ask: remedy protags/jack joyce

Lauren asked:

Your post “max payne is a positive male role model” where you talk about Max Payne experiencing actual complicated thoughts, and you mention Remedy protagonists being generally coherent and interesting. I played Max Payne through for the first time earlier this year and was caught offguard by him being relieved that his revenge quest may have some posthoc justification, but also horrified at the thought. More thoughtful than many video games today let alone for 2001…!

I wanted to ask though how do you feel about Jack Joyce in Quantum Break? I’ve played every 3D Remedy game now (except Max Payne 2) and Jack Joyce felt like an unpleasant dud to me. He has a voiceover from the framing device of an interview with a Monarch employee but he felt (to me) remarkably thoughtless compared to every other Remedy protag… what do you think?

I more or less agree with you. I love Quantum Break and felt similarly about Jack Joyce; I don’t find him unpleasant but he’s very nothing. Everyone else is more interesting than him, he’s sort of purely an avatar, performing the bare minimum narrative duties expected of him. I suppose this is on purpose? It’s very accurate to the type of movie the game wants to be.

Max Payne’s an interesting comparison because both games are loving homages to one or more pulpy low-brow genres; Max is fun cheap noir/Hong Kong action films, Quantum Break is non-self-serious sci-fi action blockbuster/juvenile sci-fi novel, but they also both go far beyond homage to become really substantial on their own. I think you could argue that the depth and development you get with Max himself is a point of divergence with its source material; traditionally it’s considered “enough” in one of these for the hero to be cool and moody and competent, you needn’t make him thoughtful.

Quantum Break doesn’t diverge in this way. Jack is no more of a character than, I don’t know, Keanu in Chain Reaction or something. He’s boringly competent, he doesn’t really react in wonderment at anything crazy, or particularly grieve when someone dies, but that is sort of consistent with this type of movie? And maybe novel, too – I don’t know, I read a bunch of Heinlein as a kid and he also seemed to often forget to have his protagonists feel anything.

Even if it’s deliberate, though, I do think it would have been better to humanise Joyce more, maybe instead devoting hours of live-action cutscene to the Monarch hacker nerd. He ends up feeling weirdly isolated from the rest of the cast, who all get more to work with than Ashmore does. He seems like he could handle it!

I feel like Jesse, protag of Control, has something of the Jack Joyce disease; there’s more of a sense that she has complicated feelings about things, but we mostly have to guess them even though we’re in her head, and her behaviour’s not consistent enough for me to feel like I can infer her motivations with confidence. Her brother in the new one fares better. Alan Wake, I think, is an interesting comparison as well; he’s presented similarly to Jesse but he’s explicitly conceited and oblivious, so his bullshit lands better. I think more games should play with “inner monologue of a medium-sized asshole”.

Also, you must play Max Payne 2! It’s the best one.