Halo, Battlefield 3, Crysis. I can't help myself. One of the reasons I like video games so much is perfectly articulated by this commercial. As a kid, my number one favorite thing to do with my friends was grab a toy gun and run around concocting elaborate stories where we fought the bad guys. These things would always spiral out of control and would end up making no sense, with at least one betrayal.
The good news is, shooters have evolved to the point where if I were to go back in time and show them to me as a 10 year old, I'd crap my pants because that's exactly what I just ran around imagining outside. The bad news is, re-read the previous sentence.
First person shooters are fun and one of the most popular genres of video games. They are also, more often than not, really dumb. Halo and Call of Duty multiplayer are frequently used as shorthand for "home to frat dudes and prepubescent racists/homophobes". Why this is can be examined by looking at the plot of the accompanying single player games.
Take Call of Duty. COD 4's story was fairly realistic, and felt like a tightly-paced, carefully constructed action movie. The sequel, Modern Warfare 2, felt a lot more like the first summer blockbuster made by an independent director. It had a bunch of extravagant set pieces and amped up the ridiculous by a factor of 10. There were plenty of plotholes and leaps of logic that could take months to wrap your head around, delivered in such a rapid-fire fashion that at times it was a chore to keep up. But at the end of the day, it was a solid game, an expansion on its predecessor with a plot that still managed to remain compelling, and tied back to the original theme of destructive cycles of revenge.
Then the series went full on Michael Bay with Modern Warfare 3. The plot makes absolutely no sense in many different directions at once. New characters are introduced just to be killed off. The "shocking moment" isn't even that jarring given how blatantly it relies on the shock factor, in stark contrast to its counterparts in the previous two games, which at least offered something to discuss beyond the event itself.
And this is just the marquee example. Pick just about any major shooter franchise these days and you'll find a poorly-written, stupid plot with barely defined goals, no discernibly unique characters, and no reason to care. Why is this?
Notice how I'm mostly focusing on military shooters here. For some reason, these "realistic" warfare simulators are all the rage, mostly I suspect due to Call of Duty. The idea seems to be that people don't want to deal with the moral weight that comes with playing as a soldier who's simply fighting other soldiers, not an army of faceless henchmen. These guys are just doing their job, same as you, but kills in these games are celebrated and then you move on.
I'm not saying shooters need to be turned into somber morality plays about the nature of war. There's definitely a place for popcorn fun in this world, and shooters are very good at providing that fun. That's why multiplayer has exploded. But the result is a bunch of games with token story modes that are obviously phoned in. The plot of most of them can be summed up as: You're a soldier, kill those bad guys or they'll kill you/America, you did it, good job.
But who are those bad guys? In most cases, they're simply the opposition. No more, no less. No examination of their motives, no reason to care. The worst offender in this respect is the campaign in Battlefield 3. (Spoilers ahead) After completing the game, the player knows practically nothing about the antagonist, Solomon. Apparently he wants "revenge", but we're never told for what. Also, he's a CIA undercover agent who uses people for his own ends. That is literally all we know about him by the time it falls to us to bash his brains out in the middle of Times Square. We don't even know what nationality he is. Probably Russian, because those GRU operatives were talking about him like they knew who he was, but he's allied with the Iranians and works for the CIA...
The ending for Battlefield 3 is intense, but after you prevent Solomon from nuking New York, there's a tiny denoument with the other main playable character, and then credits. This makes the campaign as a whole completely forgettable. Why not finish off with a bit where Solomon's motives are revealed? Give us some insight into the man we just brained. In a lot of stories, the most compelling character is the villain. The audience is supposed to hate them and root for their downfall, but if the audience isn't let in on the methods behind their madness, they just end up as boring. The Helghast in the Killzone games win the prize for reversing this state of affairs, as they end up being portrayed as more sympathetic than the forgettable "heroes".
I'm returning, one last time, to the Modern Warfare series, because it has the single most wasted opportunity in FPS bad guys. We first meet Vladimir Makarov early in Modern Warfare 2, where we learn he "trades blood for money", and then we help him massacre an airport terminal's worth of civilians in order to provoke a war between the US and Russia. Then he disappears from the game for the most part, and waits in the wings to be the Big Bad in MW3.
He wasn't the most well-defined character to begin with, but he had serious potential. One of the most iconic images of that game for me was him storming an airport wearing a flak jacket over his well-trimmed, custom fit suit. This is a product of the New Russia: a man who realizes that anything can be bought. He's an odd concoction, a mix of ultranationalist sentiments and cold, hard business, who's willing to murder scores of his own countrymen in order to make Russia strong and let her defeat her enemies in open combat.
There are hints of this in the third game which only strengthen my notions of what he could have been. A flashback late in the game gives us a taste of his development as a character. He's still immaculately dressed almost all the time, famously stepping out of a chopper in a fur coat to abduct the Russian president before executing the player with a bullet to the head.
What's missing from Vladimir is a sense of who he really is, stripped away beneath what seem like layers of deceit. When you track him down in the last level, he's holed up in a hotel on the Arabian Peninsula, which offers a very interesting implication. Here's a man who just orchestrated World War 3, ostensibly on behalf of his beloved motherland, and lost. And what does he do? Orchestrate one last, desperate strike? Perhaps another terrorist attack? A final show of force? No. He goes to a swanky penthouse club in Dubai with his entourage, and you have to go after him in order to finally deliver some well-deserved justice.
The fact that you have to go get him is revealing about his character, but only tangentially. Where was the picture of Makarov as pragmatic sociopath? One willing to sell out his cause for personal gain? Rather than painting him as just another deceitful Russian eager to shake things up because he's Russian, why not more overtly reveal his real motive as one of profit? The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games always seem to be just on the verge of commenting on the ludicrous nature of modern day conflicts. Of wars fought by people with no uniform or flag willing to kill innocents, or wars fought for the money they'll generate. Of the ridiculousness of even fighting these wars when, looming over all of them, is the specter of a mushroom cloud that can instantly nullify these conflicts.
Makarov in the games comes across as a bad guy who's evil because he needs to be in order for the games to happen. He's an enigma, but not intentionally. We don't know his intentions because it doesn't seem like the developers know what they are either. The result is a plot that leaves many people scratching their heads, wondering why any of the characters are doing what they're doing. What could have been an interesting story about a man's nationalist sentiments being co-opted and warped by the profit motive that seems to drive so much of the world today, and which could in particular be applied to modern day Russia, is instead simply a befuddling mess of a story driven by a man who's apparently evil because he's just too Russian for his own good.
Quick counter-example (And yes, more spoilers ahead): Crysis 2. The main bad guys are aliens, and their motives are inscrutable, but in a way that's understandable. They are, after all, mostly squid and completely alien, plus they've apparently been here for quite a long time already. The human antagonists, though, are what really shine. Because they aren't really villains. The PMC in charge of Manhattan is led by a guy who hates the suit you're wearing for both personal and ideological reasons. He doesn't favor the aliens, he just opposes you, and with a fairly reasonable rationale. Even the betrayal very late in the game isn't something from completely out of left field, present for the sake of simply having a twist.
Crysis 2 is a game where it on the surface doesn't make much sense to have humans as villains, because there's already a very real threat from the aliens. What, are these guys for the extinction of the human race? Because that's not a very smart career move. But at the end of the day, the humans you fight don't come across as too cartoonishly evil (Hargreave's voice-acting aside), because they have discernible motives for wanting you out of the way.
The key word there is "cartoonish", which is the main problem with most FPS bad guys. They're evil because they're terrorists/North Koreans/Russians/they have to be. Which is to say, nothing we need to think too hard about.
