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.
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.