The Darkness: Jenny

I've just finished The Darkness. (Yeah, it's a year old, but I've never been good at keeping up with new releases.) I thought it was a pretty awesome game, and more to the point, I think there's a lot I can learn from it.

(Spoilers follow about the first one-third or so of the game.)

For a start, the relationship between the Jackie (the player character) and Jenny. Video game characters have been rescuing their girlfriends from danger since Donkey Kong, but this has been the first time I've really cared about the girl as more than a token of victory.

It works largely because of the scene early in the game where Jackie meets Jenny in her new apartment and they sit down to watch a movie together. Importantly, this is not a cutscene; there is no break in ordinary gameplay. It is optional, but the option to stop it is labeled 'Get up and leave' rather than 'Skip'. I stayed, and got to experience the best moment of human intimacy I've seen in a game as Jenny fell asleep with her head in my lap. Although it's not exactly interactive, it's all still in the first person perspective and my sense of identity with Jackie was just as strong as in the combat sections of the game.

That moment impressed itself on my memory. Although Jenny doesn't appear very often in the rest of the game (unlike Alyx from the Half Life 2 episodes, for example), my character is always thinking about her, and because of the tender moment at the start of the game, I was thinking about her too. When she got kidnapped, I didn't think "Ah, so the PC's girlfriend needs rescuing, here comes the next mission." I think, "The bastards! They got Jenny!" and the sequence where I charged in to rescue her was all the more emotionally intense. I was experiencing Jackie's emotions in the same way that I experience the emotions of characters in a book or film or play, but with the added immediacy that an interactive experience and a first-person perspective provide.

And the important thing to learn is that all this was done in a quite simple way. There's that scene at the start, and then there are mentions of Jennie in character dialogue and in Jackie's loading screen monologues, but never so many mentions that it stands out. It's fairly easy to transform a plot token character who's just there to need rescuing, into a character that the player cares about. I hope more games do this sort of thing in future.