I had previously played Culdcept on the PS2.  Culdcept (both games) is a quirky combination of Magic the Gathering and Monopoly.  You do laps around a board, play creatures to defend your properties, cast spells on your opponent, and invest in your properties in the hopes that your opponents will land there and pay up.  There is also a collectible card aspect to it.  It’s a great example of how to moosh two types of games together and come out with something new and really fun.  The PS2 version had some very light journey-quest type story.  It was all the game needed, and provided a nice framework for moving from level to level.

Then you get to Culdcept Saga.  All of a sudden there is this epic destiny for your character, the Gods created these cards for some higher purpose, something about the world ending and starting anew, etc etc.  In the meantime, your character is obsessed with this one woman who is a princess who betrays her family and then she joins the bad guys but maybe she doesn’t mean to…..

There is also an endless parade of “Bad Guys” whose motivations are to rule the world.   Of course, they want to be the ONLY ones ruling the world, so they wind up fighting each other as well as your own character.

This got me to thinking. Just WHY do so many bad guys, in all forms of media but particularly video games, want to rule the world?  Seriously, what advantages would this give them?  If anything it sounds like alot of work.

Now, I can imagine why good guys might want to rule the world.  After all, there are probably many wrongs they would want to address, social programs they might want to implement, and endangered animals they would want to save.  But what possible use could the villain have for this responsibility?  Do they just want the ego-stoking satisfaction of knowing that they are the masters of all?  Do they just plan on delegating all their actual work and laying about sprawling in their harem eating chocolates filled with run and the blood of virgins?  This seems like it would be a hard transition to make after the dedication and drive needed to take over the world.  I suspect these evil-doers would soon become bored with the sedentary life style and it wouldn’t be long before they were building rocket ships and trying to expand their control to other planets.

There is a point to my rambling, and its this: Can we please have some different bad-guy motivations?  Enough of this “taking over the world” business.  Maybe your bad guy has a terrible fear of penguins and wants to eliminate them from the world?  Maybe your bad guy and his friends have some odious habits that civilized society doesn’t approve of, and so they want to carve out a little place of their own — but don’t care who is in the way.  Maybe your bad guy has some strong beliefs that cause them to do bad things to certain people in the name of promoting their own cause?

Or how about at least having a strong motivation for taking over the world?  What exactly does the bad guy hope to gain?  What are his/her long term goals and aspirations?  Do they want to convert the world into a giant penal colony and sell it off to aliens who have overcrowded prisons?  Are they an alien themselves who needs to take over a world as a prerequisite for joining a fraternity back home?  Or maybe they do just want to save the whales and they don’t care who gets hurt while they try to take over the government for the purposes of making permanant changes to environmental laws.

I feel like the “Pinky and the Brain syndrome” is perpetuated by a common shortcut in game writing.  It is, let’s be honest, a little lazy.  I think that there is a good deal of room for exploring alternative motivations for video game villains.  The most interesting game stories I remember, the ones that stick in my mind, don’t feature anyone trying to take over the world.

Of course, if you want to be truly avant-garde, you could create a video game story with no villains at all….