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Player Choice, and the Illusion of Same

Player choice is one heck of an idea. It's also a bit ambiguous as far as fancy meta-ludology talk goes. I mean, the player really has all sorts of choices before even taking into account the game's breadth of narrative or progression options. They could even choose to stop playing, which is perhaps the sort of concern that should be at the forefront of a developer's mind before making any design decision.

Specifically, though, we're talking about the instances in games where the player is able to affect the story or their own character's development in a way solely of their choosing, preferably from multiple discrete and readily apparent options. Do they pick a mage or a fighter? If they need cash, do they help the village for a quest reward or pillage it for its valuables directly? Do they drop the nearly expended assault rifle for the less powerful SMG, or risk the chance that they'll find some ammo for the former soon enough? Ideally, games should have as many of these as possible, and be balanced in such a way that the solutions to these dilemmas have equally valid outcomes.

Balance is never an easy thing to get right, though, so sometimes a game will simply present the illusion of choice. The mage and the fighter can coalesce into the same class with the right stat management, or by using a weapon that scales with magic power or, conversely, self-buff spells which enhance the fighter's ability to take hits and lead the charge. They can both rob the village and help it, due to the NPC villagers' inattentiveness towards the status of their belongings and how they're really more concerned with the ogre stealing their children than they are with the three gold pieces they hid in a boot back in their home. And yeah, spoilers, there'll probably be another chance to grab an assault rifle later if you forsake the one you're holding now.

The following games have two things in common: I played them this week (or watched someone play them, at least) and they have an interesting approach to player choice. Specifically, they go out of their way to suggest that player choice is largely an illusion and that the course of history flows as it must. The future refuses to change, and all that.

Bioshock Infinite

Booker DeWitt, here being played by Zaeed Massani for whatever reason.
Booker DeWitt, here being played by Zaeed Massani for whatever reason.

Bioshock Infinite's a new Bioshock, as made evidently clear by the reappearances of various characteristic tropes established in the first two games and their DLC side-content. There's a lighthouse, there's an enigmatic leading man, there's an innocent damsel or several in need of saving and there's an enormous and scientifically implausible utopia led astray by the socially destructive philosophies of its leader. The repressed lower classes taking down the idealistic and morally bankrupt upper classes. Fireballs and swarms of creatures summoned from one's hands. Looting food out of trashcans for minimal health gain. It's all here and accounted for. There was even an Extra Credits episode that took the game to task for being so blindly unwavering to the franchise's pre-established formula, as if the new setting would put it at risk of confusing people.

Bioshock Infinite already anticipated all this, though. It knows precisely what it's doing, adhering so closely to the existing Bioshock model. Maybe this is a narrative crutch to excuse some lazy parallel game design, but the nature of Bioshock Infinite and of Bioshock in general is inexorably linked to the idea of player choice. The game presents a plethora of options for each of its combat encounters, ranging from taking down enemies with special "magical" attacks a la vigors or plasmids, the numerous anachronistic guns, and using the hazardous environment or even their own antagonism against them, reflecting their bullets or press-ganging hostile machines to fight on your behalf. But you still need to kill all the enemies to continue. The story only proceeds once each of these encounters are dealt with, regardless of how you choose to conclude them.

Bioshock Infinite dumps you in an alternate timeline that you never actually return from. But it's not worth quibbling over the minor details, its point still stands.
Bioshock Infinite dumps you in an alternate timeline that you never actually return from. But it's not worth quibbling over the minor details, its point still stands.

Without getting into the game's ending, which is trippy no matter how you slice it, the game's central conceit is that things tend to proceed as they must and it's difficult to "break the circle". Numerous allusions to such are given throughout the game, though it's nigh impossible to comprehend their relevance the first time through. The narrative elements of fate and choice also apply to the player's experience as well, through as linear a tale as can be expected of the shooter genre. With these games, the story's often less of a concern than the gameplay after all (which I actually found kind of disappointing in many respects, but then I've never been a particular fan of FPS games in the first place and this is really neither the place nor time). Infinite's got something of a subversive, knowing edge to it and to its narrative limitations, and discovering that Ken Levine would rather work on a movie than games for a while came as no surprise given the underlying message of Bioshock Infinite: If everything's going to end up in the same place with the same people, regardless of the route it takes to get there, then why even present the illusion that the player has any say in where the story is going?

The Stanley Parable

This is me, posting a screenshot of The Stanley Parable. It's not called HD Remix any more.
This is me, posting a screenshot of The Stanley Parable. It's not called HD Remix any more.

The Stanley Parable is one of the most depressing games I've ever played.

Probably not a common reaction. I'll be darned if it doesn't go out of its way to either pontificate on the mundane pointlessness of life, the numerous problems that game designers must face in their craft or, most vitally for this blog, the limitations and illusions of player choice. Each successive ending that veers from the correct story, i.e. the one the narrator helpfully sets out for you to follow, leads to denigration of the player (well, specifically towards the protagonist Stanley, who is the entirely mute player cipher), endless contemplation on the nature of things and plaintive downer conclusions. I'd give you examples, but that would detract from the core of the game. Knowing one of Stanley Parable's endings before playing it would be like eliminating one of the better designed boss encounters from an action game - it's ostensibly the purpose of playing it in the first place, even if you wouldn't know that going in. It is, ultimately, the source of one's enjoyment of the game. Well, supposedly at least, because as you might've already ascertained from that opening statement I really didn't enjoy playing The Stanley Parable.

That's not to cast aspersions on the game itself, which has definitely been made with a lot of care and attention, and its vocal performance from the narrator is absolutely wonderful. It's simply a case of encountering a game that clearly wasn't right for me, that while chooses to interact with me on a comparative intellectual level does not do so with full regard to my mental state, which is generally shaky at best. So while I'm suffering through its many amusingly fatalistic interludes and diatribes on the meaninglessness of video game logic and of life in general, I stray ever closer to simply turning the game off and curling up the fetal position until I'm forced, via hunger or bathroom urgency, to resume the pathetic charade I call my existence.

Boy, I'm super cheery today. Thanks The Stanley Parable. You should all play it, especially if you felt motivated to get anything done today.

Ah, the doors. Which do you pick? Spoilers: You suck either way, and the game will tell you precisely why.
Ah, the doors. Which do you pick? Spoilers: You suck either way, and the game will tell you precisely why.

But I suppose I can spend a few more minutes here to discuss how this game pertains to the blog's central topic before I end up having a mental breakdown by giving any more thought to it. You see, the most important lesson The Stanley Parable has to impart is that player choice in video games, especially interactive fiction, is generally immaterial at best and a deceptive fallacy at worst. You can follow the game's clearly defined linear path, you can follow a different yet equally deliberate linear path to what you feel is an ending that's a better fit for your "subversive personality", or you can break it somehow and force it to start over or end abruptly absent any kind of resolution. TSP is a game in which all these considerations are anticipated and prepared for, with alternate endings for each decision made, even for the ones that would appear as if you've pulled the wool over its eyes. It's an impressive feat of covering all of one's bases, and might suggest that the original designer has spent a considerable amount of time doing game testing for a living, but what's important to note is that by doing this the game kind of inadvertently ruins all other games for you. It does this overtly in a few of its sequences, parodying a few major games and game features, but it's largely in the way it means to lift the veil over one's eyes that makes the experience nothing short of a thorough deconstruction of our favorite hobby. As a game designer, or at least someone who was one for a sufficiently long enough time to learn a thing or two, it's not like I hold any delusions as to the construction and the myriad technical hurdles concerning game development. I know how the sausage is made, so to speak. Yet it's still dispiriting to be reminded of gaming's current shortcomings, even in the lighthearted satirical manner that The Stanley Parable exhibits. Maybe that's what's bumming me out the most about all this.

You know what? I think I will assume that fetal position I was talking about earlier. I'll just leave all this in the word processor until I feel well enough to come back. See you soon, everyone.

Demon's/Dark Souls

It's us. The livestream audience. We're the dark souls. Well, us and Vinny.
It's us. The livestream audience. We're the dark souls. Well, us and Vinny.

Now Dark Souls is perhaps one of the least constrained games in recent memory, even compared to the many open-world games available like Skyrim or GTA V. Those games had far stricter storylines to follow, for one thing, and while Dark Souls does ask that you defeat certain bosses in a certain order to reach its end, it doesn't give you any particular guidelines for doing so. Almost to its detriment, even. So how does player choice and the illusion of same factor into From Software's gothic RPG series?

Well, in this case the player choice is illusionary simply because everyone who completes the game feels like they chose the correct path from a pool of multiple inferior ones. That the way they defeated the game is ideal; the rest all pale imitations of the "One True Path". It is an illusion, of course, because we know enough about the nature of Dark Souls (and to much the same extent its predecessor Demon's Souls) that the player is entirely free to choose whichever build and weapon and tactics suit them best and could still feasibly power through to the end regardless of the level of challenge presented. Tanking isn't for everyone, not everyone likes the weird little awkward lunges that the halberd makes nor do they necessarily appreciate the weapon's speed, not everyone's going to go fight the Moonlight Butterfly or go through the Catacombs immediately just because they happen to be accessible early in the game and people are still going to assume there are stats other than Endurance worth pouring their stat points into. And that's fine. But for some reason, so many of us have convinced ourselves of which is the better choice of equipment or the dominant strategy for a specific boss encounter based on the study of their AI and statistical weaknesses made by dozens of previous players, that we'll scream and yell, internally or externally, at those still in the midst of their journey to "play it right, goddammit".

Black phantoms usually take a more demonstrative method of proving why your current equipment load-out is insufficient.
Black phantoms usually take a more demonstrative method of proving why your current equipment load-out is insufficient.

This was never made more evident this past month than by watching the streams of Patrick Klepek, Jeff Green and Brad Shoemaker (the last of whom is playing Demon's, rather than Dark). Jeff especially, since he would often take to the Twitch chat or a NeoGAF thread on the topic in times of need. Everyone had an idea of what he ought to be doing, but so often these pro-tips would clash and contradict each other as everyone scrambled to put forward their preferred method for getting through a particular scenario. Whether Patrick was cognizant of this discordance or not, his laissez-faire approach to the game and its many advisers served him well, but a small fraction of his viewers would constantly wonder how much of the game he read up on in advance, especially when he would proceed to breeze through difficult encounters with ease. The grandest trick that Dark Souls pulls has nothing to do with its well-hidden treasures or illusionary walls, but in how it convinces players that their path, either divined by the ongoing internet groupthink or entirely of their own conception, is not only the correct one but the sole correct one. We know, deep down, this isn't true. So then why do we scream at Brad to go after the Crescent Falchion instead of attempting to fight the World 4-1 boss again?

That's enough words for today. I'm still too depressed from this morning. Good thing we have Unprofessional Fridays to look forward to later today, I could use it. Thanks for stopping by, and I'm sorry it was such a buzzkill. I'm usually so chipper I swear.

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