Bad Guys.  They’re very cool.  Awesome even so use them wisely.  They can make or break a story, book, movie, game.  Darth Vader (until those last three abominations) was always more interesting than Luke.  

I really got to thinking about villains after the epic fail of Mass Effect 3.  I was thinking back over the final ten minutes where Shepard is faced with this glowing AI/Star Child who gives you this gibberish reason why the Reapers show up every 50,000 years and kill all organic life, and then the little brat goes on to tell you that he/it controls the Reapers.  

Which means they have no agency.  They’re just the equivalent of big squid shaped guns or knives or clubs being wielded by this new factor that suddenly appears in the final ten minutes of a multiple-hours long game.  Which completely undercuts the tension of this frightening force that has been personified by first Sovereign and then Harbinger in the previous games.  The thing you are told you have to defeat turns out not to be responsible in the ethical sense for it’s actions.  I think they did this to make the idea of allowing the Reapers to survive more palatable — “hey, they weren’t really mass murdering machine intelligences, they weren’t responsible.  No harm to foul, right?”

Yeah, really bad story telling.  Game companies — you need to hire real writers.  But back to bad guys.  First things first.  You need to establish the villain pretty damn early in your story.  You can ramp up the level of threat though that needs to happen at least in the first third of the book, movie, etc., but evil needs to step on stage and take a bow.  You can’t wait until the very end, and then tell me this thing I never heard about or knew about is actually the problem.

Let’s use Dragon Age as an example.  You’re faced with Dark Spawn, and there is a mention of this Archdemon thing.  Then pretty damn early in the game you have a nightmare where you actually see the Archdemon — a mucking big dragon that controls the Dark Spawn.  Whoa, scary, the stakes just got higher, the threat more threatening.  You realize your little Grey Warden is going to have to face this thing.  Yikes.

The bad guy needs to be at least the equal of the hero/heroine, and probably more powerful so that the reader/viewer/player feels tense and worried about the ability of the hero to save the day.  You also have to have a sense that the hero will find a way.  There is something ancient and primeval and that speaks to all of us in the David and Goliath story.  We love stories where the little guy pulls it out and wins against almost impossible odds.  

That is again one of the many problems with Mass Effect 3.  There is nothing you can do to the glowy, pontificating Star Child which leaves you feeling jammed and coerced.  And in fact when, in this new DLC, Bioware offers you a chance to shoot the glowy, pontificating bastard in the face it leads to the destruction of all life in the galaxy.  “Ha ha, you lose, wanna play again?”  Actually, no because I know that the designers of this game just threw me a big finger.

Your bad guys need to not be evil just for the sake of being evil.  There should be nuance to their actions.  They shouldn’t just kick puppies for the hell of it.  Remember, in another version of this story the villain sees themselves as the hero.  Try to put yourself in their shoes, view everything you’re going to have them do through the lens of logical, rational choices.  There is a good reason for what they do, at least in their own minds.

Actually using the villain correctly is how you build tension, and will help you lay out the beats of the plot.  In a sense the villain is driving the action.  Your hero shouldn’t just react, he or she need to protag while they’re being a protagonist, but the actions the hero takes are directly related to the villain’s actions.  Its a push pull tension that will take you to a satisfying resolution.