Betrayal as a Climactic Plot Point

What's with the fetish for being betrayed by characters who were sympathetic and friendly for almost the entire duration of the game? Sudden betrayals by long-time friends, on the flimsiest and most unexpected motivations, are a bizarre but commonplace part of narrative games. What gives? And what can we do about it?

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!

FarCry 1

The support character Doyle, loyal to you throughout the game and voiced extremely well by the voice-actor Cornell Womack, suddenly turns on you at the very end. For what? Money, he says. He was only supporting you so you could do his dirty work.

Was it not enough that the game literally pits 30,000 gunmen against you? A legion of pirate mercenaries who want your head? The one friendly character has to betray you too, and then you have to execute him, and then you have to listen to your character make a heartless one-liner about killing your old friend. Pathetic.

FarCry 2

Had a big-boasted "Buddy System", where several characters of unique national origins (including several women) will come and save your life when you're in a pinch, provided that you have made them your buddy by rescuing them from hostage-takers. So far, so good. True: as characters these buddies were completely ruined by terrible voice direction--the voice acting was so uniformly stiff and vacuous that it has to be attributed to a single voice director or lead designer, rather than to multiple individual actors. Yet as game devices, the buddies were great. They swoop in with pistols blazing just as you collapse into a bloody heap in a hail of enemy gunfire, and they drag you to safety. What a sight for sore eyes, in a shooting game like FarCry 2.)

Then... what happens at the climax of the game? The game pits you against them, and you have to murder them one by one in a small arena, just to proceed. And it's not like some evil Roman emperor coerced you all into combat for his own amusement. No. The characters suddenly and genuinely wish to kill you. It's personal. After beating the game and reading the wiki I'm still confused about how the game's multiple-possible-endings work out (as a function of your choices in the game), but let me just say it was a pretty stupid plot development.

Mirror's Edge

One of your few prominent friends in Mirror's Edge, the incredible parkour game with a striking Swedish design aesthetic, turns against you. I'll give Mirror's Edge a pass though. First of all, I loved the game so much, but second of all her betrayal had some minimal amount of a real human element, and I actually find myself sympathizing with her motivation.

"I want to live, Faith-- not just survive," she explains, when the penny drops. The only way she sees to live a real life is to betray you and all her other associates and abandon the stressful business that you two previously partnered in. She sounds angry, tired, surrenderful, rather than villainous, even though she's fully resolved to sacrifice you for her own sake. So be it. There was enough subtext that the betrayal wasn't a train wreck out of left field. (Can this game do no wrong? It still warms my heart every time I try to criticize it.)

Crackdown

I loved the basic premise of this game! Here is the backstory, as understood at the outset: "This city has a big crime problem. The gangs have gotten out of control. You are a superhero cop, so get out there and destroy these gangs! Lift up automobiles and throw them at the gangsters. Leap off a skyscraper toward a bunch of gangbangers on the sidewalk, crack the cement when you land, and start kicking them in the face . Break the chain of command of the mafiosos, take out the head honchos!"

Perfect. Except at the end of the line you find out that your very own police agency allowed the gangs to come to power, in order to justify their own authoritarian crackdown. This is a somewhat common motif in dystopian fiction, and it's a politically relevant plot twist, so some part of me wants to let it slide. But like Doyle in "FarCry", the voice of your police chief was so VERY WELL ACTED, and very well established as a friendly character. Subverting the entire premise of the game is cheap and gimmicky, and completely pointless. The crackdown on crime was a self-sustaining narrative backdrop: "Use superhuman abilities to stop a crime wave." Excellent. Give us a break with the betrayals and twisted revelations!

FarCry 2 Again
Yes, FarCry 2 managed two gigantically stupid betrayals. So while your friends gang up to gleefully murder you altogether like it's a team sport, the violent sociopathic arms dealer who you have spent your entire journey trying to assassinate suddenly gets on the good foot, teams up with you, and sacrifices his life to save a group of refugees.

Come again? It's a reverse betrayal. I appreciate the idea in fiction that sometimes a mission you have been sent on by your superiors or caregivers sometimes bites you in the ass or reveals itself to be a sinister plot against you or against civilization at large. Great. When you're a hired gun, you have to be ready to find out that your employers don't really have a transparently virtuous goal in mind. But the asinine reverse betrayal of The Jackal in Far Cry 2 demonstrates that the problem is not limited to simple betrayal in a narrative, but inexplicable and inconsistent revelations about certain characters, sudden betrayals being only one instance of that.

"Find the Jackal, and kill him. He's somewhere among a thousand square miles of African savannah and jungle." That was supposed to be the game's premise! It's brilliant, it's simple. It's totally Heart of Darkness, it's totally Apocalypse Now. ...Except if Kurtz had a mood swing at the last minute and joined the Peace Corps. That's right. If only your commanders had better intel from the get-go and could have prepared you for the contingency that the bloodthirsty privateering terrorist and arms dealer The Jackal would jump into the good fight once you finally find him.

The developers or publishers evidently do not realize that the original supposed premise "Go into the jungle, and take this crazy bastard down" had MOMENTUM. It has power in simplicity. It is raw. It aligns with Apocalypse Now, an amazing classic film (which was based on Heart of Darkness.) It did not need to hobble and lean on the junky crutches of a lame "turn-around".

As bad as it was, it would have been more excusable if not for the other ridiculous betrayal they crammed into the narrative (see above).

BioShock

The BioShock team was definitely hellbent on creating the most ridiculous narrative betrayal ever in gaming history. The character who has been guiding you throughout your harrowing journey turns out to (exactly like Doyle from FarCry) have been misleading you purely for his own nefarious ends. Now that's par for the course. But it gets even worse. It turns out that you-- the player character-- are some kind of clone, or something, and your entire existence was pre-ordained by this evil deceiver, and every step you took on your journey was already programmed and brainwashed into your DNA, including the sensational and by all appearances completely coincidental accident (a plane crash) that started you on your journey, bla bla, bla. Wow, what an epiphany. You're really blowing my mind.

System Shock 2

Ah, the predecessor to BioShock, and vastly frightfully better than BioShock in every conceivable way.... and another "guide" character turns out to be a deception. (And this character is also a well acted one! Why the pattern? Are the well-acted ones the only ones that are memorable?) The deception earns a redemption by being so unique among game betrayals, so much so that I don't want to spoil it here.

OK I'll spoil it. You find that your wonderful guide character (who was a helpful voice on your radio) has killed herself, and she has been replaced on your radio by an evil sentient computer program, though I can't remember how much of the relationship was real and how much of it was a corrupt simulation by SHODAN. Yes, I know, all of this sounds incredibly corny if you haven't played and enjoyed the game, but when I found the good Doctor in the chair, in the projection/simulation room, with her gun on the floor nearby, it inspired anger and dread in me, connected wholly to the fictional villain rather than to the game's developers (as in all previous examples).

So....What Then?

The "epiphany betrayal" is nothing new or unique to games, but game developers and writers have taken the ball and run with it. It's an adventure-movie cliche that some character's superficially guides another character through a long journey, only to reveal that they were letting the adventurer do their own dirty deeds for them. ("I will show you how to complete steps 1, 2, 3, 4, ...100, so you can obtain the majestic and precious XYZ. Then I can steal it from you and leave you for dead right when you bring it to me!")

There is nothing that makes a betrayal inherently more dramatic or profound than some other interpersonal plot point. A breakdown in a relationship is much more likely to result from incompetence, cowardice, or some other basic imperfection, than from malice. An epiphany betrayal is an immature and inept overture toward drama. The artists are not crafty enough to see that it cancels out and negates previous conditions that already had more dramatic potential.

I've recently been watching a lot of Hong Kong action flicks by the director Johnny To. Many of them involve brotherhood-type groups of police officers, criminals, hired guns, and so on. Drama comes in when the characters are torn between harshly conflicting loyalties (and/or are forced to risk their own lives for the sake of their friends, often-times with some amount of reluctance). Their bonds of loyalty and admiration are tested, but never broken, except by the most vile and torturous forces (see Triad Election if you like watching that kind of thing, which I don't) . In one crazy scene (not in Triad Election), a low-level mobster is savagely beaten by a (slightly hesitant) enemy who wants him to reveal information that would compromise his crime family. The beaten man can only stupidly repeat the poetic lines of the blood oaths he took when he was initiated into the clan, all the way to the verge of death. As he lies dying, his attacker receives a cell phone call and learns that his own boss has temporarily joined forces with the dying man's boss. He hangs up the phone, promptly apologizes to the dying man, gives him aid, and they go onward to try to complete their new joint mission-- the formerly beaten man survives.

Now something about that is tacky, I know. It's partly the product of some superficial cultural meme about everlasting loyalty that goes back to ancient times, and of the mythos of crime families, and all this. But the point is, when you establish friendship and loyalty, that is a dramatic device in itself. Situations that strain those relationships are dramatic. A complete betrayal, for reasons that blindside you out of absolutely nowhere, is just stupid and gimmicky.

The weird thing about it isn't just that the betrayals of video game plots are completely inconsistent with the established story, but that the developers seem to think that "throwing a wrench into the mix! Completely upheaving the player's/viewer's understanding!" is mandatory for a good climax. Afterall, the friendship that was established over many hours of gameplay sufficed for those many hours of gameplay. There is no reason to ruin a good thing, artificially, with an incoherent betrayal, when there are already natural and man-made forces at play that can destroy your friendship from the outside, and which necessitated your friendship in the first place.

Would Lethal Weapon have been a good movie if Murtaugh suddenly put a gun to Riggs' head because the criminals paid him off? No. The idea that every game plot needs a "plot twist!" like that qualifies as a mental disease at this point. A betrayal is the BEGINNING of a good story about enemies (see: The Count of Monte Cristo, not the end of a story about friends.

The truly sad realization here is that the game writers at issue don't seem to realize that friendship, as a thing that exists in this indifferent/hostile/imperfect world, can be a perfectly dramatic entity in itself and does not require a betrayal to have a lasting effect on the player. The realization kind of creeps me out.