quote:Original post by Wavinator
What would you call a character that intentionally took pleasure in the suffering of others? How about one who annihilated an entire population for sport? Or what about one who tortures people indescriminantly.

Maybe their just insane. But I''d classify them as evil by any perspective.

As +AA_970+ pointed out, have you looked at it from their perspective.

Take Hitler. From his point of view, he was giving his country pride again by creating a scapegoat for them to fight against. The blue eyed, blond haired super human he was trying to create was only an attempt to make the perfect human, at least from his perspective.

Now I don''t want to get into whether or not Hitler was evil ( I think it''s quite obvious ), but I would really be surprised if he thought his actions were "evil". To him, they were not. They were actions that brought about the reality of his own dreams.

If we are going to create interesting characters in video games, we have to stop looking at them from the outside, and go inside and see what makes them tick. Then, suddenly, any character we make will have more depth than the flat textures we assign to them. They will have personality. They will have history. They will have complex motives. When they have this the player won''t just care that their nemesis is trying to take over the world, but they will also be enwrapped in why they want to do this. It''s the layers and layers of complexity that make something interesting.

Ut