Many story-driven games offer the player to make choices that will eventually affect further events. It’s crucially important because self-expression and interactivity are the very basics of games, so when it comes to well-elaborated plot players also expect the game to give them an opportunity to influence it as well.
Personally, I am a huge fan of branching storytelling. But, despite the fact that I see statements like “rich and reactive world” and “your choices will have consequences” in almost every trailer of AAA title, I still rarely feel that I have real freedom or an opportunity to express my own view of the world in the game. And I’m not complaining about a small number of possible branches. What I’m talking about is that I felt games usually pressure me to make the decisions they want me to make. And if I don’t, these games punish me. So no matter how many possible outcomes they have, if you have to follow one predefined path or game style to get the best possible experience, it hardly could be called a “self-expression”. To give you an example of such approach let’s dive into choices and consequences in Dishonored.
Decision-making in Dishonored
(spoilers ahead)
The premise of Dishonored is: Corvo Attano, a bodyguard and secret lover of the Empress, is framed for her murder and forced to become an assassin, seeking revenge on those who conspired against him. His ultimate goal is to help his daughter to regain power and become new Empress, while he is aided in his quest by the Loyalists—a resistance group fighting to reclaim Dunwall, and the Outsider—a powerful being who imbues Corvo with magical abilities.
Apart from the accomplishment of side quests, the player can influence the plot by:
His approach to the elimination of main targets. He can either kill villains or neutralize them by other, more complicated and non-violent ways.
His playstyle. The player can either kill enemies or sneak behind them and stun thus avoid any casualties.
This decisions eventually influence the “Chaos Level” of the game - the crueler was the player, the higher Chaos Level in the world will be. Sounds cool, right? And indeed it is, but the catch is how this chaos system manifests itself:
High level of chaos complicates the walkthrough due to the increasing amount of rats, which attacks the player.
High level of chaos leads to the “bad ending” irrespective of anything else. Even if the player saves Emily, the city remains in turmoil and is overrun with the plague.
Thus, despite the fact the game offers the player a lot of abilities and tools to kill enemies, despite the fact that some villains deserve to die, the game still just punishes the player if he does not play the way it was intended. It happens both on the gameplay level (game becomes harder) and on the level of the storytelling (player eventually doesn’t get what he was promised in full).
In this and in many other games with similar decision-making system, our “wrong” ambiguous moral choices lead us to a complete loss. And despite the fact that we can make major decisions that dramatically change the course of the story, we are not allowed to actually express our view of the world or to make a really meaningful choice. We are not choosing between equal options with their advantages and disadvantages, and we are not even choosing between good and evil. We are choosing between, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “to be punished” or “not to be punished”. That’s it.
But such games can have a great story (like Dishonored has), so why this issue happens? Well, with punishments they are trying to deliver a moral message to the player. In the case of Dishonored, the moral message obviously is: “Cruelty is bad because what goes around, comes around.”
So is it a bad idea for games to have a moral lesson? No, it’s a great idea. But I think the way, in which games are trying to teach the player, is very similar to movies. And because of the very basic difference of the story in movies and games, branching storytelling simply can’t deliver the moral message to the player in the same way as movies do.
The problem with teaching players in games
To understand why games can’t teach the player the way in which movies do, let’s firstly take a look at how this purpose is ideally achieved in filmmaking. At a very simplified level, it’s something like this:
There is a protagonist and he has a Desire to get something. But there is also an Obstacle, which prevents him from obtaining what he wants.
The protagonist attempts to overcome an Obstacle, but due to his inner Weakness, he can’t do it. Conflict appears.
The world around the protagonist reacts to his action, encouraging his right decisions, and punishing for the wrong ones. Conflict progresses.
Eventually, the world pushes protagonist to his limits, and he either changes, defeats his inner Weakness, overcomes the Obstacle and gets what was Desired, OR he doesn't change and doesn't defeat his Weakness, thus he gets nothing and the world tears the main character apart.
We as the audience watch how the world tries to “teach” the protagonist a lesson which he needs so badly. And eventually, through his struggles and change (or absence of change) we ourselves learn this lesson about how the world works.
So why this path doesn't work for games with branching narrative? Well, there is one major issue: to teach the audience a lesson, movies use the protagonist as the medium for showing valuable inner change. But in games, the player IS THE PROTAGONIST. Thus he can’t be used as a medium, because:
Player (the protagonist) not necessarily follow the Desire. He also can do something because of his personal preferences or just out of curiosity.
The player initially doesn’t have an inner Weakness the story requires him to have.
When the world tries to push him in a certain direction, the player doesn’t reckon it as a signal to change himself. He perceives it simply as a signal that he is playing the game wrong and he must choose another path to win (for Dishonored it’s: “To win in this game you must be stealthy and kill as few enemies as possible.”).
Does it all mean that games can’t help the player to learn some useful moral lesson? No, it doesn’t. Games just need to use a different approach rather than emulate movies in this question. And to explore this approach, let’s analyze the game which, in my opinion, did a great job in delivering a moral insight. Surprisingly, it’s not an RPG or an interactive thriller. It’s a recent heavily story-driven strategy Frostpunk.
Decision-making in Frostpunk
Frostpunk is a city-building survival game in which the player is the leader of a group of survivors who are trying to stay alive in an apocalyptic ice desert. The player has to take care not only of the amount of food and temperature but also of upholding people’s morale and hope. In order to help his men to survive the player has to make tough decisions.
And what is so special about Frostpunk? Many other games also feature “making tough decisions” (I already hate this cliche). Well, firstly, no matter how horrifying your choice is - the game doesn’t try to stop or punish or patronize you. Want to force children to work 24 hours at factories? No problem. Kill injured people instead of treating them? You’re welcome. Don't shelter other explorers and let them die in the ice desert? OK, boss. The game gives you complete freedom to do what is needed (or what is easier?) to save the city.
But the real magic happens after the player opens two paths: Order and Faith. They give him a possibility to establish new laws to “give people a goal” and ultimately increase the player's ability to control the city. Each new law empowers him and step by step slowly leads to authoritarianism through the increasing influence of the chosen path on people's lives and brainwashing humans minds. And there is no one to stop you or even to say that you could be wrong.
After some time, thanks to an incredible living world, you just see that society has indeed changed. In case of Faith path, people pray every morning and night, they organize ceremonial proces
