Episode 25 – Villainous Villains

What makes a good Villain? In movies some of the best Villains have been the ones whose faces we never see. Dehumanizing them by not showing their faces they can be more ruthless than a regular human being. The same with villains that are aliens and robots, there is no shred of humanity there and we can instantly hate them. The best example of this, of course, is Darth Vader. Adding to dehumanization is shrouding the villain in mystery. If we don’t know why he is doing such evil deeds there is no way for us to identify with him.

I’m not saying this is the only route to go, but it is one that has proven to be successful in cinema.

The same has worked in videogames. Faceless, nameless robot aliens have scared the crap out of us game in, and game out. Still, no villain in games ever had the kind of effect on people as movie villains. Movie villains stick with us well after a film has gone while game villains seem to plague us only until we’re done with a game. Then we move on to something else.

Having already said that videogames better immerse you in a story than a movie, why have there been no absolutely spectacular villains that haunt the dreams of children all over the world?

There are some very good villains in video games in all different varieties. Tricky robot guys, aliens, zombies, (and zombie aliens in Halo) and goombas. But these are your run of the mill bad guys and you see hundreds of them during the game. For something truly memorable, and villainous you need to an end boss. That’s where everything gets crazy.

Those boss battles are something everyone knows and loves. It usually means the skills you have mastered and items you have collected to this point will truly be tested. It is what defines games as epic. And it’s usually a while in between bosses.

But maybe that’s the problem right there. The greatest bosses and videogame villains only make on screen appearances for very short amounts of time, while movie villains take center stage and cause trouble directly to our hero throughout the film.

In Star Wars we see Darth Vader right in the beginning of the movie. He steels the princess and keeps her in his castle… er… Space Station. He strangles a general, tortures women, kills an old man, shoots down good guys ships. He basically wreaks havoc for the whole film.

I guess because we play/follow one character for the entire story there is no way of showing how bad ass the villain is unless he is doing direct harm to us. Instead we get references to this final bad guy, or we get a small video of him doing something, but he’s always just out of our reach. And he never really does anything really memorable, like in the movies.

Nintendo has some villains that are well known among the gaming community, but only because the franchise has been around for 20 odd years and we see those villains over and over again. I doubt a person on the street could identify a picture of Ganon (or Ganondorf) from Legend of Zelda.

Yet people who have never even seen a Friday the 13th movie, know exactly who Jason is, and what he looks like.