Weapon of Choice

Recently while reading Brainy Gamers’ article about Heavy Rain I started thinking about player choice in games. I have heard a lot of people making the critique that games only offer an illusion of choice because the story still has to unfold in a certain way. I even heard it from my roommate while playing Heavy Rain just last week. This is kind of a silly complaint. I want to clarify before I begin that Brainy Gamer doesn’t ever say this in his Heavy Rain post, he just got me thinking about this.

While it is true that games don’t really allow the player to do whatever he wishes, there are few insurmountable problems that cause this. The most obvious problem is that in order to have a narrative game, which is the only type of game where this issue could arise, the player cannot be allowed to do whatever he wants. It’s impossible to tell a story when the main character can just kill any other character whenever he wants. What if in Half Life 2: Episode 2 Alyx actually dies anytime you get curious and shoot her in the face? I’d be willing to bet almost everyone shot at her at least once. The entire story would have to change. What if the story was complex enough that it had a ton of characters, the amount of branches the developers would have to create would quickly become astronomical. That’s just thinking about the freedom to kill anyone at any time, what if you could do other things, all altering the story appropriately? Even if someone managed to get over the technical feat this would require, you would no longer be playing a story, you would be writing your own.

The best example I can think of a narrative game that allows you to do whatever you want is the GTA series. In GTA4 you can go out on dates, drink with friends, surf the net, or drive a stolen taxi down a sidewalk leaving dozens of broken corpses in your wake. You can't do anything you wanted, but there was plenty to do in Liberty City. Still, any mission you embarked on relating to the story could only end one way if you were to proceed. Yes, there were maybe three or four key missions that gave you some superficial choice that had little bearing on the story, but overall there was no real choice because it was necessary for Rockstar to prohibit certain actions in order to tell their story. This resulted in critics coming up with newfangled words like ludonarrative dissonance to describe the disconnect players experienced when Nico would take Kate out on a nice date and discuss his desires to escape a life of crime shortly after murdering thirty people on a busy street because he was bored between missions. This type of freedom has its problems. Besides, it is an entirely separate entity from the narrative, so it doesn't address the critique at all.

On the other hand, games like Mass Effect 2 do an interesting job incorporating player choice. Depending on your actions you can be a total jerk, an agent of justice or more realistically anything in between. Pretty much every other game that has a morality systems is superficial and silly, but the Mass Effect series has some subtlety. Shades of gray does wonders for this kind of system. When you get down to the story however, aside from a few major bulletpoints it plays out the same for everyone. I’d put this into the branching storyline category I was talking about earlier. BioWare went with the much more technically feasible approach of only having a half dozen or so branches all ending with essentially the same thing, still leaving players with only an illusion of choice.

I think a current idea is emergent narrative is the solution to this problem. Hell, I get the impression that emergent narrative is the heralded promised land of storytelling in games, period. It is a neat idea, making the focus of the game how the player accomplishes a task rather than the intermittent story his actions interconnected definitely plays to the unique strength of the medium and I would love to see it flourish in the future. However, the poster child for emergent narrative is Far Cry 2 and it has a very rigid story that it adheres too. Clint Hocking and Ubisoft Montreal made the decision to put emphasis on the player experience and provided the player with lots of tools to have a myriad of them. They all have these experiences while going through the exact same story however so player choice only goes as far as how you want to go about killing the next group of guys.

Another games that has done emergent narrative very well is Left4Dead. The stories you hear fellow gamers tell after playing this game are always about their unique experience rather than one specific part of the game everyone went through. Left4Dead might be the best example of a game succeeding in giving the player freedom of choice. Valve provides the players with a setting and really does allow them to write their own story. It is an interesting compromise between narrative and player choice. The only problem is the story Left4Dead tells is hardly of the type that gamers like us are asking for.

What I’m getting at is if we are going to ask for meaningful and interesting stories in our games, we cannot possibly expect them to give us the freedom to do whatever we want within their world. It cannot work on a fundamental level. Besides, I don’t quite see the problem with our current setup. Sure, video games interactivity is what makes them unique from the other art forms, but interacting can still have a very powerful impact without allowing the player to make any meaningful decisions. Just by virtue of being in control of the main character is enough to add that extra layer of feeling that movies and books cannot. The anxiety and pressure I felt during some of the more intense scenes in Heavy Rain and the adrenaline rush I got from certain parts in God of War 3 were far more powerful than if I just watched them on a screen. Kratos doesn't have to have the option to give Zeus a bouquet of flowers and a bucket of puppies instead of punching his face into oblivion for games to truly reach their full potential!

Celebrate liberty by pre-ordering Splinter Cell Conviction

I just got an email from GameStop with the same subject as this article. I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about it, I just thought it was totally absurd and felt like sharing. Can you think of any better way to celebrate your freedom and liberty than by purchasing a game from a faceless corporation several weeks before it's released?

I'm pretty sure I can... but that silenced SPAS-12 is pretty enticing.

Heavy Rain Addendum

Maybe a half hour after posting my Heavy Rain review I realized I forgot to touch on a key point. A large part of what made the game so intense was that it could unfold in quite a few different ways and once you made a decision or a mistake there was no turning back. This meant that if during one of Ethan’s trials you failed and he died, his story was over and he was obviously no longer able to save his son. I’m not entirely sure if you can die in every dangerous situation, but I know every playable character can die and alter the story accordingly. There is no reloading, the story progresses no matter how well you do, which makes every decision and every rapid button press that much more important.

I found this quite interesting because it made death actually mean something in a video game. Joystiq interviewed the Heavy Rain writer and designer David Cage, and he touches on how killing another person is very different in this game as well. I can’t really go into any detail without spoiling anything, and definitely don’t read the interview if you are worried about that. I just found it amazing how with a few small changes killing and dying in a game becomes much more like real life than it ever will be in something like Halo.

Heavy Rain

I finished Heavy Rain yesterday and while I will say it has a lot of problems, it clearly stands out in my mind as being one of the most intense game experiences I’ve ever had. The divided nature of its criticism makes perfect sense. Heavy Rain is not for everyone, it’s bound to displease a few people. That’s just comes with the territory of taking risks I suppose, universal acclaim only seems to come to highly polished and well done versions of established ideas. Games like Uncharted 2 comes to mind, my and many others game of the year for 2009.

Let’s start with the problems before I join the praise brigade. Heavy Rain has a pretty underwhelming introduction. The opening scene felt forced and artificial. At important times even the animation looked wrong, so much so that once the climax had reached I was left feeling more confused than anything else. The game quickly makes up for this problem by having much more polished and moving scenes for the rest of the game. Still, there are a few times when certain characters motivations are left unexplained and once the story was complete I had a few lingering questions. Honestly though, I am willing to overlook them considering the big picture of what Heavy Rain set out to do.

My only other problem is the controls tended to get quite tiresome after an hour or so of playing. Since you could technically call the game one big quicktime event I wasn’t surprised to feel this way. The only times the game isn’t acting like a quicktime event it is plagued by contextual movement based on a constantly changing camera that often times resulted in me walking back and forth erratically trying to figure out the right direction to push the thumbstick. What I was surprised by however was the incredible job Quantic Dreams did at creating some of the most overwhelming and emotional playable sequences using nothing but timed button presses for input. Heavy Rain had me gripping the controller tighter and focusing harder than games that require far faster reflexes and much more complex thumb maneuvers like Devil May Cry.

Despite these problems, I was enthralled by the game and couldn’t put it down. If it wasn’t for having to work an abnormally large number of hours this week, I probably would have finished the game in two play sessions. The story had me guessing until the very end (though that was in part due to the game lying during a particular scene) and combined with excellent graphics and an intense musical score, Heavy Rain definitely delivered the powerful and emotional game they set out too.

I doubt this type of game will become the new norm for quality narrative experiences in games, but there is definitely room in the market for this style. With a bit of refining, I expect this genre will become an important part of the currently unfolding storytelling movement. Still, I’m not entirely sure how successful it will be with a story that doesn’t keep you as engaged as Heavy Rain. The controls are tedious enough at times that if not for absolutely wanting to know what happens next I may have put it down. Overall, I think I’ve made it clear that if you have a PS3 it definitely deserves eight to ten hours of your time. It’s a pretty unique experience that you should check out.