A man chooses, a slave obeys

I have just caved in my father's face with a golf club.  My reasoning behind this?  He asked me to do so.  Of course I am talking about the game Bioshock.  A mix of first person shooter, and action adventure RPG.  In the class all students had to choose a RPG to play while completing other course content.  I picked Bioshock for the simple reason of owning it, and never playing it.  While this game is not as free flowing as almost all other RPG's it does present some interesting theories on the choice.

In this particular game the main choice you have while in game play is whether to save little girls who have been horribly mutated by the drug like Adam, or to kill them to take their Adam for yourself.  I have chosen to save the girls, mainly because I kill so many other creatures in this game the thought of adding these girls to my gamer conscious was too much (turns out it helps you in game play as well).  Other games you choose everything form back story, sex, abilities, race, political affiliation (Alliance and Horde).  At the end of the day, is that what makes these games so compelling?

We all love Mario, and Sonic.   They are canonized, but they really compare to what is in development.  Isn't there a part of us that would love to see Mario give up his chase after the princess, and with the help of Luigi and Yoshi, help the Shy Guys free their home land?  Maybe, instead of rings, have Sonic quest downtown Miami, dealing drugs, wasting rival gang members, and putting Tails on a street corner.

I think it is a safe assessment that gamer's do not want to be told what to do by their games anymore.  They want their games to say, "I have made all of this for you, now what are you going to do with it?"

Identity Crisis

So far this semester, our class has read graphic novels such as Blankets, and Maus.  Well, this week it finally arrived.  Masked vigilante week, more commonly known as super hero week.  However, when your novels of choice are Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and V for Vendetta it is harder to use the term super hero.  In fact, after reading through these titles, it may be hard to even refer to them as masked vigilante's.  Frank Miller and Alan Moore have seemed to give us a group of grown men and women who can only work through their personal "quirks" by putting on a mask and trying to make the world a better place.  

V seems to actually make some differences in the world around him, so kudoo's to him.  Batman cleans up the streets of Gotham (kind of),  but becomes America's most wanted in the process.  While the crack squad of Watchmen watch the world go to shit while working on their own personal issues, mostly revolving around mid-life crisis's. 

Which brings me to a scary thought.  Are hero's just as insecure as the rest of us.  Are the identity's they have made hide behind as important, or more important than the job they set out to do?   Do they really care about peace?  Justice?  Or are they so wrapped up in the cowl, the shield, or the cape, that the rest has fallen to the wayside?  V could have shown himself to the world, shown what Norsefire had done to him.  Billionaire Bruce Wayne could give more money than the police or correction departments would know what to do with.  Night Owl could have joined up with Rorschach in the first chapter, and actually saved New York.  

I realize that none of this makes for good character development, and therefore lousy story telling.  However, if art (yes, graphic novels are a form of art) are a mirror of the human condition, then what does that say about us?  Why do we identify ourselves the way we do.  Do we strive to become doctors, to heal, or for the white coat?  Do we become a cop to protect and serve, or for the gun and badge?  Could their be a simpler way of going about our life, but we will never see it because we are so obsessed with how we are identified by the world?

Or have I over thought the whole thing?  Is it simply that fictional people who dress up like ink blots and animals may have much more severe issues than that of the average (and not fictionalized) human being.