Games still struggle to offer players meaningful choices that enrich the story, rather than distract from it.
Hands up who has spent at least five minutes agonising over a decision in a game. Fifteen minutes? An hour?
It’s strange, isn’t it? Even when a choice has little or no impact on the rest of the game, it can still have plenty of emotional pull. We don’t want to get it wrong, especially if it affects other people – determining the fate of an NPC can drive a certain kind of gamer to insomnia and put a game on hold for days.
When I had to choose the fate of an entire species in Mass Effect, I went through three straight cups of tea before I made the choice.
Mass Effect is full of tough choices; they’re part of the reason people love the first game (god knows it’s not for the combat). Where Halo’s all about the shooting, Mass Effect’s about making decisions – you decide where to go, what to say, who to help, who to foil, who to kill and who to spare. And you decide how much of a bastard you’ll be while doing it. It sits very much within Sid Meier’s philosophy that a good game is “a series of interesting choices”; even the lacklustre combat is more about choosing between skills and upgrades than it is about aiming.
If you’ve played it, you’ll appreciate the consternation people are feeling over Mass Effect 2’s revisionism if your save file from the original game is unavailable. I sympathise with that anxiety, although mostly I’m just pleased that Bioware has allowed this continuity in the first place – too many sequels ignore the choices you made in their predecessor and rewrite history to be more convenient.
(I’m just bitter because I never agreed to work for the G-man.)
Choice in games is important; it’s one of the defining characteristics of games, the definitive characteristic according to some. Anti-games crusaders decry it as the dangerous difference between films and games. Games reviewers praise it or lament its absence. Developers seek new, more exciting, more meaningful ways to provide it to players. Marketers hype it up in pre-release time with grand, often exaggerated rhetoric. Academics speculate on its psychological influence.
It’s a big deal.
Bioware obviously understands this, because they did a lot to make Mass Effect feel like a galaxy full of choices rather than, say, a corridor full of sons of bitches. And it works – you often feel as though you’re affecting the story instead of being an impartial observer. But at a structural level, you’re not: it’s an illusion. You’ll go through all the same plot points regardless of what choices you make along the way.
This is typical of story-based games, and it’s easy to see why – it’s wildly inefficient for developers to create truly branching story paths for pre-scripted games, so the result of your choices is usually something like a small modifier to NPC reactions or a cosmetic change to your avatar. The game usually gives you no way to proceed without carrying out the hero’s quest.
BioShock is one of the few games to acknowledge this restriction and address it directly. The power to choose is the major thematic concern of BioShock, and yet throughout the game choices are forced upon you. Whether or not this complements the narrative or, as Clint Hocking has argued, undermines its message, the way in which the game forces your decision is uniquely videogamey: there’s nowhere else to go. If you disagree with the course of action presented to you, you do it anyway simply because there is nothing else to do other than quit the game or wander the space aimlessly.
There are a few exceptions to this predestined videogame story model, from the exploration-based vignettes in Fallout 3 to the more open social narratives of MMOs. One interesting example is a game series that uses almost entirely predetermined plots: Grand Theft Auto.
The Grand Theft Auto series has a paradoxical story structure; each game in the series is designed to be completely open, from the freedom of travel around the city to the lower-level mechanics such as the negligible penalties for dying or being arrested. The game encourages the player to take risks and break laws – the missions that form the story nod at this freedom, allowing the player to pick from two or three missions available at a time and to undertake them in their own time. But aside from slight variations in the order of missions, the story arc is almost entirely pre-set. Grand Theft Auto IV, for example, presents only three big decisions during its central plot, only one of which alters the missions that follow in any substantial way; arguably none of them make a significant difference to the story arc of the protagonist, Niko Bellic.
The unusual thing about the missions of Grand Theft Auto is that they are set within the context of a normal life. There are a multitude of things to do as an alternative to the succession of heists and murders offered by the main story – unlike most games, there’s life outside the quest.
In GTAIV and its expansions, you can turn down the shady offers to work for various crime lords and decide to make a living as a taxi driver instead. You can shoot pool or go to the pub with your friends, surf the internet, write to your mum, court a potential girlfriend and make new friends on the street. You can listen to the radio. You can watch TV. You can play a videogame.
You can live and work productively for a year in Liberty City without ever breaking a law. You probably won’t, and it wouldn’t help you to complete the main story, but it’s entirely playable.
What that means is that the choice to engage in the main story missions is more explicitly a choice. Unlike Mass Effect, BioShock and the vast majority of narrative games, engaging with the story is a decision that has to be made while you play the game, not something that you do by default. It adds a dimension to the ultimately tragic story arc told in each game’s missions and cutscenes. If you’re saddened by how the life of Niko or Johnny or Luis turns out, you can share in a small part of the guilt – after all, unlike most game characters, they could have stayed home and watched TV.
Related posts:
- RKD on… 2010: Part 5 – Dealing with death
- The game narrative triangle
- Who killed the high score? Part 2: RIPG
Tags: choice, Grand Theft Auto, Mass Effect
[...] As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to sit down and get as far through it as I can. It’s my choice to spend some of my precious weekend on something that many would consider stupid and wasteful. [...]