Yes, I absolutely love this model for villains!! It got me thinking about villains in video games, of course. Pious in Eternal Darkness is a great example of the model you propose, even as he's handled in a surprising way: you begin the game by, as the player, "making the choice" (but sadly not a choice at all) that clarifies Pious' role in the story -- to uncover forbidden knowledge -- the threat Pious represents to the player for the rest of the game is that the forbidden knowledge you keep uncovering will kill you / destroy your mind, and the world will be destroyed. This threat is particularly powerful, because the player plays so many characters, but it remains a constant throughline: whether you are a slave in Angkor Wat, a European monk, or a badass firefighter during the Iraq war, you're delving into Secrets Best Left Buried, and hoping that your combination of smarts / mental fortitude / gun will allow you to control these Secrets, rather than be controlled by them.
It's true! And in this way Pious (who I keep typing up as Pius, which is what it would be in Latin dangit) serves as a dark mirror to the player character, an ominous shadow. You get the sense that Pius is in fact doing exactly the same sort of thing your more heroic characters are doing. So all along you ask, what separates us? (Aside from all the genocide and human sacrifice of course... "Weeeee are not so different you and Iiiiiiiii")
Yes, I absolutely love this model for villains!! It got me thinking about villains in video games, of course. Pious in Eternal Darkness is a great example of the model you propose, even as he's handled in a surprising way: you begin the game by, as the player, "making the choice" (but sadly not a choice at all) that clarifies Pious' role in the story -- to uncover forbidden knowledge -- the threat Pious represents to the player for the rest of the game is that the forbidden knowledge you keep uncovering will kill you / destroy your mind, and the world will be destroyed. This threat is particularly powerful, because the player plays so many characters, but it remains a constant throughline: whether you are a slave in Angkor Wat, a European monk, or a badass firefighter during the Iraq war, you're delving into Secrets Best Left Buried, and hoping that your combination of smarts / mental fortitude / gun will allow you to control these Secrets, rather than be controlled by them.
It's true! And in this way Pious (who I keep typing up as Pius, which is what it would be in Latin dangit) serves as a dark mirror to the player character, an ominous shadow. You get the sense that Pius is in fact doing exactly the same sort of thing your more heroic characters are doing. So all along you ask, what separates us? (Aside from all the genocide and human sacrifice of course... "Weeeee are not so different you and Iiiiiiiii")