Power Fantasies and Their Problems

For a short time in college I considered enlisting in the military but you have to understand my mind was in a very dark place then. I got over it, though I still find shooters and military-themed games fascinating. What boggles my mind, though, is how wrong most of them are about why I want to play them. It's as if they think I think being a soldier is this thrilling and glorious experience. At least Modern Warfare got it right when it killed me in a nuclear blast.

This isn't one of those complaints about there being too many shooters, though. Instead I bring up shooters to make an observation about games that are power fantasies, and some of the problems inherent to that style of play.

For the most part, a power fantasy is what it sounds like. It's the idea that if only you were a better more capable person. Games allow us to play as characters with abilities far superior to our own. God of War, Halo, Ninja Gaiden, Gears of War, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Devil May Cry, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and The Witcher are all examples of power fantasies in games. Such games naturally fall into the action adventure, shooter, and role-playing genres, because power fantasies tend to revolve around dominating one's opponents, and these genres revolve around combat.

Identifying a Power-Fantasy Game: Themes vs. Systems
I think power-fantasy games are characterized at least as much by their thematic and fictional content as by their gameplay systems and player interactions. For example, take the old laserdisc arcade game Space Ace, which is by all means a power fantasy about being a sci-fi action hero. The gameplay itself consists of reflexive button presses and memorization. Just dial in the proper button sequence, and you get to watch a cool cartoon unfold. Games like this are where quick-time events came from. The same format could just as soon be used for a game based on Schindler's List. So then you'd have two games with identical gameplay, but only one would be seen as a power fantasy. Not sure what people would make of the other.

Spy Party designer Chris Hecker offers a succinct argument against power fantasies on his blog that got me thinking about this themes-vs.-systems distinction. In Bastion, the game I've been working on, I wanted to avoid creating the tone of a power fantasy. For example, the protagonist character is someone the player is intended to feel for rather than envy. On the other hand, aspects of Bastion's game systems can be likened to those found in power-fantasy games -- it's a combat-oriented game in the action role-playing genre. Does that mean it's a power fantasy in spite of my intentions? Of course not. The narrative and thematic substance of a game sooner defines its character as being a power-fantasy or not, rather than the genre or the gameplay systems.

To illustrate my point, take ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. These games revolve around conventional gameplay challenges, including relatively straightforward platforming and combat systems. You run, jump, and kill things in those games in a manner that's comparable to games like God of War or Assassin's Creed. However, I don't think many would consider ICO or Shadow of the Colossus to be power fantasies. The emotional content of those games gives the experience of overcoming their challenges a nuanced and contemplative feel.

Problems With Power Fantasies
I don't want to make power-fantasy games for a variety of reasons that have little to do with how common they are. Rather, it's because I think power-fantasy games have three inherent, thorny problems I would like to avoid:

Problem 1: Risk of creating emotional disconnect or sense of inadequacy in the player
In the typical power-fantasy game, the player's skills will initially not be aligned with those of his character. You're controlling a character who is far superior to you.

This can make the crucial first experience with the game feel dissonant or off-putting. In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which I think is a stunning and well crafted game overall, if you don't know how to sneak around as well as Nathan Drake knows how to sneak around, then there's a good chance you'll get flustered in one of the opening sequences. There's no explaining why Nathan Drake is suddenly incompetent in what should be a routine mission -- immersion is broken and you're reminded that you're just a poor schlub playing Uncharted 2 and failing at it. In The Witcher 2, my favorite game so far this year, the outstanding exposition and beautiful world can likewise come grinding to a halt as soon as the actual gameplay starts and you realize just how lethal the world of the game really is, and how lousy of a swordsman you are in spite of how proficient your character is supposed to be. You lose empathy for your character because you never experience having to go through what he went through in order to be good at his job.

Some games get around this type of problem through smart use of exposition or flashbacks. I thought the first hour of Assassin's Creed 2 wasn't as exciting as the rest of the game but at least it let you work your way up to earning the ninja-like skills of the protagonist. Most of the time, though, if a game is inviting you to be the badass then it's going to have an awkward learning curve, either nakedly easy or too hard.

Problem 2: Design limitations of an inherently powerful protagonist
If you're playing a game in which your character is very powerful and versatile, then not only is the game going to be harder to learn than it probably needs to be, with tons of front-loaded tutorial, it also won't leave much room for growth. Or it'll be some kind of nongame where you give minimal input, like Space Ace. Ironically, all this undermines the basic appeal of a power fantasy, which is to have a growing sense of superiority.

In Grand Theft Auto IV or almost any of the games derived from that series' template, you start with the power to wreak all kinds of havoc inside that sandbox world. You might work your way up to faster cars and deadlier guns than what you have access to right from the start, but in spite of the open-world scope, the sense of character progression is naturally limited. This is especially true of games set in the real world. In games like God of War, you start off extremely powerful but there's still a sense of progression as you move from superhuman to godlike powers. But in a military shooter, where you're a man with a gun, you don't expect to gain new abilities, and in 99 out of 100 such games, you don't. Realism.

Role-playing games have a traditional solution to these problems, by making the player start off as a nobody and gradually letting him grow his powers while his notoriety in the gameworld grows through the fiction. Even still, RPGs are notorious for their complexity, often front-loading far more game systems than the player ought to be concerned with at first. And most RPGs still are power fantasies from a fictional point of view.

If you're not making a power-fantasy game then you have far more latitude when defining your protagonist character. The player doesn't always want to be the badass, does he?

Problem 3: Limited emotional range
When a game is a power fantasy then it occupies a narrow and limiting emotional range. Power-fantasy games can be about justice, revenge... and, that's about it.

Look at the long list of games I've cited above and try and point to ones that aren't about justice or revenge.

Justice and revenge are age-old themes, deeply ingrained in human nature. The emotional range associated with these, I'd say, tends toward the aggressive and the negative. Some of the best works of fiction in the history of fiction have concerned justice or revenge. But these themes aren't everything.

Of course there's a whole slew of other themes and corresponding emotions that games can explore. It's an oversimplification but ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are games about love more so than they are about justice or revenge. By successfully applying an alternate thematic spin on conventional action adventure tropes, these games stood out as unique and provided unique and memorable experiences.

. . .

Power-fantasy games have a lot of things going for them. That's why so many of them are made. Games that attempt to solve the problems I've listed here have plenty of their own problems, including, I suppose, having a potentially more-limited appeal than power-fantasy games do. Even still, when thinking about the kinds of games I want to make, I'd much rather take my chances with exploring relatively untapped thematic territory than trying to attack head-on some hundreds of different games I hold in very high regard. I've tried that before and didn't like it as much.

Death and Games

Video games weren't always dominated by power fantasies. In fact I think the rise of the male wish-fulfillment Hollywood blockbuster of the 1980s, in movies like Rambo II and Commando, is what led video games down a similar path with stuff like Rush 'n Attack and, well, Commando. But even before this shift, games were still concerned with death, a trope that players young and old could always identify with. In Space Invaders you die. In Pac-Man you die. In Donkey Kong you die. In Pole Position you don't just lose the race, your shit fucking explodes and you die.

The noted screenwriting instructor Robert McKee says that stories are a metaphor for life, when he explains why people are innately drawn to stories. I think games are a metaphor for life. This is the reason games don't need stories to be interesting, because in essence it's all the same.

Many games are literal and so they depict death. The player fails by causing his player character to die in some fashion. Yet, for the vast majority of games, death is handled in a lazy, conventional fashion. It's strange when you think about it – something as serious as death, treated with such disregard as game death. What's the last game you played that handled death in an interesting way, that didn't act like the last 20 games you played by giving you a gameplay hint and respawing you at the last checkpoint? Death in games is nothing but a bit of inconvenience. Or when games neglect to put checkpoints close enough, it's a source of frustration, a poor design choice. It's almost never something profound, something complicated, something scary -- you know, like death.

Most games don't even deliver on the promise of immortality. You have unlimited lives in military shooters just because whatever. Just like Afghanistan in real-life. Super Meat Boy, a ridiculous and funny and awesome game, has a more thoughtful approach to player death than virtually all the self-important AAA games this year by having a late-game cutscene where the villain gets frustrated by Meat Boy's propensity to keep respawning whenever he's killed. Meat Boy just kind of shrugs, almost apologetic for his immortality. He can't help being the way he is.

Why should death even exist in games? Death used to exist in games because games needed a mechanism to punish failure. Today more and more games are becoming more and more lenient about failure, because they want more players and want to eliminate frustration and only keep pleasure. It's to the point at which failure becomes almost impossible in certain games, and yet as a player you're still expected to believe that your character is in mortal danger. What's the point?

My main point is this: I think if a game is going to have death in it, then death in the game deserves careful consideration as part of the design. I am not OK with games thoughtlessly borrowing the auto-respawn-at-last-checkpoint design one after another. I want games to treat death with dignity, or disrespect, to make me fear it or laugh at it, to make me think about it or even want it, but I'm sick of games thinking it's something I don't care about as a player. If you don't think I care about it then don't put it in the game, or if you're going to put it in the game then do something interesting with it.

Here is a short list of games that have done interesting things with death.

- In the Fire Emblem series, which I love dearly, death comes swiftly and permanently. These are character-driven strategy games in a fantasy setting, but death isn't just an inconvenience in that setting as it is in most fantasy games. A character who dies in the game is gone forever after speaking his or her often-tragic dying words, and you'll be left to wonder how his or her story might have resolved. Players end up restarting entire missions to prevent character deaths, but at least it's a choice. Few games make me value staying alive quite like Fire Emblem. Other strategy games like X-COM and Jagged Alliance have done similar things, I just think Fire Emblem does it even better by building up its characters so well through its rich storytelling.

- In the Soul Reaver series, you are the immortal vampire-wraith Raziel. Your body can be destroyed but not your spirit. When you "die" in the game, you sink into an alternate version of the world, a spirit realm filled with pathetic lost souls you must consume in order to regain your corporeal self. Some of the game's puzzles involved having to traverse both instances of the world to reach new places. Raziel is a tragic character who would like nothing better than to rest in piece, so the game subverts expectations around video game death on multiple levels.

- In the arcade games Ninja Gaiden and Final Fight, both featured rather graphic "continue" screens showing your character bound and, respectively, about to be eviscerated by a spinning razor or blown to pieces by a bomb. You have 10 seconds to insert another coin to continue playing and prevent this fate. It was a cheap but effective play on the player's emotions. There was something base and manipulative about it, and for that reason I should hate it, but something about it was so playful that it worked well for these games. I'm sure it helped them earn a bunch more quarters, and as cheap emotional plays for player's time and money go, it was way cooler than FarmVille telling me to adopt a homeless orphaned crippled baby seal or whatever.

- Braid is a game about what if you could move forward with the knowledge gained from failing while erasing the failure itself, so its handling of death is very interesting.

- The officially-old massively multiplayer game EverQuest placed severe consequences on player death, often representing hours of lost time or even worse. In a worst-case scenario players could die in such a way that their corpses, which held all their belongings (representing potentially hundreds of hours' worth of questing), were impossible to recover. As a result, I imagine that fear of death in EverQuest probably approximated a real-life fear of death for some of its players more than any other game. MMOs have since repeatedly loosened the reigns on death penalties in order to reduce frustration / heartache and make themselves accessible to wider audiences, but EverQuest achieved something special in its time.

- ZHP: The Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman... look I'm sorry it's Japanese OK? I haven't played this game yet but it's on my short list in no small part because of its fascinating, funny, upbeat take on player death. It's a game about the inevitability of disgraceful death at the hands of a hopelessly powerful enemy, yet your character has the ability to reincarnate and begin anew with greater potential for advancement than his past self.

- Last year's Demon's Souls reminded me a lot of EverQuest's corpse runs. Death came swiftly and often, and carried a heavy price of essentially all your money and experience, though the game gave you one chance to try and recover the lost goods... and did that ever make you take things slow and steady, take the time to learn the environments and the encounters. The best part was seeing apparitions of other players dying and seeing messages left by other players, warning you of impending dangers. The sense of a solitary-yet-shared experience was amazing in that game, like being trapped in a dungeon with other survivors and naturally joining forces to try and survive.

- In Diablo II and its hardcore mode, death was permanent. Hit a lag spike going into Duriel's lair in Act II and that character you'd been building up for the last two weeks would be gone. Similar feelings to Fire Emblem – you felt a healthy respect for the possibility of death, an appreciation for how it could come at any time, would have to make peace with the shocking reality of it. I loved hardcore more.

- In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the character has a Braid-like ability to reverse time (in fairness the game came out well before Braid), and in addition to that there's a narrative layer in which the character is recounting his own story. When the player character dies, the narrator says things like "That's not how it happened," justifying why a respawn mechanic exists in that game, justifying why the game was pretty easy but nonetheless exciting because you wanted to know how it all worked out in the end. It was excellent.

- In Counter-Strike, death was often shocking and meaningful. Here was a shooter where you couldn't just respawn. When you died you sat out the rest of the round. You were failing your whole team and all you could do was watch as the rest of your boys probably get killed because they were down a man. Death has never felt more meaningful to me in a shooter as it did in that game, so much so that I was never much of a Counter-Strike player. Of course most shooters trend away from this type of consequence, and yet Counter-Strike continues to be extremely popular, because it gives people reasons like this to become invested.

. . . .

In the game I'm working on, we don't want you to die, but I want you to know it's possible to fail if you play in a careless fashion, if you ignore danger. If you do run out of health, you'll have at least one more chance to carry on from where you left off in any given sequence, which we think encourages players to push forward more carefully if they started getting a bit lazy or sloppy in their play. It works as a literal wake-up call. Our reactive narrator will also have different things to say about the player character getting knocked out in each of the game's sequences, and will say different things depending on whether or not you fail, so we at least acknowledge the possibility of death in this fashion – we keep track of it and respond to it.

We struggled for a while with what to do about player death in the game, and were tempted by systems that would eliminate any penalty whatsoever because we didn't want to force people to repeat lots of content if they didn't want to. I think what we decided on is a good solution for our game, and I'm glad we arrived at it through thoughtful exploration and iteration rather than just taking the existing conventional checkpoint solution and calling it a day. I also like that our solution maps to the aesthetic of our game. In Bastion's world, death may be an inconvenience that can be prevented. At the very least, the narrator of the story does not seem to take death very seriously, as you can infer from the trailer. Part of the reason for that is, as you can see, that I don't think game players take death very seriously either.

Let me know what are some of your favorite examples of games that treated death in interesting ways.

. . . .

I also wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading. Since I started this blog in March, I've succeeded in making the types of preoccupations expressed here into a key part of my job. I love what I get to do everyday and look forward to creating a game next year that's going to deliver on some of the ideas I've expressed here over the months. Happy holidays and here's to a good year for games in 2011.

Closed Narratives in Open Worlds

I liked open-world games a lot better back when they were just called role-playing games. Maybe I couldn't mow down pedestrians with a car in Fallout or Ultima VII, but I still could go wherever I damn well pleased and do whatever I wanted, even if it meant breaking the rather strict laws of the respective gameworlds. The thing is, I felt like those games fully supported my actions no matter what I did. Such games fed back on the entire breadth of my gameplay choices. Ultima VII was not a game about being good or evil quite like Knights of the Old Republic, but it always let you do evil just so you knew it was there as an alternative, just so the temptation and the option for it were always there. You didn't have to be good, you chose to be, and that gave weight to your actions in the game.

My problem with today's open-world games – and by this I really mean the Rockstar Games genre, because as a collective of studios, Rockstar really has single-handedly defined this genre in recent years – is that their narrative content is increasingly conflicting with their gameplay. Their gameplay says "do whatever you want when you're not playing a story mission" while their narrative says "watch this character's story unfold." From a narrative standpoint, these games have become the Western equivalent of the glory days of the Japanese RPG, the days of games like Final Fantasy VII. Except those games have long since fallen out of vogue.

In those days, your reward for overcoming a gameplay challenge of some sort was a bit of noninteractive story. This was a wonderful structure as just about anyone can attest who played one of the well-regarded Final Fantasy games back in their heyday. You became attached these ensemble casts of crisply defined, empathetic, interesting characters and through your actions as some disembodied turn-based combat specialist you were able to help them reach the end of the line of their respective stories. I'll never forget some of those characters. Their stories benefited from the linearity of the structure and the lack of player control during story scenes. If I had control over the Dragoon Kain's choices in Final Fantasy II, I wouldn't have turned traitor against Cecil in the first place, and I would have inadvertently negated one of the game's more interesting subplots. Or if I had a real choice as to whether to remain a Dark Knight or become a Paladin as Cecil, well... I had no complaints about being something called a Dark Knight at a time when RPGs almost always cast me as a pure and noble hero.

Today's open-world games such as Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto IV are presenting these increasingly lavish tales with huge casts of characters. I like what they're trying to do with their stories. I finished this year's Red Dead Redemption on the promise of a deeply satisfying ending, and in the end it totally delivered. However, the strength of these games' characterizations is adversely affecting the way I play. I don't like the freedom of choice that the gameplay offers me because most of the choice runs counter to what my character would actually do. Red Dead's John Marston is a good-natured man with a dark past. That the game lets me wantonly slaughter people in the streets in exchange for some petty cash and a slap on the wrist just feels all wrong, and I find only the absence of entertainment in it – not because I have a distaste for violent videogames (if I could drink videogame blood I would), but because I don't like when games give me lots of ways to break my own suspension of disbelief, especially when they do an excellent job of getting me to suspend my disbelief in the first place.

Along these lines I just couldn't bring myself to rampage through GTA IV's Liberty City like I could in Grand Theft Auto III back in 2001. It's not that the novelty was gone, because it was absolutely there. GTA IV seemed like such a great playground in which to be some horrible, horrible crook. But Niko Bellic isn't that guy. He's a guy who's trying to help his Mom and find his cousin a nice girl. He doesn't mow people down on the sidewalk.

I played and enjoyed both of these games and the lengths they took both to create vividly detailed clockwork worlds and relatively serious, relatively thoughtful stories. I'm just saying that the two halves of the games – the story part and the open-world structure – didn't mesh for me, so in both cases I found myself actively trying to ignore the peripheral content and beelining through the story missions with a feeling of "I hope I don't break anything" along the way. In effect, I made myself play these games as linearly as possible.

I'm not suggesting these games should have been strictly linear, as the reception to the recent Mafia II is a good indicator of how a not-insigificant number of players do expect open-world gameplay systems from a game with any superficial resemblance to other open-world games. (There are also exceptional cases like Batman: Arkham Asylum, which supports a broad range of actions from the player, pretty much all of which seem internally consistent to the game and its famous starring character.) But I do find it strange how the open-world genre has evolved, when older examples like GTA III didn't have the same problems. GTA III and its silent protagonist let me decide what sort of man I was, whether I was the sort to drive on the sidewalk on a busy intersection or take care to only shoot the bad guys, or somewhere in between. In that game I truly felt like I was in an open world. Today's open worlds may be bigger and more detailed but they feel a lot more restricted to me, because I can't bring myself to ignore their stories.

Knowing vs. Growing Protagonists

In recent years more and more games have made me feel like an actor who doesn't know his lines in the middle of a performance. The set dressing changes but the experience is the same: For a while, everything is happening according to the script, until we reach the point where I start screwing up my part. Pregnant pauses and awkwardness ensue. Failure in highly scripted games feels almost embarrassing, like failing to solve a simple puzzle, because the star's performance as the hero/soldier in these games isn't even intended to be challenging.

I think all this is a byproduct of what happens when games are chiefly designed to fulfill a particular power fantasy for the largest number of players, even at the expense of giving those players the ability to relate to the situation. There's an inherent dissonance to playing a realistic-looking game as a highly experienced character of some sort -- a spy or a supersoldier or whoever -- when you yourself don't know how to perform actions that should be second nature for the protagonist character. And judging by the trends, mainstream retail gaming's answer is to reduce difficulty, automate, and front-load lots of contrived training in order to ease you in. This feels like formula. So what does it take to provide a genuinely different and affecting experience in a mainstream game at this point? I think the answer is closely linked to the design of the protagonist character, and his or her persona, abilities, and relationship to the world of the game.

It used to be more common for games to ramp the player's abilities. Classic games like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda demonstrated how compelling it is to start off as a character with great potential but limited ability and gradually gain access to a wider variety of powerful moves. This achieves a few things: It gives the player incentives to continue exploring, knowing that the next cool ability may be right around the next corner; it allows for intricate level designs that make the much-maligned concept of backtracking seem palatable if the player is later able to traverse areas in surprising new ways and faster than before; and it provides a natural ramp for a game's challenge and difficulty, by allowing early encounters to be simple and later encounters to be tougher and more complex. I love games that have these qualities, whether they're Castlevania: Symphony of the Night or Metroid Prime or Batman: Arkham Asylum. But it seems to me they're less common now than they used to be. I don't think this is because this type of structure became unpopular. I think it's because the pursuit of realism in games (or rather the idea of "superficial authenticity") became relatively more popular.

If you're a supersoldier or a spy, you're what I'd call a "knowing protagonist", someone who's been training your whole life for this mission of a lifetime you're about to go on. The world of that mission does not support the idea that you'd somehow gain an incredible new ability during the mission, since you're already at the height of your prowess. You might find an experimental weapon or some cool new gadgets, and you might ride on vehicles or have to go through a level without killing anybody or something. But the pressure's squarely on the level design and possibly the story rather than on the ramp-up of player abilities to keep you engrossed. On the other hand, if you're somebody like Link, a kid with humble origins but a lot of potential, you start off with nowhere to go but up and you're what I'd call a "growing protagonist". As well, having a gameworld that's more imaginative than real opens up opportunities for Link or others like him to grow in power in a dramatic way.

A protagonist character with humble beginnings doesn't have the natural, superficial appeal of an already-experienced character such as a tough-as-nails supersoldier or an unstoppable assassin. But by starting out strong, these types of characters naturally and severely constrain the internal logic of the gameworlds they inhabit, forcing designers to front-load play mechanics and put all the pressure on level designs and story to keep things interesting. Max Payne, Master Chief, Markus Fenix, and Soap MacTavish all start with the same exact abilities they end with -- the guns change, the scenery changes, the story changes, but the moment-to-moment gameplay basically stays the same the whole time. I love the games these guys are from, too. But their games have influenced two whole generations of similar stuff that seemed to muscle out many of the Links and the Alucards and the Samuses, in favor of more true-to-life and arguably less interesting characters and worlds.

Reality-based games may be a big draw for mainstream developers or publishers, but reality imposes some really awful constraints on games. For instance, how do you teach a player the basic rules when you're also trying to make him believe that he's that badass supersoldier looking tough on the box art? The two goals are almost contradictory and yet almost every action or adventure game faces the challenge of building immersion while teaching the player how to navigate the environment.

Some games manage very clever solutions. I loved playing as a Russian grunt at the beginning of Call of Duty 2, learning to throw potatoes like grenades because grenades were too costly for the Soviets to train with. What a fantastic bit of exposition. Running the training course as the new guy at the beginning of Modern Warfare, while an obvious solution on some level, also worked well to draw players into the experience while making them empathize with the protagonist character -- even a silent protagonist like Soap MacTavish. After all, Soap was going through exactly the same thing as the player -- learning, training, trying to fit in. By the time Modern Warfare 2 came around, Soap was no longer wet behind the ears, so developer Infinity Ward did something brilliant by making him a nonplayer helper character (at least when we first meet him) and once again cast you as someone still learning the ropes.

Batman: Arkham Asylum also did a fantastic job of justifying the player's learning. Batman is a perfect example of a character who should be at the height of his power at the beginning of a story, unless it's his origin story. But in Arkham Asylum, developer Rocksteady Games justifies making him a "growing protagonist" by telling a story of a routine Batman mission that happens to go pretty badly wrong... leading to Batman being physically unprepared for what's to come and having to scrounge up additional tools from the Batmobile, his secret Bat Cave, and so on. Batman's growth is further expressed by his suit becoming more and more tattered over time -- he physically appears more experienced by the end. The moments where Batman gains new powers in the game feel pretty forced from a story perspective, but they enable the open-ended structure and that immensely satisfying feeling of having escalating powers and abilities.

A protagonist character's status in his world at the beginning of a game is the foundation for the internal logic that structures the player's progress. If you start off as a supersoldier, there's not a lot of room to grow. You might succeed against all odds, but no one's going to promote you if you're already Master Chief. Or if two hours into the experience you already have your own team, your own spaceship, and carte blanche to do pretty much whatever in the galaxy as in Mass Effect, then no wonder you're going to wind up feeling a bit let down by the shallow systems governing character progress -- there's no real room to grow, not within the constraints of a "hard science" world where you start out on top. On the other hand, in BioWare's own Knights of the Old Republic, your character dramatically gained power, becoming a Jedi and gaining all its perks at record speed... something that felt almost suspiciously too good to be true until the game's big reveal that completely justified your character's remarkable ability to grow in power. Of course, the role-playing genre tends to heavily revolve around the concept of character progression, but almost any kind of game can use fiction to justify and support progression of the player's abilities and a smooth ramp of the complexity of the game rules.

So, coming back to the question posed at the beginning: How to satisfy the mainstream power fantasy while avoiding the dissonance of having the player's lack of experience with a game collide with the protagonist character's strength and know-how? There's no formulaic answer, of course. But games that work hard at this problem I think tend have tighter internal logic, more empathetic protagonists, and a stronger structure than games that just assume you want to be a supersoldier and that you're OK with a few minutes of obligatory tutorial at the beginning even if it has nothing to do with the plot. Assassin's Creed II is a good recent example, a game that had a ton of natural appeal through its fantasy of becoming a cool-as-ice assassin stalking through the back alleys of rennaissance Italy -- but you had to earn your way into that role, learning the ropes as you went along. I didn't like the first couple of hours of that game as much as the rest (I'll come back to this when I write more about exposition), but I think playing through the "origin story" of Ezio made the brunt of the experience of that game all the more rewarding.

In short, I think it's a good thing for a gameworld to justify the protagonist character's ability to change during the course of the game. If I could make whatever game I wanted, I'd make one with a protagonist character who has a significant capacity to grow throughout the game, as a reflection of the player's own growing familiarity with the game rules.