The Great Escape

An excerpt from a press release about new survival horror title Deadly Premonition:

“Deadly Premonition puts players in the role of the intuitive FBI Agent Francis York Morgan. In the process of investigating a murder, players will examine a series of interlocking mysteries in a remote rural town and will encounter an array of complex characters pivotal to the unraveling of the storyline's mystery.”

An excerpt from a press release about new survival horror title I’m Not Alone:

“In the role of a bold exorcist the player travels to the Austrian mountains to free an old mansion house from the grips of a supernatural power. On location he has to face sheer horror. Disfigured demons have risen from the underworld and spread fear and terror. Now it is the task of the player to put an end to the sinister occurrences.”

So what’s the problem, you ask? Well, the problem - or at least what I perceive to be the problem – is this: “remote rural town” and “old mansion house.” Hardly the most imaginative settings for survival horror titles are they? Do you think the rural town might be a bit foggy? And sparsely populated? Will there be a badly lit cellar in the mansion? Or the odd secret passage?

Yes, this week it’s gaming clichés  or, more specifically, environmental clichés. No, I’m not talking about Sting but rather the way in which game developers use the same hackneyed tools when creating their game worlds. The excerpts above are great examples of how we’re still mining away at the same coalface over ten years on from Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Of course, these clichés aren’t limited to the survival horror genre. Another main offender is the first person shooter. Now, anyone who’s played just five minutes of a first person shooter in their entire lifetime will have encountered a cliché. The exploding barrel is the most infamous, and enduring, still appearing with tedious regularity in almost every shooter. We can only imagine bad guys don’t attend the health and safety seminars too frequently because they do like to gather in numbers around the highly explosive and CLEARLY MARKED barrels of fiery doom. Perhaps being a henchman in an evil organization requires a laissez-faire attitude to personal safety or an unlikely combination of colour-blindness and illiteracy.  

If there’s one thing that appears more in shooters than the barrel, however, it’s the warehouse. Yes, for many years now the warehouse has mystifyingly been the setting of choice for many a gunfight, offering as it does a wealth of brown-looking things to please the discerning eye of the gamer. What’s most obvious about the overuse of the warehouse is that it’s clear most devs have never been in one. I’m still waiting to see an accurate warehouse in a game; one which echoes with reactionary right wing opinion and is generously decorated with pornography.

Other settings have become almost as common as the warehouse. The train yard is another popular venue for a gunfight as is the abandoned office but, without a doubt, the most en vogue is the futuristic, post apocalyptic wasteland. Offering a wondrous kaleidoscope of grey, the post-apocalyptic wasteland is almost as visually thrilling as the warehouse, providing a great escape from real life. And that’s my point; games are an opportunity to escape - they offer us the freedom to go anywhere. I live in England. If I want to wander around a grey, depressing wasteland populated almost exclusively by strange, threatening beasts I can just open my front door and go outside. I want to escape and, to be honest, if given the choice of venue I wouldn’t opt for the warehouse. Or the office. Or the war-ravaged dystopia. Imagine you were given the choice to go anywhere in the world, right now for absolutely no cost. And you chose Hull.

That’s not to say that some devs don’t get it right, however. Sometimes, they realize that the setting can be as much of a character as the protagonist. Crytek’s Far Cry is a prime example, using a stunning, tropical paradise as the backdrop and it’s impossible not to be impressed the first time you catch a glimpse of its vibrant panoramas. Oblivion did the same for the RPG, Mirror’s Edge proved that a futuristic dystopia can be all kinds of pretty and, most recently, Uncharted 2’s treasure hunt took in some beautiful locales. We need more imagination in game settings and we need to make it clear that primary colours are not, in fact, the enemy. As Sting would say, “why does everyone despise me-” sorry, my bad - “spare a thought for the environment.”

Got any suggestions for more gaming cliches? Check out our forum thread on the topic.