So, those who have paid attention to my last two posts must be wondering: “Wait, what do you mean games aren’t about you? Didn’t you just spend two weeks extolling the ability of games to make stories feel personal and provide next level immersion?” I did do that, and I stand by those statements. At least in theory. However what most games have THE POTENTIAL to be doesn’t always match what games ARE. And the reality is sometimes you can get games that take all the decisions you’ve made and culminate them in a satisfying finale which alters in subtle ways depending on your choices…
…And other times you get games that ignore all of your choices in favor of color coding the ending.
Just in case you are out of the loop I am making a comparison between the ending of Mass Effect 2, which can have any of your team-mates and even the main character die, depending on your choices, to the ending of its sequel Mass Effect 3, which essentially squandered the culmination of three games’ worth of development for three comparable endings that differed mostly in the color of an explosion of light and that didn’t factor in any prior choices. The latter is often brought up as an example of a worrying trend in modern gaming: that of the prevalence of substituting meaningful decisions and variable narrative paths with superficial choices that have absolutely no impact on the plot. This is a common complaint in the gaming community and has the effect of completely ruining the player’s immersion, sometimes to a point where their whole opinion of game becomes wholly negative. Although there is no technical term for this phenomenon, I will henceforth refer to it as The Illusion of Choice(If for no other reason than it sounding cool), and I contend that it is the shattering of this illusion that leads to the failing of a video game narrative.
Of course Mass Effect is not the only example of a game where the Illusion of Choice is broken. Last week I lauded Telltale’s Walking Dead for having a fantastic decision where in the climax of the first arc the player must decide how the main protagonist must die, a choice that was shown to be emotionally resonant with most players. Would it surprise you to know that in spite of moments like that, Telltale actually has a bit of a reputation of creating “choices that don’t matter” and that seem significant on the surface, but have no bearing on the overall story. One particularly infamous example occurs in their adaptation of Game of Thrones. During an early arc you play as a young lord who has to play host for a character who is a known major villainous antagonist. Whether you choose to act passive and subservient to him or rebuff him and protect your sister against his advances, he still stabs you to death at the close of the arc. I mean, you knew he was a villain, but you’d think that if the choice exists to get on his good side, then it would give you SOME chance for survival, especially so since most people would have preferred to tell the smug bastard off if it meant dying anyway.
Many other examples exist; new Fallout games are said to have very simplistic linear narratives when compared to the originals, Cyberpunk’s story is divergent based on what character backstory you pick, but becomes homogenized towards the middle, etc. So why does this happen? How can some games offer compelling and meaningful choices, while others offer decisions that seem trivial as what you’ll eat for lunch?
Well, to start things off, writing stories is haaaaard.
I know, it sounds like I’m stating the obvious, but bear with me. If writing was easy, everyone would do it (now I sound like someone’s dad). A lot of thought needs to go into writing a good story. You need to create interesting and compelling characters, conceive of some kind of central event that puts them into conflict, figure out a series of events that help progress the characters towards their goal while simultaneously endearing them to an audience and helping progress them as individuals, provide interesting hooks or twists that keep the audience paying attention and you must make sure it all makes sense (you think this obvious but how many times have you seen a movie and thought: no you fools, DO NOT SPLIT UP or wouldn’t it solve the problem immediately if they did x instead). Oh yeah… and then you have to actually write it. I can tell you from experience, it is quite soul crushing to think up a great idea, spend hours and days figuring out how it would low, but the second you sit down to write it out you have no idea how to get started. Good writers will power through this obviously, but I hope you can see writing fiction ain’t easy.
That would do it for any regular story, but we’re talking about video game narratives, you’ve just finished step one. One story isn’t enough. You need to figure out multiple endings, different routes of progression, changes in dialogue depending on characters present. If the choices are truly meaningful you need to figure out how one act near the beginning would cascade to impact something in the middle, create some flowcharts to figure out all the branching logic, scrap most of it as the initial plot becomes re-written and start over. Oh yes, but make sure that every single choice is meaningful otherwise the Illusion of Choice becomes broken as the whole game is dismissed and throw in the trash. Of course this is the reason why companies hire teams of writers, because a single one would likely go insane in the meantime.
Oh yeah, this is all assuming the game doesn’t get overhauled in the middle for reasons having nothing to do with the story forcing major parts of the narrative to get rewritten or cut out wholesale. Creating a deep, interactive game with a plethora of choices is great and all, but companies need to focus on the bottom line first of all. They have investors to please, deadlines to meet and quarterly earning reports to bulk up, so sacrifices need to be made somewhere. And when games need to cut out troubled game-play elements, the story inevitably suffers in tandem. This is the sad reality that often causes triple A games to skimp out on creating compelling and diverse video game narratives in favor of safer and more straightforward narratives with broader appeal.
Now I’ll be straight, I don’t know a solution to this problem. I’m just a guy. I can only observe the situation from the side. Indie games suffer from this less as they tend to focus more on getting the experience right as well as often having a singular unified vision. However if this trend continues, it would mean that the mainstream games are increasingly unlikely to be able to deliver complex, decision-oriented narrative, and that’s just… sad.
However, rather than end this own a dour note, I want to present one thought I’ve had. To do so, first I want to introduce one of my favorite “choices” in all of gaming:
You might ask: “What do you mean choice? There’s no choice here.” And in saying that you might be correct, but you wouldn’t be right. Sorry, just making a little F/SN in-joke. Certainly all the options would lead to the same result. But that isn’t the point. In a juncture approaching the climax you are being pursued by an overpowered enemy and the young girl you’re trying to rescue is asking you to save yourself and run away without her. Normally, you would expect a binary choice. But, after everything that has come before, the mistakes the protagonist has made, it is unthinkable that he would choose to leave. And you know this, and you know that you too would do the same in his shoes. So strangely, you feel empowered. Despite the lack of options, you feel empowered. Because in that moment you and the protagonist are on the same page and you want to do right thing. I remember bursting out in excitement when I saw this because the game knew in advance what I was thinking and because I knew exactly what choice I should make.
Granted this example is a little unique, but I think it has the key to designing impactful choices. The problem with moments that break the Illusion of Choice is that they rob the player of their agency in the scope of the story. If you feel like your choices in the game don’t affect anything then why should you care about making them? After all, we get our fill of meaningless decisions in the real world, why would they enjoy having the same thing happen in our escape from that real? You want to feel like your choices meant something, or at least that the choice you made is in some way right.
Let’s reexamine the the pair of Telltale games one last time. In the Walking Dead, the final choice is rather quite meaningless; whether you shoot Lee, or let him turn into a zombie he still dies. But it matters to the girl shooting her father figure and it matters to us who have played the game as that figure. Hence our affections towards the pair gives value to the choice. And, in the case of Game of Thrones, while you cannot change whether the antagonist kills the character, you can impact additional meaning to the event depending on the choices. Imagine if after you’ve chosen to be passive in hopes that he wouldn’t harm you, he not only kills you, but belittles you for thinking that you’d escape his wrath by sucking up to him. Nothing would change, the character would still die, but you’d grow to hate the antagonist a little more. The renewed hate you’d feel at the depths to which the bastard would sink would then justify your choice.
So ultimately it doesn’t matter if the choice is an illusion, it matters if the game can trick us into thinking it matters, that we did the right thing. The choice can have no consequence, no bearing on any of the characters or the plot, but if it can get us to feel something, whether that would be empowerment, hopelessness, affection, anything, our affections give it meaning. In games, just like in real life, things aren’t always fully within our control, that our decisions doesn’t always lead to the result we hoped for, but we can accept it if we feel like the choice means something to us. And that quantum of meaning is enough.
