‘KOTOR’ Conversations: On Video Game Narratives and KOTOR’S Big Twist
PART FOUR: ON VIDEO GAME NARRATIVES AND KOTOR’S BIG TWIST
AS: Okay, let’s talk about the actual game’s story. Because I want to try to put the most positive spin on it that I can. Because I think you can make a decent movie out of it.
JB: Oh, for sure. The Revan story is an excellent story. It’s one of the best in video games, you know.
AS: Well, I’m not even sure that I would say that. It’s a good story, but it’s very…there are elements that are very game-y. There is still this thing, with how game stories are viewed, and it’s weird because video games have for decades now had a ton of story.
JB: Yeah, the last 20 years or so they really stepped up.
AS: I feel like we used to have kind of heated arguments, on CHUD back in the day, about whether video games could be considered art.
JB: Yeah…(groans)
AS: To me, I always thought that was such a silly thing, because-
JB: It’s a written story!
AS: Yeah, that seems sort of self-evident to me. But also, the idea that to call something “art” is bestowing on it like, some sort of great blessing —
JB: (laughs)
AS: — or badge of quality? I’m like, no, things are art that are terrible. All over the place.
JB: Definitely.
AS: Music is art, but there are a ton of shitty, shitty songs out there. It doesn’t mean it’s not an art form. But there’s still, obviously, video game stories get graded on a curve because they sort of have to flow backwards from gameplay. In a lot of instances. Rather than from wherever people think pure expression should come from, theme or whatever.
JB: It’s almost like it’s its own artform, really. With its own constraints.
AS: Right. Haikus have their own arbitrary constraints. As an artform.
JB: Yes, but they are not externally imposed. By like, commercial restraints, the need to just move units…(laughs)
AS: To move as many haiku verses as possible, no. (Laughs) But especially with KOTOR and what I think of as the Bioware model, the storytelling is the gameplay, in a way. I call it that because they made, the Baldur’s Gate games, KOTOR and then Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
JB: Oh, I know Bioware well.
AS: It goes beyond them, I think they’re the best at it. But they aren’t the only ones doing it, I mean. This thing where there are a ton of different pathways and permutations the story can take, and the player ultimately decides what happens, which version of the story and what ending you wind up at.
JB: No, The Witcher is kind of eating their lunch a little.
AS: Yeah, even later period GTA games, or Red Dead Redemption.
JB: Definitely.
AS: Like, it’s still that branching narrative thing. The player is choosing what happens…you know, there are still rails, bounds you can’t go outside, which you start to see more clearly if you play it enough.
JB: I’m kind of waiting for the next one of those. Not like Red Dead, I’m sure the next of those is like 12 years from now, but…the next big kind of open world, Bioware style game? I’m kind of patiently waiting for something to scratch that itch.
AS: I don’t know why it can’t be Dragon Age 4…(sigh)
JB: Apparently it can’t. (chuckle)
AS: Or I am totally down for a sequel to Mass Effect: Andromeda. It’s not as good as the original games, but-
JB: Eh, I played it. I don’t hate it, but-
AS: Actually, Andromeda is sort of exactly what I am pitching here, when I think about it.
JB: Kinda. Mm-hmm.
AS: We’re going to keep all the ships, the alien races we’ve established, the general vibe, but we’re removing it to a completely different galaxy. So there’s no way we have to worry about impinging on, not touching or contradicting anything going on in the original series.
JB: Well, they ran into an issue, a narrative issues where that was kind of the only thing they could do, in a sense. Because they told a complete story.
AS: Which is remarkable in itself. In that medium. They really made it harder on themselves…to move more haiku units.
JB: Yes. But I think what that game shows is that you can run into problems with execution. But it’s also expectations, you know, if it’s not what the fanbase wants then they will reject it. When you do these adjunct things, this sort of sideverse, new continuity thing, if it doesn’t have enough of what they expect, they will just turn it off. And make angry videos about it on Youtube. (laughs)
AS: (groans) Oh god, the video recommendations on my youtube page are just full of whiny garbage. Even some stuff, like I was pretty harsh on some of these Star Wars movies-
JB: Yeah, but anyone can make a video, and like (laughs) we watched some video one time, and all of a sudden we just got flooded with like anti-feminism videos about, like Birds of Prey. (laughs)
AS: Oh yeah….okay, you mean Birds of Prey as in like the DC show, right?
JB: No, it’s the DC Harley Quinn movie.
AS: Oh. Oh yeah, right.
JB: That, like, weak men hated. (laughs) Because it existed, it was one of those things.
AS: Right, I’ve always been more of a Marvel nerd, so I didn’t like immediately… in my head, I thought of that one as just “the HARLEY QUINN MOVIE”, so I kind of forgot it was actually called Birds of Prey. (laughs) So my initial reaction was like, oh god, is “bird of prey” some kind of like, some horrible new vernacular that Men’s Rights Activists have come up with, to describe like…
JB: (laughs harder)
AS: …a woman with a library card, or…(trails off laughing)
JB: Oh, they have plenty of those terms. Red pills and Brads or whatever it is…
AS: Yeah, it’s like I watched one video that was critical of Force Awakens, and now Youtube is convinced that I just hate women.
JB: Yep, it’s an unfortunate algorithm. But more depressing is, there’s just thousands and thousands of those (videos). No shortage.
AS: Okay. Moving on to talking about the game storyline, which can maybe get me back to talking about hating women in a little bit…
JB: Oh. Great.
AS: So, as I see it, there are some potential problems that come from using a 20 year old game as your template. And the start of that is, okay, we talked about this being a prequel, but it’s not really bound up by the standard prequel nonsense. And there’s not even really a guarantee…I mean, this being Star Wars you kind of assume that the good guys are going to win, eventually. But there’s nothing to say, there’s no actual continuity reason why the Sith couldn’t conquer the entire galaxy in this era. Obviously it doesn’t stay conquered forever, but technically, you could keep that open as a possibility. At least a threat, that is slightly more credible in this distant era. Without needing to contort yourself with a No-Prize explanation for why no one ever mentioned it in the original series.
JB: It’s just a long time ago.
AS: That’s all the explanation you need. So then, I think it comes up that the plotting of video games tends to be very fetch-quest driven. And KOTOR is definitely like that. And it’s actually great, in terms of gameplay, because it sort of opens up the world of the game and lets you explore at your own pace, whatever order and direction that you want to. But so, it does that by basically just planting markers for you in various areas and then it’s up to you to go track down these items. And that is not the best way of plotting out a movie.
JB: No.
AS: However…Rise of Skywalker totally did this. (laughs)
JB: It does it entirely!
AS: It’s like 10x worse. Without even being made out of a video game?
JB: (laughs) Yep!
AS: (chuckles) So I guess that’s not a dealbreaker, for making a blockbuster movie? I mean, it was amazing how much it was just that.
JB: Yeah, well I think you’re right that you can’t just adapt KOTOR as the game is. Or you shouldn’t. Because then it is just, well here’s this world with a star map. And then tell a story on that world, which is its own contained thing. And then you go to this other world with a star map, and another and that’s not really how Star Wars movies work. At least not until the last one. Harry Potter kind of turned into that too, in the last one, come to think of it. But I mean, with the series of maps…I guess you could do like a 4 movie arc or something, but it wouldn’t really hold together.
AS: It does kind of, it makes for episodic storytelling, though. If you were to adapt it to TV, that looser series arc could sort of-
JB: That’s why I think Mass Effect could be an amazing television show. Because you could do it that way.
AS: And Star Wars even started the sort of serial thing of labeling itself with an episode number, even the first movie.
JB: What you could do, I think with Knights, is take some of the locations, and the characters and setpieces around them and sort of refashion them. Into something that resembled the old structure of going to 2 or 3 planets in a film.
AS: Well, I can tell you, years ago around when the game first came out, I was tinkering around, and I actually wrote treatments for a whole trilogy of movies. And I’m sure they can do better than what I came up with, because it probably wasn’t very good, but I think the basic skeleton that I settled on was functional enough. Where the first movie was all on Taris, and ends with the destroying that planet which is a big dramatic setpiece. And after that you start the jedi training process, which you can sort of skip over between episodes. And still including the star maps, but cutting out one of the 4 planets entirely, so you have the group split up and go track down two different maps during the movie, they meet back up, get captured and have the big reveal at the end of the second movie. Then open the third movie finding the last map on the last planet, and then do all the endgame stuff. That is kind of aping the Return of the Jedi structure, you open with the Jabba’s palace stuff, a more self-contained adventure in the first act. And I think as a general skeleton, I think that would be fine.
JB: It could be.
AS: You still have the map chasing element, the macguffins.
JB: It absolutely can work, it’s just a question of execution. If it’s properly done, the macguffin, the star map, it’s a reason to be there but it’s not what’s really going on, you know? It’s not the central thrust, which is the characters and all that. Especially after Rise of the Skywalker, and all the searching, for the Sith wayfinder or whatever…gosh, every time I think about that I go “well shit, that was dumb.”
AS: If I remember right, did the wayfinder…did they even need it at the end?
JB: I don’t know. It was a convenience, in some narrative sense. Who cares?
AS: It really doesn’t matter. The star maps are a particularly naked macguffin, which I think is more acceptable in a video game context.
JB: Yes.
AS: Because you just need to have objectives. And part of it is that, as a game, you want the player to feel more involved, to feel like they have more agency. And so the macguffins are fine, they set a waypoint and then how you get there is up to you. It makes you feel like you have a hand in creating the story as it unfolds. And I think that touches on the really difficult part, of adaptation, because a movie audience doesn’t really need that and can’t have it anyway. And then, the writing in KOTOR is really good writing, but in large part because it plays right into the video game nature. Like, the blank slate nature of the protagonist is not something that translates into movies. You need a strong personality as the anchor for a series of movies. But for the game, the whole idea is that it’s an empty vessel, that the player projects their personality onto.
JB: Any time a game pulls that off, it’s also the Bioshock thing, where it’s like “oh, the reason I’m a blank slate is because I’m actually this other thing, that is being withheld in some way from me.” When a game can thread that needle in a way that feels organic, I’m blow away.
AS: Yeah, maybe we should just establish exactly what the big twist is at this point. So, big giant spoilers, but you find out 2/3 of the way through the game that your blank-slate character you created, who found they were this prodigy of force powers, that kind of skipped through the jedi training process very quickly…and you accept that during the game, because you know you’re playing a game, and you want to get back to fighting monsters and aliens instead of stopping to like, do exercises and read books in the middle of it. And you understand the context of having an empty vessel at the start, so you can customize the look and gender what kind of weapons and abilities you specialize in, and so to give you the flexibility for all that stuff you have to start from a blank slate. And then of course you’re going to become a jedi because there wouldn’t be much point to playing Star Wars if you aren’t going to get a lightsaber and use the Force.
JB: Right.
AS: So that part comes pretty easy for you. But the game then flips all that on its head, by saying actually, you were the Emperor. That’s why you didn’t need much training, because you were already the big evil overlord, that Darth Vader turned against and overthrew, and everyone thinks you’re dead. But actually the jedi wiped your mind of memories, and are now trying to turn you against the Vader figure, to fight him now.
JB: But here’s another problem. Another thing that just occurs to me, when you say that. Is that much like the Sith wayfinders and all the star maps in Rise of the Skywalker…did they not also just kind of do a shitty version of the Revan story? With Rey in the new movies?
AS: Yeah, well —
JB: I mean, it’s kind of just a shittier, less stakes, less personal version of that.
AS: Yes, but this is what I’m getting to, though. And it will get me back to hating women.
JB: Okay. (laughs)
AS: Because one of the really cool things about that game twist, actually, is that it plays off of Star Wars, off Empire. And the original trilogy had one of, arguably the greatest twist of all time.
JB: Sure. The formative twist.
AS: “I am your father” is great in part because it wasn’t something, like a mystery that people were already trying to solve before they drop that on us. And maybe that’s not possible with this, in the modern world, at all, with the internet. But the neat thing was, the original story didn’t really need a twist to work, to make sense of anything, and so it was this added bonus that just blew people’s minds.
JB: Mm-hmm.
AS: But this, with KOTOR you can evoke that structurally. Where you have a big earth-shattering reveal in the confrontation with the Big Bad at the end of the second movie. It definitely evokes that, but with a different enough feeling, without just…like, redoing “I am your father” with “I am your grandfather” is just astonishingly dumb.
JB: (cackles maniacally)
AS: It’s like a Robot Chicken sketch.
JB: It was a Spaceballs bit! With “I am your father’s brother’s former roommate” or whatever.
AS: They did that. I can’t believe they went with that. They really did that. But okay, the other thing, this plot twist is based on amnesia. Which is something I really hate, actually.
JB: It also, at this point, is like a major red flag that big reveal is coming.
AS: Right, and it works in the context of the game, like I said. Because it asks you to kind of create your own backstory, and that is by necessity very vague. Like even the Mass Effect games, that came out after this and have a much more defined for the main character that you can kind of only steer in one of two basic directions. Shephard is a much more defined personality, but even then you chose between a couple of backstories that are one sentence long. That’s a staple of this genre, and you accept it and move on. They want what you are doing and deciding in the present to be the things that define the character, and the less specifics you are tied down to, the less it restricts player choice in the personality of the protagonist or style of play, whether you want to be a warrior or a healer or a stealth specialist or whatever. So you don’t ask questions about that, it’s not even that you know your character has amnesia before that twist drops. You just think that he has a vague backstory because he’s a video game character, and there are some obvious mechanical necessities behind that. And I think in a movie, there are ways of massaging that too. Like there are only going to be scenes of people sitting around discussing their childhood if you decide to put that in. If you have enough forward momentum, since you have an in media res opening to the game anyway, then people will not really have time to question “why doesn’t Revan ever talk about anything before the beginning of the movie?” Especially if none of the other characters are doing that either.
JB: Well, this is not unlike what they give you with Rey.
AS: Okay, and my big problem with Rey, and I think it sort of hobbled the entire trilogy they built around her, is that I think she is essentially a Mary Sue. And I hate using that term because it ruins my Youtube recommendations, I wish there was a non-gendered version of it.
JB: (sighs) Yeah.
AS: Because I think gender is entirely incidental to the underlying issue, which is just indulgence and fan service. And the movies really struggled, because JJ Abrams just wanted to give everyone that ice cream for breakfast, to give that character a reason for being and to establish why? Like, why is she so much more powerful than everyone else? And I think Rise really fails to elaborate on that, but even with that movie, you can sort of tell that it knows it’s necessary to put some kind of, attach some significance to it and put some kind of a darker spin on having easy access to all that power. It just doesn’t have the nerve to follow through with it. But it still has like the scene, where she accidentally kills Chewbacca. But doesn’t really, they immediately walk it back.
JB: Even Last Jedi is seeding that in, that there is a dark aspect to Rey. Which I guess is the Palpatine’s grandaughter thing, in the long run. But that’s not something that really shapes her personality or anything, the decisions she’s made. But the source of her power is tainted, in that way. In theory. Which is interesting, except now in hindsight it is apparent that it didn’t amount to anything. A character based shift or what have you.
AS: But even they realized, felt the need like, that they needed to do something with that. And putting a darker spin on it is something that would justify it to some extent, they just don’t follow through on it. Her being a Palpatine doesn’t present her with any real problem. It’s more just confusing than anything.
JB: But if she had ended up being Revan, or somebody, if she had been the one, the student that went rogue and killed all the jedi at Skywalker’s compound. Something like that, that may be too far, but it might have worked better. To do more with something like that.
AS: Well, that’s what I’m saying, with Revan you do get the darker twist on it. Because Revan is very much in the Mary Sue thing as well, you know. He’s the best at everything, he can fight and race hoverbikes and play the stupid little card game better than everyone. Because he’s a video game hero, and video games are the most indulgent artform there is.
JB: Yep.
AS: At their base-
JB: Eh…comic books, maybe. (laughs)
AS: They are power fantasies. Well, comic books, yeah. But even comic books don’t engage the audience as directly in that way, invite them to be the avatar.
JB: Right. Right.
AS: It’s more of a passive experience than an active one. Same with movies. But video games are power fantasies.
JB: Yeah, yeah. GTA, for fuck’s sake…
AS: Oh definitely, but it’s all the way down to…and I have a blog post that gets into this in a different context, but down to sports simulators.
JB: Oh sure.
AS: I mean, I’m not actually good at basketball because I can push buttons in sequence. But I can feel something that sort of translates to that.
JB: Yes. I’m playing the Assassin’s Creed game, and there is no challenge in the game at the point I’m at. You know? I’ve been playing it so long, it has become a boring murder simulator. It’s only about how efficiently can I kill 30 guys, in like two minutes. The skill becomes in how little I can do. (chuckles)
AS: I’m right now, I’m at the very end of an XCOM2 campaign, where I really had to cheat and scrape my way through the first month or two, but now I’m just unstoppable. (chuckles) Overleveled for even the hardest parts of the game.
JB: That’s satisfying though. You earn it on that one.
AS: Yeah, XCOM makes you earn it. So you do enjoy it at the end.
JB: That’s a good game.
