captain's America.

What makes a Hero?

2007-03-08T23:13:00.000-08:00

I'm a total comic geek. The most obvious evidence of this fact is that I have a tendency to read too much them. Relax, I'm not jumping out of any windows yelling "up, up, and away!" (though I've never really liked Superman anyway). I mean that I see the ideas, stories, and possibilities in them. Majoring in philosophy won't grant you much (like, say, future job prospects) but it will teach you to analyze everything, and I find myself dissecting my favorite comics with the same fervor as I would a piece of classical literature or the current political climate.

I'm also a gamer. I'm not a great one in terms of ability, I'll admit. But I like to think that what I lack in skill, I make up for in depth. I'll play a game repeatedly until I've explored every conceivable outcome (you don't want to know how many times I've played Fable). I'll mod games in what little spare time I have. Hell, I've made a few extra characters for Marvel Ultimate Alliance and my current computer won't even run the game.

So naturally, I found myself thrilled about the new MMORPG based on the mainstream Marvel Comics property that is Earth 616, and being made be a veteran team, Cryptic Studios. My mind reeled with the possibilities. This excitement slowly dwindled as I talked with some of my friends of similar interests. Most of my friends into comics were only concerned with how much it would cost and if they could play as their favorite hero. Most of my gaming friends thought they knew exactly how the mechanics of the game should work and expressed the large disappointment they'd feel if Cryptic didn't adopt their personal model to the letter. I thought they were missing the point.

Beyond money and mechanics, there's something much more important that Cryptic has to keep in mind here: with the Marvel property, this needs to be more than just Massively Multiplayer, it needs to be a real RPG.

What I mean is that this is more than just a bunch of gamers, this is a chance to tap into a group of people that regularly loose themselves in immersive stories and media. The internet constantly proves that you need no more than free exchange of ideas to form a community and that's just what I suggest this be. Marvel has always been about more than just super-beings bashing each other, and Cryptic needs to capture that. You don't need flashy graphics or gameplay to get into a world like this, fans have been doing it with pen and paper for decades now. We just need it to be good enough to make it feel real and to have enough freedom and interaction to really put us in the Marvel Universe.

Sure it'd be cool to collect every power out there and be able to take on any obstacle that comes your way, but if you want that, go play Superman in DC's universe. This is the universe of Spider-Man and painful choices, of the X-Men and families forged through common dreams, of the Fantastic Four and facing challenges you can't take on alone.

I, for one, don't think players should be able to play major characters. It would only cheapen them. We have Marvel Ultimate Alliance for that and as fun as it is, you're never surprised that Iron Man is actually fighting beside you, because you know it's just the computer or your friend. I'd rather have an experience like the early Matrix Online where one person played Morpheus and Seraph, and if you were good enough and lucky enough, you might just meet them. Imagine actually going toe-to-toe with the one and only Red Skull, and at the last second, being saved by Captain America, rallying your team and pulling together to beat him. Would his death have actually meant anything if the last time you saw him, he was being controlled by a preteen shouting "4V3/V63|25 4553|V||3|_3!!!!11111"?

Players could easily make new characters that fit into Marvel Continuity. The comics refer to countless meta-humans that have never actually shown up, most recently shown by Iron Man and Black Panther's call to gather them across the United States and Africa. 100 Thousand new heroes in a world of over 2 billion people might mean something in the real world, but in a comic universe, it's a blip on the radar.

I'm not saying the game shouldn't look good, they should make it look as good as they possibly can, or that mechanics don't matter, they could really do something truly revolutionary with the gameplay. All I'm saying is that it's more important that they capture the tone of the comics beyond the trite stereotype of City of Heroes/Villains. Marvel Comics regularly address major issues both real and fantastic and can offer a virtual world that does the same in a way no other MMORPG could. Anyone can make a good game, but make a place where the next time a Registration Act size issue shakes up the world you're forced to choose a side and fight your friends, where you can be a Villain infiltrating a group of heroes for months and you really have to choose whether to follow your plan to betray them or not, where you have to make a choice between saving the person you love or a huge group of hostages, then you have more than a game, you have a chance to experience the Marvel Universe.

Using this opinion as a starting point, I've decided to use this as a vehicle to vent my own creative build-up and formulate my ideas. If people respond to those ideas or contribute their own, that'd be great. If a group is formed that is actually large enough to have a voice that will reach Cryptic's ears, all the better. To this end, I'll constrain myself to suggestions that can be adopted in most any engine to keep from pissing the game-programmers off by telling them how to do their jobs. I'll also keep this tied into this narrow piece of subject matter (avoiding any tempting comic/game critiques or the occasional lapse into political commentary) to avoid pissing off anyone who happens to read it.

And as we've learned time and time again from villains, the ranting helps fill the time until the heroes (in this case an entire universe of them) finally arrive to silence you.