To start off lightly:
But this raises a good point: heroes in most games are mostly jerks…
They scrounge along the possessions of people while they’re home and take what they want! While some games penalize this sort of behavior (by not allowing players to do it, or only certain classes), most games are happy with this loot whoring!
And this is not the only instance of heroes being jerks… For example, think of the multi-character games (Baldur’s Gate, for example), where you could breeze through the game only worrying to gear up the main character and just passing the leftover pieces to the other members… and none of them got pissed and left! It’s funny to think that in MMORPGs, you have to devise pretty complex loot distribution systems so that it is more fair… would be fun a single-player game where players other than your main character could also try to get the loot for themselves, instead of defering to the great hero…
Another example is a kill X of Y quests in most RPGs (especially MMORPGs)… in World of Warcraft, for example, you get a quest where you have to kill some Murlocs because they’re being riled by an evil sorcerer… why not just kill the sorcerer?! Oh, wait, you get that quest later, but in the meantime you were a genocidal maniac just killing people because they were of a different, hardly-sentient race!
I’m not saying that games shouldn’t have these kind of quests, but make it a moral quandary… give the player the oportunity to not outright slay everything in sight and get different rewards according to the path… Is this boring for most players? Ok, how about we just kill really evil things, instead of this grey moral ground? Or give some penalty to allignment, which influences what you can or cannot use… Would love to see that kind of feature in WoW, to be honest…
I know it’s harder on the devs, requires much more game design, but it would definately be interesting…
In most RPGs, heroes are made out to be saviors of all that’s good, veritable paragons of virtue; and yet, they are probably responsible for more death than the evil dark lord they’re trying to dethrone… but that’s allright, ‘cos most bad guys are evil because they do evil stuff to innocents…
And hence we come to the crux of the issue: in games, the end justifies the means, which if you think carefully enough, is the reason while most people think violent videogames are the worst thing in the world… While in most movies (the competing media for “Worst Thing In The World”), when the character does something “wrong”, it gets to struggle with it for the whole duration of the film, on videogames, the character is you… so, ideally, you would struggle with the decisions you make… but the decision you made wasn’t to go postal on evil-controlled race, it was in fact to use your pixels to hit the other pixels, until the other pixels wielded more pixels and you ran away happy…
There is no correlation between what you do in the game and the real life parallels (and that’s why that the relations between game violence and real violence are completely blown out of proportion!): if you would feel in the game that you were indeed “killing” something/someone, you would generate an empathic relation that would make you struggle with yourself, negating the positive feeling you get with the “quest achieved”… If that wouldn’t happen, congratulations, you’re a sociopath and if games don’t send you over the edge, probably the wrong type of cereal will!
Games nowadays struggle hard with graphical, audio and physics realism, but they still shy away from the really though concepts of game designing for realism… yes, I know magic doesn’t exist, but I’m willing to suspend my desbelief for that… what I’m less inclined to do is to suspend my realism on what I’m supposed to achieve in the game by my victory!
Of course, this doesn’t apply to the oh-so-popular anti-hero player character, that isn’t a clear-cut good guy as most RPGs have… these are a whole new level, and they’re much harder to create as believable characters, in my opinion.
At the end of the day, heroes are indeed jerks… jerks on a mission, but nevertheless jerks…
Changing topics, went yesterday to see “Star Wars in Concert”… and it was frikkin’ awesome… John Williams might not be the most original guy in the world (just check out the soundtracks for Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones and Harry Potter… they have the same elements), but when it comes to creating movie anthems, he’s probably the best in the world in what he does… His sense of melody and grandeur is just breathtaking, and listening an orchestra playing this live just adds to the sense of awe…
To finalize, the dutch metal band Epica doing a cover of the Imperial March (also awesome live, I’ve seen it, yay!):