Fantasy is shit

Brief Disclaimer:

I'm using the word "fantasy" to describe swords, orcs, magic, elves, epic quests etc. I am aware that some people out there describe this as "High fantasy" and use wikipedia's definition of fantasy as theirs. This definition, briefly, is "Anything with magic in it".

And as Dictionary.com defines magic as, amongst other things:

"Magic, necromancy, sorcery, witchcraft imply producing results through mysterious influences or unexplained powers"

That definition is fucking aweful because it can be argued to include the following:

Lord of the Rings (Gandalf's Staff)
Bioshock (the plasmids)
Star Wars (Jedi Powers)
The Chronicles of Riddick (Judi Dench's telepathy)
The New Battlestar Galactica (Roslin's visions of the future)
Crysis (The aliens and their Ice Ray)
Dawn of War (Psychic powers)
Half Life (portals)


The list is endless, and includes pretty much anything where something doesn't have a very definite scientific explanation. IE, Half Life 2 is a meld of science fiction (because we get an explanation for how the gravity gun works) and fantasy (because it has portals and we don't know how they work, so they're magical.)


One of the important things I learned during my english degree is: Genres are functional. They're descriptive. They're there so we can say that THIS work of art conforms to this, this and this criteria, therefore it's THIS. It's also important to note that works that have multiple features, or features that don't tie it down to a genre... aren't tied down. They remain genreless- which is very important for the progress and evolution of art.

But when the word "fantasy" can be used to describe litterally anything that doesn't take place in the world as we know it - with the modern neutonian physics laws etc... It ceases to be a genre becasue it includes everything from The Bible to Battlestar Galactica.

So I use the word Fantasy to describe "high fantasy" and anyone who sticks with Wikipedia's definition is welcome to it, but be aware that you're not actually describing anything when you use the word. You're just saying that it has some elements in it which aren't fully explainable scientifically.




Wow.

I said that would be a short disclaimer. I thought it would be much shorter than that.

Let's take a short break.

Watch this video of the most awesome man in the world:






Aaaaand we're back.

Right.

So I was playing the Dragon Age: Origins character creator demo and wondered why I hadn't come across a decent fantasy thing in the last... well. Ever.

Actually, that's a lie, The Witcher is fantastic but I'll get to that in a minute.

My thought process was roughly:

Fantasy seems to always boil down to

THE GOOD RACES:
Men
Elves
Dwarves

fighting

THE EVIL RACES:
Orks
Trolls
Dark Wizzards


You never get, for example, elves who betray the humans for power, or whatever, because that would be monumentally stupid... Why? becuase THE EVIL RACES only ever want destruction, there's no complexity to it.

And that got me thinking... Maybe what kills all fantasy isn't the incredibly cliched settings, characters etc. but it's the complete lack of complexity to the stories. Take Dragon Age: Origins. It describes a bunch of monks who turn evil and build an army and start attacking the good races. Why? They're evil and want destruction.

This inevitably boils down to a GOOD ARMY and a BAD ARMY scrapping over the earth and every character has a natural alliance, there is no room for ambiguity or neutrality. It's exactly the same in Lord of the Rings and pretty much every other fantasy game you can think of.

So why is The Witcher different? It's simple, the baddies all have genuine motivation and want something other than wiping all life out that doesn't agree with them. There are elf and dwarf extremists who are resorting to acts of terrorism to make sure they aren't wiped out by a society that considers them third class citizens. I would hapilly side with them. There are an order of knights who are trying to stop this group killing innocent people. I would hapilly side with them. Then there are the magority of the people who just want to be left alone and think that both sides are using questionable methods to achieve their goals. I would very hapily side with them.

This is slightly different for films, I should point out. Films can focus on a very small group of people who are genuinely morally complex (Boromir in Lord Of The Rings, for example) whereas games tend to involve much larger groups of people and the focus is more on stopping the enemy than the fairly insignificant adventures of a small group of people.

So yeah, in fantasy games, developers should really start putting some thought into the motivation for the baddies. Without complex baddies, the heroes can't be complex either. Take the characters from Battlestar Galactica - they'd all be useless in Lord Of The Rings because they'd all be concentrating on the morality of war when what they should be doing is building as big an army as possible because otherwise they'd just get stomped.