Heroic?

I feel like I let game characters down a lot of the time. In nearly every game I play, the character's motivations are not aligned with mine, which makes for a fair amount of cognitive dissonance within the game itself. This is all, of course, an over-complicated and wordy way of saying that I make game characters into total dicks. Here are some of the ways I have made characters act like dicks.

Example #1: Red Dead Redemption. Cutscene: John Marston steps off the train and saunters into a dusty Old West town, a grim look on his face. Gameplay: John Marston runs around chucking bottles at people, lassoing them to cactuses and shooting all the bottles behind the bar.

Example#2: Half Life 2. Gordon Freeman, survivor of Black Mesa and humanity's last hope mostly chooses to spend his time flinging old drinks cans at passers-by and playing on the swings.

Example #3: Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Adam Jensen is the gruff, no-nonsense, cybernetically enhanced head of security for futuristic human enhancement corporation Sarif Industries. After being augmented with devices he never asked for, he lets off steam by chucking vending machines at tramp's heads, squatting in air vents shooting guard's kneecaps and positioning knocked out guards in compromising positions in public bathrooms.

Of course, the worst offender for this kind of cognitive dissonance has to be GTA IV. Theres a mission about three quarters through the game in which Niko Bellic chases down an old friend he knew from the war in Eastern Europe, culminating in a Tough Moral Choice(TM). Should you let revenge take over and kill this gentleman, or will you walk away and let him live? The problem is, I had run over about eighty people on my way to this mission and also shotgunned another five while walking around the area - I don't really think Niko would have had any problem popping a cap in this fool too. Games need to realise that their unique position of offering player choice means that they cannot work as well with traditional narratives or characters. The only game where this has worked, in my opinion, was Saints Row 2, seeing as your (fully customisable) character was an unremitting psychopath anyway, so it feels right to run down the street naked, wildly swing a chainsaw!

Maybe some day, games will realise their unique position as interactive narrative devices and allow for player actions to influence a story in any direction, but until that day I will carry on playing these dudes as absolute douchebags. Because it is empirically funny.