The illusion of choice is something that's hard to get right.
There's this general idea among gaming discourse that the best games are the ones where the choices you make matter, and not in the sense of something like Doom, where choosing the right gun in a specific fight makes it easier. But instead, what your dialog choices lead up to and the implications of the tough decisions the game throws your way are. I'm going to spoil my opinion for you right now: there is no game where your choices "matter." There can't be unless the game is focused ONLY on those choices. Games like Kyle is Famous, and countless one-offs on Itch.io come to mind. But as long as we're talking about games that are focused on their gameplay structure and, above all else, narrative, you can't exactly have a game where a line of dialog spoken to an NPC 30 hours ago yields a different ending.
Choice-based games have to structure themselves based on how their choices are presented. Think of something along the lines of the original InFamous, where hard-hitting decisions are delivered in this comic-book style and always come at the least opportune moments. Life is Strange works, too; think of how that game uses its emotional impact to give the player different options. Both are great games, but if we're talking about how choice-based narratives are paced, the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead is as good a place as any to really delve into it.
To date, this is probably the most played game in any library of games I own. Yes, I got it on the old PS Vita I asked Santa to give me for Christmas all those years ago, and yes, I haven't beaten it on a single platform that isn't my Vita, even though I own, like, two copies of it on PC. The first time I played this through, I was shocked. My jaw was on the floor, and my heart was torn open. So I went at it another time, and one more time after that. And by the time the second season was rolling around, I was saving up for a physical copy of that, so I didn't have to beg my parents to buy it all digitally for me.
I can say, with confidence, that whenever the game tells you that your choices matter, it's lying to you. At least, in the sense that your choices do matter. The point of that message and every time the game tells you that somebody will remember one of your actions isn't to hammer home that everything will have consequences in the end. But to set an uneasy atmosphere where the people you rely on most could tear you to shreds faster than the zombies of this world could ever possibly hope of doing. The Walking Dead teaches one crucial lesson about choice-based game design: if you want everything to feel like it matters, even if it doesn't, you have to choose your setting carefully. I kept going back to The Walking Dead not because I wanted to see if saving Doug yielded a different ending, but because I wanted to know how that action played out in the setting I was in. Of course, it never quite feels like that, and that's by design. As I said, the idea that all of your choices have tangible consequences is an illusion.
Going back to The Walking Dead in 2021 is a little rough, but that has to do more with the sheer number of times I've sat through this thing than it has to do with any sort of age. If you want to study how games can put their players in challenging situations while having those situations feel natural within the world the game takes place in, this is an easy four-and-a-half stars. If you're playing it for fun? Yeah, it's still pretty good.
There's this general idea among gaming discourse that the best games are the ones where the choices you make matter, and not in the sense of something like Doom, where choosing the right gun in a specific fight makes it easier. But instead, what your dialog choices lead up to and the implications of the tough decisions the game throws your way are. I'm going to spoil my opinion for you right now: there is no game where your choices "matter." There can't be unless the game is focused ONLY on those choices. Games like Kyle is Famous, and countless one-offs on Itch.io come to mind. But as long as we're talking about games that are focused on their gameplay structure and, above all else, narrative, you can't exactly have a game where a line of dialog spoken to an NPC 30 hours ago yields a different ending.
Choice-based games have to structure themselves based on how their choices are presented. Think of something along the lines of the original InFamous, where hard-hitting decisions are delivered in this comic-book style and always come at the least opportune moments. Life is Strange works, too; think of how that game uses its emotional impact to give the player different options. Both are great games, but if we're talking about how choice-based narratives are paced, the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead is as good a place as any to really delve into it.
To date, this is probably the most played game in any library of games I own. Yes, I got it on the old PS Vita I asked Santa to give me for Christmas all those years ago, and yes, I haven't beaten it on a single platform that isn't my Vita, even though I own, like, two copies of it on PC. The first time I played this through, I was shocked. My jaw was on the floor, and my heart was torn open. So I went at it another time, and one more time after that. And by the time the second season was rolling around, I was saving up for a physical copy of that, so I didn't have to beg my parents to buy it all digitally for me.
I can say, with confidence, that whenever the game tells you that your choices matter, it's lying to you. At least, in the sense that your choices do matter. The point of that message and every time the game tells you that somebody will remember one of your actions isn't to hammer home that everything will have consequences in the end. But to set an uneasy atmosphere where the people you rely on most could tear you to shreds faster than the zombies of this world could ever possibly hope of doing. The Walking Dead teaches one crucial lesson about choice-based game design: if you want everything to feel like it matters, even if it doesn't, you have to choose your setting carefully. I kept going back to The Walking Dead not because I wanted to see if saving Doug yielded a different ending, but because I wanted to know how that action played out in the setting I was in. Of course, it never quite feels like that, and that's by design. As I said, the idea that all of your choices have tangible consequences is an illusion.
Going back to The Walking Dead in 2021 is a little rough, but that has to do more with the sheer number of times I've sat through this thing than it has to do with any sort of age. If you want to study how games can put their players in challenging situations while having those situations feel natural within the world the game takes place in, this is an easy four-and-a-half stars. If you're playing it for fun? Yeah, it's still pretty good.
2 Comments
Thank you!
CretinWorkshop
2 years ago