In the
last post, I discussed the way in which games make the player part of the
narrative, which is part of what makes them such a fascinating medium. Yet
there’s something else they can do which is even more remarkable and
revolutionary, something that’s really come to the fore in the last few years
thanks to a rash of choice-focused games. Game players can not only take part
in a narrative, they can actually shape it,
decide on its course.
Theoretically,
this can happen in just about any game which features a narrative to some
extent; the player jumps at the wrong time and, rather than confronting Bowser
and freeing Peach and a succession of Toads, Mario meets an ignominious end in
a fiery pit. But there’s still a linear, set narrative involved; it’s generally
impossible to choose to side with Bowser, entertaining as that prospect is*.
Increasingly, though, games are offering players freedom of choice not only in
how they play the game, but how the game’s narrative unfolds.
I
daresay Bioware would, rightly or otherwise, consider themselves the most
prominent champions of this trend, beginning with the D&D-inflected Baldur’s Gate games. The Mass Effect and Dragon Age series have offered a narrative that unfolds over the
course of several games, altering in response to the player’s actions such that
subplots in the third game of the series depend on decisions made in the first.
Then there’s Telltale, whose games make a point of informing the player at the
beginning that the story changes in response to their decisions. Characters
(apart from the protagonist) live or die based on the player’s actions, and
scenes can progress in entirely different ways based on decisions made
previously.
There’s
a pitfall that both of these examples fall into, though. Simply put, the
narrative isn’t mutable enough for
many players. Bioware’s Mass Effect 3
in particular attracted a great deal of criticism for its ending, which seemed
to many players to negate their choices; they felt excluded from the ending of
a story which they had essentially helped to craft. There is often a sense with
Telltale too that the effects of one’s actions are little more than cosmetic;
the story still goes to the same place, taking much the same course, no matter
what you do. It’s still brilliant interactive storytelling, but it can feel
frustrating once you start comparing notes with other players and realising how
little that decision you agonised over really mattered.
This
partly stems from technical limitations, of course. Unlike a tabletop RPG
session, where the story, via the gamemaster, can evolve in all kinds of
unexpected ways based on the unforeseen actions of the player characters, only
a certain number of possible paths can be coded into a video game – hence a
limited number of choices, in action and dialogue. The trick is always to
create the illusion of total freedom
and unpredictability within the story, at least for the first playthrough.
Effective immersion is key here; smoke and mirrors to obfuscate the technical
workings. When I first played Persona 4 (full
disclosure: my favourite game of all time), I assumed that the dialogue choices
and relationships with characters mattered, that they affected the course of
the story; only discovering that most (though not all) are cosmetic on
subsequent playthroughs. But, crucially, the story and characters drew me in
enough to create the illusion that I could affect this world, and then enough
that I didn’t care much once the illusion was shattered.
Even
if a fully player-shaped narrative is more elusive than it might seem**,
though, there’s still a lot to be said for the notion of player choice in
games. For one thing, it heightens the sense of immersion which I talked about
in the last post, by giving you more influence over the game world and events.
For another, it allows for a customisable experience; a great talking point
with friends, even if “So who did you
choose to kill?” is a fairly worrying thing to overhear in casual conversation.
Even
more remarkably, it allows for the ability to experience essentially the same story
in different ways, the much-touted “replay value”. The more agency the player
has over it, the more the story becomes mutable. In fact, many games encourage
replaying the game from a different perspective, even if that’s something as
simple as the choice between a male and a female character, as in Persona 3 (a choice which, in this case,
does have a significant effect on the relationships at the heart of the game).
One of
my go-to examples of the concept of divergent paths in game narrative is (not
coincidentally) one of my favourite games, Virtue’s
Last Reward. The game is essentially a visual novel which features a
limited number of crucial decisions; which door to enter, and whether to “ally”
or “betray” in the Prisoner’s Dilemma-style challenge at the heart of the
game’s story. Each of these decisions leads the player down a separate path,
like a variety of universes within a multiverse (a concept which is in fact
significant within the game). Some decisions, as in many visual novels, will
lead to “bad ends”, usually death, while others lead to “good ends”, usually
centred around a resolution to one of the game’s various mysteries. So far, so
normal. Where the game is unique is that it features a flowchart, accessible at
most points in the game, allowing you to jump between unlocked paths (warning: this
image is potentially spoilery):
 |
| It's not a short game. |
This is crucial, because the game requires you to use
information from one path (a code to deactivate a bomb, a computer password) in
order to progress in another. Naturally, this means that, while not every
variant on every decision has to be experienced (the bad ends are optional),
the player has to consider consequences carefully, and figure out where each
decision might lead them. Every major path, though not every branch, has to be
played through to finish the game, and so the narrative takes on a curious
non-linear form, where the only constant is the protagonist’s consciousness.
In a
sense, the logical conclusion of the “many paths” approach is something like
what’s being done with Fire Emblem Fates.
The game features at its core a momentous decision of which of two kingdoms to
side with, and is being sold as two separate retail versions, one for each side
of the decision***. At first glance, this might seem excessive and
money-grubbing, but that one decision changes the entire game from that point
on – the characters you meet, the battles you fight, etc. The decision to
separate the campaigns not only allows for a much bigger game overall, but
highlights the significance of player choice – just by choosing which version
to buy, the player is already determining their character’s fate (so to speak).
If anything, I’m surprised that it’s taken Fire
Emblem, a series in which your tactical decisions can lead to the deaths of
characters, this long to come around to the notion of player decisions being at
the heart of the story.
If
there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to pique my interest in a game, it’s the
notion of player choice being significant; whether that’s framed as creating
one’s own character through dialogue choice, having multiple routes through a
game/level, or simply the ever-popular multiple endings. It’s why I’m so
passionate about gaming as a narrative medium - it allows the player to act as
co-author of the story they’re experiencing. Even something as simple as
dialogue choices help to draw the player in and make them feel like this world,
this experience, is fundamentally theirs.
* - The first generation of Pokémon games (Red/Blue/Yellow)
contained an unavoidable NPC who would ask the player if they wanted to join
the villainous Team Rocket. There was no “yes” option, something for which I
felt hurt and betrayed throughout my childhood.
** - Actually, the closest thing to a truly
player-shaped narrative is probably the meaning imposed by fan communities. We
saw this prominently in the last couple of years with the absurd masses of lore
retroactively imposed on the fairly basic horror game Five Nights at Freddy’s and its interminable sequels by fan
overanalysis. Far more interesting were the strange memes spawned by the
unmitigated chaos of Twitch Plays Pokémon,
in which random acts were given quasi-religious meaning by an audience who were
collectively simultaneously spectator and player.
*** - There is a third, DLC-only option which involves
siding with neither kingdom. Some fans have criticised this, seeing this option
as the “true ending”, and lamenting having to pay more for it. Not having
played any version of the game yet, I can’t speak with any authority, but my
sense is that there is no “true ending”; that the three versions of the game
are equally weighted.
