Originally a series of tweets from my Twitter, @an_enemy_stand. Spoilers throughout.
Since turning my friends on to Dungeons & Dragons, some have said they’ve been spoiled for video games where “lasting, important choices” are part of the marketing.
When I played Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, there was a sense that not matter what I did, the world would continue to get worse.
I had not played the original Deus Ex at the time, and I still have yet to do so, but I was aware of it. I knew this was a pessimistic cyberpunk (there’s an oxymoron) prequel to a pessimistic cyberpunk story, but there was still this incredible sense of futility that seemed wholly original to this particular game.
There were all these decisions to make about who I thought protagonist Adam Jensen was, how he thought, what he valued. I initially decided to go for the nonlethal stealth route to gameplay because Adam didn’t seem like the kind of person to go into a potential firefight like this was a John Woo movie. In fact, the reason Sarif Industries hired him in the first place was because he was kicked out of SWAT for not firing on a physically augmented but unarmed teenager. When I switched to a lethal stealth route, I did have mechanical “I’m playing a video game” reason for it, but I personally justified it as Adam coming to a decision that if he’s going to investigate what are apparently government-sponsored terrorists, he’s going to have to play for keeps. When I had to make even the smallest of moral decisions, I tried my best to follow where I thought Adam would allow his conscience to lead him.
And that’s all great.
But there was still this nagging feeling in the back of my mind – even as I pressed the button labeled “Tell everyone everything about the conspiracies” – that none of this really mattered. This wasn’t going to change anything. Again, I knew this was all the set-up to a dystopian status quo, but the futility was baked into the writing as much as any discussion of human augmentation.
The big tagline for Human Revolution was Adam Jensen saying, regarding his augmentations, “I didn’t ask for this.” And he truly did not – when his body was broken and bloodied, his employer, David Sarif, took the liberty of replacing not just irreparably damaged limbs and organs with robotic copies, but perfectly functional ones as well. Was this moral? Was this ethical? Is Adam okay with being a cyborg? The answers to all these questions are a resounding “no”, but none of that matters, because he signed a contract that included a loophole giving Sarif sole control over his medical treatment, if Adam himself was unable to make a decision. Adam just has to live with it.
When I played Bioware’s Mass Effect 3, I again got the sense that my choices didn’t matter, but this was because the writers seemed to actively not care about following player choices, in a way that harmed the story. In the first game, did you have mercy on a dying insectoid race, or did you commit genocide on her species so they can never threaten the galaxy ? Doesn’t matter, the race always appears as enemies lead by a queen/”queen thrall” in the third game. In the second game, did you save the highly advanced enemy base for study, or did you blow it to smithereens on your way out for the express purpose of keeping such technological advances out of terrorist hands? Doesn’t matter, the terrorists get the tech either way in the third game. These things were going to happen no matter how little sense it made, because the writers said so.
Now, obviously video games cannot emulate the level of freedom (or the illusion of it) present in a tabletop RPG. Video games are a prepackaged, largely set experience, like a board game. Tabletop campaigns are made on the fly, with the players and the writer (or should it be “developer”?) acting in concert to construct the story, like improv theater.
So how do you emulate choice in a way that feels “real” – for that is the aim of all stories – when you’re locked into the writer’s path? Do you do what Human Revolution did and create a world and story that revolve around how ultimately what you want really doesn’t matter at all?
Ubisoft’s 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia was a visually stunning action-platformer romp that had a grand total of one choice in it, and it wasn’t even a choice to begin with. Either you release an ancient evil once more to save the woman you love, or you don’t finish the game. But in that moment, I wasn’t mad at the writer for making me do this. On the contrary, it seemed entirely right that The Prince would make this decision – to him, there really is no other option.
More similar to Human Revolution is Rockstar Games’ love-letter/eulogy to spaghetti westerns, Red Dead Redemption. Deus Ex’s other tagline translates well: “It’s not the end of the Wild West, but you can see it from here.” As soon as the credits roll, we see that the days of the gunslinger on horseback are all but over – when protagonist John Marston arrives on the scene, so does a Model T. The world is changing, with or without him. Even Marston’s old gang leader knows it – their Robin-Hood-like campaign to keep the West free of Big Government deteriorating into general outlawry in the face of new technology and the bureaucracy that came with it.
If all the medium can allow for are choices that are illusory as the images on the screen, then why not be open about it? The solution seems to be not to write a story in which player choice is illusory, but in which the larger world operates on many more choices that the player characters – and thus the players – have no control over. All they can ultimately change are themselves.
Through a Touchscreen, Darkly 