Make a Plan! Stick to the Plan!
It's time to make a plan. Based on what I was thinking about last time a rough plan of the forthcoming project might look like this:
The PlanDoesn't seem so daunting laid out all simplified like that, does it? Let's break it down and see how much it really might be:
Finally, something creative to do.
We've got a bunch of Marines holed up in a bunker waiting for a dropship to pick them up. Here they are. We can probably make the wait more interesting by introducing a little opposition. Let's say that the Marines are being chased across the surface of the planet by a superior force. Basically they're on the run, having lost in battle their situation was made much worse by getting cut off from the main retreat. Tired and beat-up they reach the temporary safety of a previously prepared fortification and manage to contact their support ship for a pickup. The support ship acknowleges their request and assures them that help is on the way but they are going to have to hold out until a dropship becomes available as they have their hands full pulling the main force off-planet. The Marines dig in and start watching the clock.
Hmm, alright I suppose, but could probably do with livening up a bit. Let's open Creating Emotion in Games (David Freeman, published by New Riders, remember?) and see what advice he can offer us on improving the basic premise. According to Freeman our Marines are part of a Group (note capitalisation), the Group called Space Marines. OK. There are two immediate things we can consider doing with a Group in the context of this backstory, the first is a chapter called Group Interesting Techniques, the second is an adjacent chapter called Group Deepening Techniques. I must admit that I find it quite hard to reconcile Freeman's distinctions between what is Interesting and what is Deepening and he even admits in the text that there is plenty of blurring of the lines. He also says the blurring doesn't bother him.
The Group Interesting Techniques chapter opens with Star Trek's Klingons as an example. Groups, he says, possess Traits and he proceeds to list the Traits depicted of Klingons. He says that Groups that have Too Few, sorry, too few Traits can be boring as are those Groups that have Trait combinations that we consumers of the media have seen too often i.e. cliched.
Looking beyond the fetish for capital letters and overlooking what the actual definitions of Groups and Traits are I can hold my hand up and say that so far I haven't really thought about any group aspects of my newly-formed band of Space Marines. Because I've used the Group that came with the game I've subconsciously taken it for granted that everybody is going to know exactly what Space Marines are about, i.e. running around, shooting shit up and shouting. Actually, I've accepted the cliche as a shortcut to get to the good stuff and totally fallen into the trap that Freeman seems to be warning about. Hmm.
The Unreal team really didn't go into any more detail than that when they were defining their Space Marines (oh yeah, now it's THEIR Space Marines). So let's imagine a few other traits we can bring in to make them more Group Interesting.
Marines, now then, they are honourable, they are brave, they are well-trained, they are, er, they are The Few! They are the...
This isn't working. How about Marines that are deeply religious? Maybe they follow some kind of cult and worship their machines of war as totems of some all-powerful Emporer-God that feasts on the psychic essences of... no wait, that sounds familiar...
How about a unit of Marines that are entirely gay? Tempting, but then again I don't think I could effectively pull that ... er, portray that convincingly.
The underlying problem with this is that if our potential player has played the original game then he's going have a firm idea of what these character models are about, seeing as a lot of time is spent in their company. We probably need to look further afield.
The two other major human groups in Unreal II are mercenary units. Two great multi-mega-monster corporations have an interest in the artifacts of the original plotline and send their respective armed forces in to acquire them. The Izanagi Corporation employ the exclusively Japanese and Samurai-like Ghost Warriors and the Liandri Corporation employ the exclusively female and 'modified' Liandri Angels. There are just as many character models for those two forces as there are for the Marines and come with pre-prepared Group Interesting Techniques.
The Samurai thing seems a little too obvious for the main group but they'll do for the opposing force and MY GOD, why didn't I think of it before? The Liandri Angels! An all-female fighting unit! With 'modifications'!
In the actual game the Angels are no more interesting than the rest of the endless ranks of cannon fodder that comes marching towards you to die in droves. I admit it was mildy disconcerting for a moment to hear them scream 'nooooo!' in anguish when one of their comrades fell in battle but the repeated sample soon wears thin. Turn the tables and have the player (who is, let's face it, nine times out of ten going to be male, it is a shooter after all) commanded by and commanding a unit of women and we might be able to shake some of the rust off this crusty old paradigm.
It brings to mind Book 3 of Alan Moore's Ballad of Halo Jones, in fact, still one of my favourite comic stories of all time. Moore had his female protagonist join an all female military unit and used the futuristic juxtapostion to raise all kinds of interesting points. Not that I'd aspire to reach those heights within the scope of this little experiment of course, but it's an interesting precedent. At the time the Ballad was first published, comic books were at a similar stage of maturity to videogames now and it was only people like Moore stretching at the elastic boundary that they became the accepted form they are today. I think. Somebody will jump on me if I'm wrong about that.
So our band of sisters are a unit of Liandri Angels, sent in by the Liandri Corporation to perform a 'hostile takeover' of an Izanagi Corporation mining facility. The operation has gone badly wrong and Angel-Two-Five-Zero have run overland until they can't run any more. The foxhole provides them with shelter while they wait for a pickup and the Ghost Warriors are bearing down on them. Can they hold out long enough for the dropship to arrive and carry them to safety?
I'm interested by the other Traits kindly provided by the Unreal II team. Firstly, the idea that our girls have been 'modified', maybe genetically, maybe cybernetically, maybe both. Liandri Corporation is an industrial concern and a business, they mine their own raw materials, design their own products, manufacture them in their own facilities and ship them to markets all over the galaxy (I just decided). If they're anything like the corporations I'm familiar with then they are run by a small cadre of elite executives at the top, for whom the spreadsheet is the litany and their god is the Bottom Line. Let's say that in the Unreal future that training people how to be soldiers is old hat. It's inefficient, inaccurate, hard to measure and frankly just doesn't stand up to the cost-benefit analysis. No, Liandri doesn't believe in teaching soldiers, Liandri believes in manufacturing them. All kinds of girls come to join the Angels, some because they want excitement and adventure, some because they get great pay compared to local work, some because they believe in the Liandri marketing machine that stirs the outer worlds into a frenzy with it's promises of a New Life and a Better Life through the Marvel of Liandri Products(tm).
Liandri accepts them all, because Liandri Products can Make a Soldier Out of Anyone(tm). Occular implants improve targetting ability, artificial sinews and reinforced bones mean the Angels run faster and jump higher and cortical brain enhancements mean no more endless hours practicing on the firing range, you'll be able to field-strip, clean, reasemble and shoot an assault rifle with the best of them just as soon as the scars heal.
But because Liandri never look further than the bottom line they forget about the psychology of the soldier. It can't be measured on a pie-chart so they're blind to its existence. Some of these girls just weren't born to be fighters and in the high-pressure environment of the battlezone, sometimes the cracks begin to show. The implants and the gene-therapy keeps them fighting and as long as there are more naive women in the recruitment queues to replace the fallen ones why should the execs at Liandri care?
There a couple of holes in that, but I think it's an improvement on the pale skeleton I started with. Hmm, maybe there's something to Freeman's Emotioneering, after all.
More fleshing out of The Plan next time.
Comments: on the _blackbored