Dead Pixels has 41 chronicles

1. Choose Your Own Adventure
   

   Player Chronicle -- Posted on May 18 2009

   Dead Pixels
   By Ryan M. Eft
   5/18/09
   
   It wasn’t so very long ago when games followed a certain path, to a certain goal.
   
   The sense of achievement came from racking up a high score or finding all of the items, or something tangible. If there were any decisions to be made, they were along the lines of “Do I take this path to the end? Or this path?” Either way presented the same outcome, with maybe different things to find along the way. There might be hidden rooms or a warp whistle, but the end result was always the same.
   
   Maybe we should call that the era of instant gratification. Whatever we call it, we’re certainly not there now.
   
   Choice. Depending on what you want out of games, it’s either the most important word in the industry right now, or an annoying buzzword that marketing demands be put on the back of every box to complicate an otherwise simple game. I certainly need a quick-and-light experience every now and then, and in fact recently had a blast cutting people up with Wolverine’s adamantium claws. But for the sake of this week’s discussion, we’re going to go with “choice, in general, is good”.
   
   I hardly need to go into the amount of games that taunt choices. The games that successfully implement them are fewer. Bioshock (an otherwise great game) made a big deal out of affecting your environment,, before boiling the “choice” down to being either a saint or a total ass. The original Fable has become the poster boy for the Land of Failed Choice, promising a lot and offering comparatively little.
   
   Fortunately, things change quick in the land of gaming. The second Fable title presented a lot more in the way of choice (it may also have helped that Lionhead learned to gag Peter Molyneux a bit more often). And if Fable was the poster boy for a failed choice-based design, Fallout 3 is the best example of how to do it right. When the world can be significantly altered by minor decisions, you’ve reached something that’s a little bit like real life. From nuking an entire town to helping lost wanderers, everything seemed to count.
   
   But all Bethesda ended up doing in the aftermath of Fallout was to make people wonder what’s next. Where does choice go from here? Is there such a thing as too much…a point where people are saying “Oh for Heaven’s sake! Just show me where to go already!”?
   
   I’ll admit up front that I usually fall distinctly on the “choice” side. I like divergence. Choices, to me, are good. After all, if you don’t want to have to do a lot of deep thinking about where to go next, you can simply go where you want. People who don’t need eight branching paths aren’t suffering. There will always be linear, instant-gratification games for that crowd.
   However, while the Era of Choice (that’s copyrighted, you have to pay me 25 cents if you use it) may seem like a recent phenomenon, old-timers know it has been bubbling under the surface of gaming almost since gaming started. The watershed moment may have been the original Legend of Zelda, which threw out the scrolling levels and start-to-finish progression common in games at the time.
   
   Instead, Shigeru Miyamoto gave us strange, untried game mechanics, stapled to a world whose mysteries were often within view, but tantalizingly out-of-reach. To be able to see what you wanted, but not have any way to get to it, was not something most gamers were accustomed to. That The Legend of Zelda still sold a crap ton of copies may have been the most important success in American gaming. If it had sold poorly over here, we can only speculate where we’d be in terms of linearity today.
   
   Of course, we still didn’t really have choice with Zelda. Link still invariably saved the Princess and the world, and all that stuff you could not get to was stuff you would have to get to eventually. All Zelda did was complicate the roadblocks. It wasn’t Zelda’s fault; the storage capacity necessary for real choices was still years away from existence.
   
   Now, though, we’re living in an era where the ideals first presented in old Zelda and Final Fantasy titles can come full circle. The question is, have they?
   
   Some, even some who are fans of choice, say they think it’s gone far enough. Not I. I wonder how far it all has yet to go. Imagine, for instance, a phenom like Blizzard applying open choice to an MMO. Rather than just “Should we go on this raid?” or “Should we invite him to the guild?” your choices would then reflect a broader, more rounded view of the universe you’re playing in. MMOs right now tend to create the same range of experiences for everyone. Sure, you can choose which experiences to have and which ones not to, but it still remains within strictly defined perimeters: everyone must have access to the same experiences, so the world as a whole cannot really change.
   
   For all I know, a clever company has something up their sleeve right now that intends to make a multi-player world that can change. I don’t know. Apparently Bethesda just acquired Interplay’s lapsed rights to a Fallout MMO. That could very well be the thing that does it, and it will at least be a must-see because of the pedigree of the developer. Picture the effects you leave on a post-apocalyptic landscape affecting other players who come after you, in a way expanded upon from Fallout 3, and you’ll begin to see why the time and effort required to pull off true cause and effect, and true choice, in an MMO could be well worth the rewards. Creating your own story in a wide-open setting is the sort of thing virtual reality (of which games are a part) has been promising for years. It is something we only recently are gaining the power to deliver.
   
   Not discounting the single-player experience, I can think of a few applications of this philosophy of true choice to that landscape as well. It seems in most choice-based games, no options are ever really closed off to you because of your actions. At worst, you have to put a little more work into certain objectives. I realize it makes no sense for developers to go to the work of creating a mission or objective, then bar it from certain players because of a minor choice. But again, Bethesda and Fallout tossed this consideration out the window. Now that we know you can do this and still make a great game, the next step should be characters.
   
   Creating a character is one of the most compelling parts of choice in games, but even in the best of titles they still experience the same story. The end goal is still typically the same. This isn’t true in all cases, but in the discrepancies with this theory, the choice of goals is always highly stark. Detailed differences between two story paths, ones dependent on how you construct your character, would be the next logical step. If you make your character 23, you’ll actually experience many of the things that would already be in your past if you made them 33. But if you made them 33, the story may continue past the point of the 23-year-old story. Did you make them grow up in a penthouse or a shack? Did they attend a military academy, or did they teach themselves on the streets? The possibilities are endless, and all are begging to be tapped by developers.
   Before you wonder if I’m going farther than gaming can handle, I want to point you back to where we were ten years ago. O.K., now five years ago. Now three.
   
   Gaming changes so quickly…more quickly than any other medium…that there may be no limit on what we’re capable of tomorrow. Choosing your own life in a virtual world is well within the realm of projected possibility. Maybe you’re not down with that, and that’s fine. I don’t think games delivering opportunities for high kill counts and instant rewards are going to die off, at least as long as humanity’s attention span remains questionable. But for myself, I can only look forward to where choice will go next. No doubt it’ll be a gradually climb, but I can say one thing. When we get there, my player will have grown up in a shack in the canyon, and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become an explorer. After having been a mercenary. And he’ll return to his canyon, as obscure as when he left, but much smarter, having had many adventures.
   
   And then, the real game will start.
   
   I can’t wait.

   
   

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Dead Pixels has 3 comment s on this chronicle.

1. Dead Pixels
   Posted On Jun 08 2009

   Late in saying, I know, but if you want the closest we've yet gotten to true choice, you really need to pop in Fallout. We're not yet there, but it's a huge step.
   
   Probably going to elaborate more on this topic soon, especially with things like Natal making the scene.

2. Seripha
   Posted On May 19 2009

   Very well written article. You definitely illuminated an aspect of gaming that has been slowly pushed into the biggest titles as of late. While I agree that "Choice" based games are blast to play, I hope that linear, arcade, and point based games never die. And, I honestly doubt they will seeing as how people want diversity in all aspects of life, video games included. I still have yet to play a game that successfully incorporates even the smallest decisions into the outcome of a game. Fable II, while a fun game, failed at all it promised. I found that little decisions changed nothing, and only a handful of large decisions really affected anything of notriety. However, I have yet to really try Fallout 3, so I can't speak regarding it. I am definitely with you, though, in the excitement of what the rapidly changing video game industry will offer tomorrow!

3. BEN
   Posted On May 18 2009

   Great article this week Ryan!
   
   Why can't it be like the good old books where it was as easy as "To open the door, go to page 34" or "To run away, go to page 47"