Winning and Victory in media these days...

Welll.... here's the thing in almost every sorta book, movie, story, game you play, you play for one reason only: TO WIN! It does not matter if your opponent is a dumb-as-a-rock-AI, or eight-nine-ten-year-olds. It doesn't matter if you have a team of as dumb-as-rock-AI, or eight-nine-ten-year-olds... in 99% of the situations you find yourself playing a game, you are playing to win:


 Nerf Damansara Game in SS2 a few weeks ago. Don't recall if I was at the backof my "army" screaming "CHARGE! TAKE NO PRISONERS!" or cowering and thinking , "Let them all get shot first!"

Getting back to the assignment at hand: Winning, Victory, Games, Movies, Books, etc....
A wise lecturer - said during a Fundementals of Game Development Class last semester that:

"A Game is a play situation with rules

the rules create goals and obstacles

the means of overcoming the obstacles have to be interesting

Interesting means giving players choices"

So in games when you go for the win, how do you do it? The honest answer is that it depends on not just the genre of the game, but on the Game itself. An easy example is to compare Mass Effect 3 possible endings with those of say Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare 2, and Modern Warfare 3: Where Mass Effect gives you the ultimate pseudo choice of how to end things, Modern Warfare does not. but this does not make the victory any less sweet when you achieve it.

RTS games such as command and conquer tend to have awesome cut scenes and cinema/movie quality movies at the beginning and end (when you win) of the games. The same can also be said of various RPG games such as Dragon Age (DAI and DAII), and the very old Dungeon Siege franchise. In essence the ending cinematics are what making fighting/slaughtering your way through HOURS worthwhile. so if they get this part wrong - as they did with the original ending to Mass Effect 3... well let's just say things get ugly FAST.

In contrast, the entire Warhammer 40,000 franchise featuring the Blood Ravens (that's Dawn of War, Dawn of War II and Retribution) has had some awesome cinematics as linked. Even the expansion packs had some fairly awesome cinematics. I particularly enjoyed the Imperial Guard ending from Winter Assault, and there are just too many victory scenematics in Dark Crusade and Soul Storm to choose from. One Thing I would like to point out was that while Dawn of War II's Chaos Rising expansion pack had a solid enough ending to it, it hinted at Darker things to come which were delivered in the Retribution expansion pack.

One of the most cinematic style movie endings I have seen and still remember fondly is the ending cinematics from the Final Fantasy Series: Final Fantasy 8, X, amd X-2, which is also done in Deus Ex Human Revolution. This is a game where the ending was truly the player's choice as to what kind of victory they wanted to win: there are four main choices... but there were sub choices (alledgedly) creating a total of 12 different endings (Jensen's monologue varies).

Other games that give you the happy ending include Starcraft (I'm talking the Protoss Campaign in Starcraft, NOT BROODWARS). Of course, on a rare occassion, the "bad guys" do win - mostly because the player is the bad guy: Starcraft Broodwars Zerg campaign comes to mind, as does Dungeon Keeper 1 and Dungeon Keeper 2, and more recently Dungeons.


In many movies the good guys tend to win - good guys being a relative term because there are such thing's as Anti-Heroes, and the so-called Dark Hero. more on that in a bit. The good guys winning you see in just about every humans versus aliens war movie - most recent would be Battle Los Angeles and others include the likes of Independence Day. Needless to say two recent movies where the good guys basically steamroll the hell out of the opposition would be The Expendables and EX2. Now looking at the anti-hero or dark hero the immediate few that pop in to my mind are: Jack Reacher, Pitch Black, and Chronicles of Riddick and Blade and Blade 2 Bloodhunt.

Fiction Novels are very, very guilty of this of the good guys either the happy ending or (when there's a sequal) hope that they CAN win: Almost any mainstream author and title you mention will have the good guys winning, and saving the day. A few that I can think off right off the top of my head:
Tom Clancy - Patriot Games, Rainbow Six (YES THE BOOK CAME BEFORE THE GAME!), The Sum of all Fears, Executive Decision, The Hunt for Red October, the entire NETForce series.
Dan Brown - Digital Fortress, Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code.
Clive Custler - Pacific Vortex!, Atlantis Found, Inca Gold, Raise the Titanic
Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood
Dan Abnett - Gaunt's Ghosts Series, Eisenhorn and Ravenor collection.
Stephanie Meyer - Twilight Series, and of course her other stand alone novel, "Host".

The one thing that has always kinda irked me with a lot of these writers is that they seem to minimize the injury that their principal characters sustain, be it physical, emotional or psychological. It is understandable as killing the central character kills the story - unless you 're writing a tragedy or something to that effect - ending a series/franchise is a common cause of this. Suffice to say that my fanfiction work has gone against the grain here - I kill a lot of characters important to Harry, break up the "Golden Trio," and go so far as to throw in a LOT of heart break and guilt. Link to parts 1 and 2 of this orgy of destruction are here and here respectively. Admitedly, children's writers are even more guilty of this:
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter franchise either has a happy ending for every book (1-3 and 7) or one that ends on an upbeat/positive note despite the gathering storm (4-6)
Christopher Paolini: Eragon, Elder, Eldest
CS Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
Enid Blyton - Famous Five and Secret Seven series
Franklin W. Dixon - The Hardy Boys series

I could go forever here.... but I think the point has been made on books that you almost always get a happy ending or at least a satisfactory ending. If the ending is neither of those, it's a pretty safe bet that  there's a sequal lurking around somewhere in the author's head. That said, a happy ending does not prevent an author from bringing a character back and tormeting them a whole lot more - Dan Brown puts Robert Langdon through a lot.

Books and movies tend to flow in to one another as books get made in to movies and vice versa the fact that they are different mediums telling the same story does not detract from the genre fact that the good guys or the anti-hero (and on occassion the bad guy) wins.

But like all games there has to be a plot and that plot will involve obstacles and rules that have to be followed so that the player can win.Trainers, hacks and cheats can break the rules of the game... but where' the fun in that? You win without having to work for it which can make even the best game soooo utterly pointless to play.

 So if that is winning and victory in games... just what the hell am I going to do for the assignment? Ideas and comments will be welcome! I am admitedly thinking something NERF Related, but a whole lot simpler than my nutty force powers idea....