What Does It Take To Make You Care?

I came up with some coherent thoughts as I was reading the article and wrote them down. I doubt they shall be a milestone in our understanding of videogames, but it's worth a forum post. Only the next paragraph is what I initially wrote.

Maybe interactive entertainment can't evoke the way the great plays & movies do, if one supposes these menageries serve a purpose, to wit, that they are emotional practice. In these we empathize and imagine, but to evoke in a game the emotions must be real. To do otherwise is to cast the player as an actor, and most people suck at acting.

When we see a movie or a play, no matter how good the special effects, our imaginations are engaged in a particular way. We use what we see to stimulate ourselves(another way of saying 'emotional practice' I think). We use it to expand or maintain parts of our brains high-level functionality. We grow or cease to shrink. We can be inspired. We hold every POV, our own and the characters and the universe in the story. We can compare and contrast and generalize.

When we are in a game, we use ourselves to stimulate what we see. We certainly add knowledge, but only to ourselves. We only see what we can see. I did not intend this to be quite so binary/ying-yang, it's a matter of how our brains are being used and it is not or not only passive vs participatory but I cannot place it. I hate faltering at the end.

It is not a function or fault of the mediums themselves. I think we can all remember emotional emails, sent or received.

If you want emotional responses from interactive entertainment, you need to be able to identify yourself with the protagonist in some way. That's why great actors are great, as they respond and react naturally and believably no matter how unrealistic their role is (Gandalf can be hundreds of years old and have magic powers - i.e. unrealistic - but in the movie you immediately respect him).
The games have an added complication that the more interactive they are the higher the risk of creating a dissonance between the protagonist and the player. E.g. you have several choices of how to deal with a certain situation. As a player you feel that it should be solved in a specific way - but the game doesn't have it among the options! You immediately feel your character bumping at the technological barrier, breaking the immersion. This can happen every time you can make a choice, every time you interact.

My personal experience is maybe paradoxical - the less amount of options the better the immersion. I'm not sure whether it's because it feels more movie-like or because the options given are carefully chosen to exactly fit the character, hence increasing rather than breaking immersion.

wanderingtaoist wrote:

The games have an added complication that the more interactive they are the higher the risk of creating a dissonance between the protagonist and the player. E.g. you have several choices of how to deal with a certain situation. As a player you feel that it should be solved in a specific way - but the game doesn't have it among the options! You immediately feel your character bumping at the technological barrier, breaking the immersion. This can happen every time you can make a choice, every time you interact.

My personal experience is maybe paradoxical - the less amount of options the better the immersion. I'm not sure whether it's because it feels more movie-like or because the options given are carefully chosen to exactly fit the character, hence increasing rather than breaking immersion.

This is pretty much what I was going to say. I find myself more involved when I'm playing a character, and not just projecting myself onto a blank avatar. Since I'm playing a set character, I don't worry about whether or not the options are what I want to do; so long as they're options the character would do, I'm happy.

If they want me to care more about the inhabitants of the world, they need to spend more time on giving me a reason to. Remember to give the NPCs an actually interesting, non-cliched backstory.

Stengah wrote:

I find myself more involved when I'm playing a character, and not just projecting myself onto a blank avatar. Since I'm playing a set character, I don't worry about whether or not the options are what I want to do; so long as they're options the character would do, I'm happy.

This is so true for me as well! I never finished Half Life 1 or 2 because after a while, I just don't care. Gordon Freeman means nothing to me - a mute who uses only violence to communicate really isn't compelling. I love Far Cry 2, but I'm stalling out in finishing it because the character doesn't emote anything at all to me.

In general (not being much of a badass in real life) I tend to prefer games where I am a do-it-all ass kicker. Master Chief says just enough to tell you - he will take on any odds and knows he'll win. Would Max Payne be nearly as interesting if you just played Generic Good Guy #16 or something? No, his constant stream of monologue and his deeply personal reasons for killing everybody he sees give me a reason for the violence.

InspectorFowler wrote:
Stengah wrote:

I find myself more involved when I'm playing a character, and not just projecting myself onto a blank avatar. Since I'm playing a set character, I don't worry about whether or not the options are what I want to do; so long as they're options the character would do, I'm happy.

This is so true for me as well! I never finished Half Life 1 or 2 because after a while, I just don't care. Gordon Freeman means nothing to me - a mute who uses only violence to communicate really isn't compelling. I love Far Cry 2, but I'm stalling out in finishing it because the character doesn't emote anything at all to me.

In general (not being much of a badass in real life) I tend to prefer games where I am a do-it-all ass kicker. Master Chief says just enough to tell you - he will take on any odds and knows he'll win. Would Max Payne be nearly as interesting if you just played Generic Good Guy #16 or something? No, his constant stream of monologue and his deeply personal reasons for killing everybody he sees give me a reason for the violence.

I think i'm similar though i can and do appreciate 'blank' characters that i inhabit but they have to be in large, free-roaming worlds like The Elder Scrolls or MMOGs.

I enjoyed the Half Life games but there were just so many jarring instances where people were adoring me etc or where i just wanted to have some agency in the world and story instead of just being lectured at and around.

In a sense it's futile - you can't make someone care. But I hope games did a better job at removing barriers for my caring. I notice that most of the time I'm trying to get into my character, even in shooters. It really bugs me every time something reminds me that I'm playing a game and it doesn't make any sense and it doesn't matter whatever I do.

It's not even about choice, for me, but rather being able to engage in the narrative on a character (emotional) level. Getting to make dramatic decisions can help a lot with that, sure.

I think he is over-generalizing, and also giving far too much credit to Han Solo. Harrison Ford is one of the finest actors of the last 40 years, no doubt. He can make us buy a lot of schlock, and boy can Lucas write schlock. But I see people as invested, if not more in their Sim, their Animal Crossing home, their WoW character with people having these alternate lives. Who here was not severely taken aback when Eli Vance died? When Alyx was on the brink? We waffled as we had to betray Sigfried, our compatriot in the sewers, or go against our better judgment and kill the Squirrels.

I think he stacked the deck a bit by comparing Harrison Ford and his break-out role to what is largely B-movie rubbish in many games that never get beyond the escapism of blowing crap up.

It's definitely very tricky to make you seriously seriously identify *directly* with a game character that you are playing. I think that I've only ever really seen it solidly done once, and it was by an unexpected mechanism.

Specifically, I'm thinking of Shadow of the Colossus. Every time I killed one of the great beasts, I felt more and more like my hands were soiled with the blood of innocents. And this was partially because the game eschewed so much of the framework of storytelling. The only actions in the game were actions you chose. There wasn't anybody telling you "X is good, Y is bad". There was a voice telling you that you had to go all stabby stabby on the colossi to save your girl, but... all of the morality was purely in what you brought to the game. There was a sense of railing against fate--you could only imagine what brought you to that place, with that goal.

You couldn't help but feel that the voice was lying to you--which lead to thoughts of perhaps destroying the source of the voice instead, except... what was there to fight against? If you leave, you are abandoning your goal. If you continue, you don't know if you'll achieve your goal, but... you might. You were trapped into a course of action, but it felt like you were trapped into it of your own circumstances.

Another game that did something similar was Portal, although your actions in that game carried less moral weight. Portal has the same Valve model of "don't break out of character for cut scenes" that the Half-Life games have, but like SotC, this depth of immersion is supported in Portal by not giving "you" a reason to talk. You are commanded by a disembodied voice, and actions speak louder than words.

I personally identify with the action more in HL2 than in Halo (for example), because I find the Valve-style cut-scenes to be much more compelling. There is certainly more than a little cognitive dissonance created by interacting directly with other characters, though--because when people speak to you, the natural action is to speak back, and that's not something the game allows for.

The other side of the picture is games that take the story out of your hands completely. These can also create empathy with characters, but it's generally not "your" character. Frequently, you'll even be switching between character in this sort of game. In essence, this class of game-story is pushing you back into the role of an observer, and the classical means of drawing a reader/viewer into empathy with characters work (or fail to work) just as well here as in drama or literature. These games might work because the writers know that they must use the classical techniques to draw you in--and the more direct interaction games fail because the writers think they can take short cuts.

Or, and I think this is more likely, there might simply be something in the "free agency" of games where you "own" a character that makes the classical techniques fail. A sort of "moral uncanny valley" where you have enough control over your own destiny to feel like it's actually you making your own choices, but where the choices available are limited, illogical, or simply obviously pre-destined enough that you lose connection with the morality of the choices because although it's your character, they're not really your choices.

In any case, I think that both routes have merit for future games. Both the well-scripted story where you're obviously acting as an observer, and the cut-down kind of story where there's no interaction outside of the game's model.

And, it's possible that as we establish the boundaries of games as players we'll feel more connected as well--those things that draw us into empathy when watching a movie or play are partially there because they just work, and partially there because of many many centuries of establishing standard idioms in drama. We know what's expected of us when we're going in, and I don't think we've got the same sort of expectation going into games. That is, in my opinion, a big reason why the dramatic tools that games like Fable 2 or KotOR or the like use work for some people, but not for others.

Semi-Spoilers for Fable 2 wrote:

[color=white](Side note: Most of the choices in Fable 2 didn't get to me at all. I mean... eating crunchy chicks that cheep when you munch on them? wHATEver. However, when I supported the dark temple... coming back after the Spire and seeing part of the world turned from a vibrant community into a depressing town full of despondent people surrounded by a land that was dying? That hit me a lot harder than anything I did while I was in the Spire. And I felt the same sense of wretchedness and regret every time I visited that town.)[/color]

Great topic.

Is it strange that, looking back at my historical experiences with games, the most emotional and moving moments were ones that were 'railroaded': either a cut-scene or a might-as-well-be-a-cut-scene?

Storytelling requires a captive audience and a deft handle on narrative controls. I can't remember feeling much about things I actually did, of my own free will, in games. Hilarious experiences, sure. But I don't generally feel bad about destroying towns (Megaton) or ignoring children who are enslaved or anything like that. It feels somewhat like Sims syndrome, where the 'people' feel more like digital experiments than actual... people.

I suspect it has something to do with saved games. If I decide to go buck wild and destroy the inhabitants of Rivet City with mini-nukes, I can always reload to an earlier save and they'll be just fine. Even if I want to live with the consequences of my actions, I know Rivet City will be alive and well the next time I start a new game. Maybe I'll slaughter them again, maybe I won't.

But Aeris will always die halfway through Final Fantasy VII. Her death has a permanence, and that fact is unchangeable.

I think things like Dear Esther are pushing the envelope when it comes to interactive storytelling in games. As such, that was a much more emotionally intense experience than, say, your average FPS would be, and the narrative in that game would not have worked in any other media. Of course, that game did not have much in the way of choices either, and it could be argued that it's not really a 'game' as such.

wanderingtaoist wrote:

If you want emotional responses from interactive entertainment, you need to be able to identify yourself with the protagonist in some way.
< snip >
The games have an added complication that the more interactive they are the higher the risk of creating a dissonance between the protagonist and the player. E.g. you have several choices of how to deal with a certain situation. As a player you feel that it should be solved in a specific way - but the game doesn't have it among the options! You immediately feel your character bumping at the technological barrier, breaking the immersion. This can happen every time you can make a choice, every time you interact.

Exactly - I know I'm not the only one that had trouble reconciling Nico-Bellic-the-cold-blooded-serial-killer with Nico-Bellic-the-guy who joked around with his cousin. The sense of immersion was broken once the true depth of Nico's sociopathy was revealed.

Coming from the other direction (and it's already been mentioned), Far Cry 2 elicits no emotion whatsoever, as your avatar is a blank slate. He's a gun-toting faceless drone - as a player, I have no idea if he's trying to end the war, or merely profit from it, even after 30-odd hours of play.

I agree, Far Cry is not an emotional game. The only thing I've felt so far is a sense of awe at how beautifully put together the world is, how stunning it looks graphically, and how much fun I'm having with it. Not that this is a bad thing of course - fun is after all the major reason most of us play games.

I also agree that using Han Solo has an example of characters we care about rings a little odd, but I get what the guy is saying. It can basically be applied wholesale to games. For the player to have a chance of caring (there is always the possibility the player will not care because they're not inclined to and/or a heartless bastard) then something needs to be included which the player can identify with.

Half-Life 2 to is wonderful in this regard because it offers some interesting NPCs which the player can become attached to. Alyx is a amazing. Her actions and helpful, her words kind, and her character animation - the face in particular - is stunningly done. When she gets into trouble, it really concerned me. But we don't even need all of that - even some good voice acting can do the trick. Remember the sequence early in Bioshock where the guy's family supposedly dies in an explosion? That really impacted me. The game had done a good job of making the character sympathetic, and then that tragedy happened to him. It was a sad moment.

None of these elements are so different from what is found in movies. Or books. Nor should they be. Most people have a natural ability to relate to fictional characters as long as those characters have actions and behaviors which seem realistic. Most of us can understand a character wanting to perform action X to save family member Y. Having the same character perform action X to save the world from a terrible nano-virus, on the other hand, is a bit more muddled. Which, by the way, is not a problem exclusive to games.

Hypatian wrote:

Specifically, I'm thinking of Shadow of the Colossus. Every time I killed one of the great beasts, I felt more and more like my hands were soiled with the blood of innocents. And this was partially because the game eschewed so much of the framework of storytelling. The only actions in the game were actions you chose. There wasn't anybody telling you "X is good, Y is bad". There was a voice telling you that you had to go all stabby stabby on the colossi to save your girl, but... all of the morality was purely in what you brought to the game. There was a sense of railing against fate--you could only imagine what brought you to that place, with that goal.

SotC is always an interesting example because the narrative is so thin it barely exists. The absence, however, requires the player to fill in the gaps, and makes the player very much involved in what is going on. It is also a beautifully structured game because it has an end sequence which finally brings everything together - and not just the narrative. SotC actually uses the gameplay mechanics to summon emotion. It puts the player in the shoes of the other side.

And despite the attention SotC usually receives in this debates, I think it deserves even more. Games need to look deeper into their own gameplay mechanics and ask how they can be used to create interesting situations. Bioshock, for example, falls well short of its potential. It plays a narrative gotcha, but the gameplay remains the same before and after.

InspectorFowler wrote:

I never finished Half Life 1 or 2 because after a while, I just don't care. Gordon Freeman means nothing to me - a mute who uses only violence to communicate really isn't compelling.

Gordon Freeman is a completely blank slate, but my affection for his friends and allies is what the game uses to convey him character. This was done less successfully in HL1 due to the limitations of the engine, but they seem to have pulled out all the stops in the HL2 episodes to make you care for Freeman by giving him some people to care about.

If I'm separated from Alyx, I feel relieved when I see her again. I f'n love Dog. Playing catch with him is for me the highlight of the HL games. I'm always happy to see that Barney is still alive. And I can extrapolate that, if I (the player) feel these things, then I (Gordon Freeman) also feel these things.

I haven't been able to find out what makes me care. I hope the statute of limitations has passed for these spoilers:

Twilight Princess:
After the water temple, I was ready to take a break from the game. Then Midna is attacked and I have to take her to Zelda. I really felt I had to save her right then, and I did. I didn't think I cared for Midna, but I really felt I needed to save her right then.

Bioshock:
I could never bring myself to kill the little sisters. Then later in the game, if they were ever attacked by random mobs without the big daddy around, I charged in like an angry father to save them. If I couldn't kill them, I made sure they were safe.

Mass Effect:
The characters fell into categories of ones I cared about and ones I didn't. I never cared for Kaiden, and sometimes Ashley and blue chick would get on my nerves. However, Wrex and Tali I always liked and would try and protect them during combat.

(ME spoiler) wrote:

[color=white]When Wrex died in my first game, I was upset because I thought that it was my fault.[/color]

ExitPursuedByBear wrote:
InspectorFowler wrote:

I never finished Half Life 1 or 2 because after a while, I just don't care. Gordon Freeman means nothing to me - a mute who uses only violence to communicate really isn't compelling.

Gordon Freeman is a completely blank slate, but my affection for his friends and allies is what the game uses to convey him character. This was done less successfully in HL1 due to the limitations of the engine, but they seem to have pulled out all the stops in the HL2 episodes to make you care for Freeman by giving him some people to care about.

If I'm separated from Alyx, I feel relieved when I see her again. I f'n love Dog. Playing catch with him is for me the highlight of the HL games. I'm always happy to see that Barney is still alive. And I can extrapolate that, if I (the player) feel these things, then I (Gordon Freeman) also feel these things.

That's what totally drew me into Half-Life 2 and the episodes: I wasn't playing as Gordon Freeman, I was Gordon Freeman. That was just an alter ego name for me. The game succeeded admirably at drawing me in very quickly to the game world, making me feel immersed, and then giving me characters to care about.

And I never played through the original Half-Life. Valve succeeded wholly at this with me starting fresh into Half-Life 2. Very good stuff.

Faceless Clock wrote:

SotC is always an interesting example because the narrative is so thin it barely exists. The absence, however, requires the player to fill in the gaps, and makes the player very much involved in what is going on. It is also a beautifully structured game because it has an end sequence which finally brings everything together - and not just the narrative. SotC actually uses the gameplay mechanics to summon emotion. It puts the player in the shoes of the other side.

This is an aspect of storytelling I find unique to video games, and one that Team ICO does extremely well. It shows up in SotC, ICO, and will most likely be very prevalent in their upcoming game.

My problem with most stories in games, or attempts at storytelling in games, is that the writers and designers aren't taking into account all the advantages and disadvantages of the medium, or even of the game they are trying to build. For example, I saw the god-awful split-personality complex of Nico Bellic was brought up, and this is a prime example I think. Here is what we are supposed to believe is initially a story of someone trying to rebuild their life, after being torn apart in a war. But this same person, who expounds on the virtues of family and of how horrible war is, doesn't bat an eyelid at jacking a car, running over civilians, and blowing up half a city.

BioShock did another fantastic job of screwing up what could have been an interesting avenue with the protagonist. The game hypes being all about choice, and it's story is based around a civilization that tore itself apart through mass drug addiction. Yet you start the game, supposedly able to choose your path, and you have NO CHOICE in whether or not you start taking plasmids, the very things that brought about the fall of Rapture. I was really getting into BioShock for the first 5 minutes, until that event occurred - it served only to rip me out of the narrative, tell me to my face "you have no choice in this game", and make me thoroughly disinterested in whatever came next.

These are examples of titles that I think failed to take their medium and design into account when attempting to create a narrative that might draw their player in. GTA failed because it attempted to make you feel sorry for this former-soldier, while simultaneously having you run rampant through a city as him. BioShock set itself up to be almost like ICO or SotC, with a somewhat blank slate narrative, but then it shoves morality down your throat and rips away what interpretation you could have had on the events of the game.

My brain wants to say more, but I'm going to cut it off there, so as to not ramble.

I've always liked Leigh Alexander's oft-repeated conceit that engagement is a choice. As a corollary to that, different games require you to choose different routes to engage with them. Some draw you in with a strongly written protaganist, others, like the Half-Life series, intentionally leave the protaganist as a blank slate and use that absence to draw you in in a different way.

For me, the quickest key to my heart is for a game to have a strong sense of place. This is the main thing that I think games do better than books, movies or any other media out there. Games do not portray a place any more realistically than a cheap film set, but for some reason they are much better at delivering the character of a place, the particular sensation of being there. This is why games like Assassin's Creed speak to me so deeply - when I crest a hill and see 12th-century Jerusalem laid out below me, crowds bustling back and forth, merchants calling out, it is definitely worth all the cheesy cut scenes and repetitive tasks I had to complete to get to that point. Silent Hill 2 is a horrifying game because of who the characters are and what happens to them, but the way that it delivers that punch with such power is that it first spends hours making the town exist in your head, and then it uses that stage to depict the story.

I think BioShock takes a lot of flak for being overly linear, but where it succeeded beautifully was in the world it built. The undersea forests, the mad concert halls, the beauty and the crass commercialism. The dripping, leaking, constantly invading force of the water. In the end, it was a game about your lack of choice (and it becomes obvious that this was quite intentional) - but that isn't what spoke to me about it.

ahrezmendi wrote:

These are examples of titles that I think failed to take their medium and design into account when attempting to create a narrative that might draw their player in. GTA failed because it attempted to make you feel sorry for this former-soldier, while simultaneously having you run rampant through a city as him. BioShock set itself up to be almost like ICO or SotC, with a somewhat blank slate narrative, but then it shoves morality down your throat and rips away what interpretation you could have had on the events of the game.

Interesting. I did not run rampant through the city while wearing the shoes of Niko Bellic. Rather, because I empathized with the character, I was very careful not to ruin my sense of narrative. No shooting innocents, no running over pedestrians. It didn't feel like a constraint to me - I was making a choice.

With Bioshock, it felt weird that the protagonist just took the plasmid syringe like that - but of course, it was meant to feel weird and get you questioning about what exactly was going on. I worked just beautifully for me, even up to the very end of the game.

misterglass wrote:
(ME spoiler) wrote:

[color=white]When Wrex died in my first game, I was upset because I thought that it was my fault.[/color]

It was your fault, he doesnt have to.

ahrezmendi wrote:

BioShock did another fantastic job of screwing up what could have been an interesting avenue with the protagonist. The game hypes being all about choice, and it's story is based around a civilization that tore itself apart through mass drug addiction. Yet you start the game, supposedly able to choose your path, and you have NO CHOICE in whether or not you start taking plasmids, the very things that brought about the fall of Rapture. I was really getting into BioShock for the first 5 minutes, until that event occurred - it served only to rip me out of the narrative, tell me to my face "you have no choice in this game", and make me thoroughly disinterested in whatever came next.

My take on BioShock is completely different. Rapture destroyed itself not because of mass drug addiction, but because of too much freedom (freedom to alter yourself, freedom for doctors not only to heal, but also to try and improve people, etc.). The game plays out the freedom vs. control dichotomy continually by giving you choices that seem significant (which plasmid do you equip? which weapon do you upgrade? do you save the baby or eat the baby?) but which turn out to be mostly an illusion (because you're being led down a specific path to learn that you do not have the freedom to answer the question "would you kindly?" with "no").

jlaakso wrote:

Interesting. I did not run rampant through the city while wearing the shoes of Niko Bellic. Rather, because I empathized with the character, I was very careful not to ruin my sense of narrative. No shooting innocents, no running over pedestrians. It didn't feel like a constraint to me - I was making a choice.

That's fine, but you have to go out of your way to play in that manner and nothing about the gameplay mechanics reinforces this method of play.

In fact, one oversight in GTA IV which I thought stunningly stupid was how the game world continues to treat the player as a hostile intruder. Go grab a car and then try to obey traffic laws - you'll see what I mean pretty quickly.

jlaakso wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

These are examples of titles that I think failed to take their medium and design into account when attempting to create a narrative that might draw their player in. GTA failed because it attempted to make you feel sorry for this former-soldier, while simultaneously having you run rampant through a city as him. BioShock set itself up to be almost like ICO or SotC, with a somewhat blank slate narrative, but then it shoves morality down your throat and rips away what interpretation you could have had on the events of the game.

Interesting. I did not run rampant through the city while wearing the shoes of Niko Bellic. Rather, because I empathized with the character, I was very careful not to ruin my sense of narrative. No shooting innocents, no running over pedestrians. It didn't feel like a constraint to me - I was making a choice.

True, you could run as rampant or not-rampant as you chose, but what about the story scenes and missions that you cannot control? Nico willingly shoots a man and dumps his body into the river. He willingly accepts missions to rob, harm, or murder people he has no connection with. He traffics drugs, deals weapons, and basically breaks just about every law our country has. This is the man that is supposed to want to get away from violence?

jlaakso wrote:

With Bioshock, it felt weird that the protagonist just took the plasmid syringe like that - but of course, it was meant to feel weird and get you questioning about what exactly was going on. I worked just beautifully for me, even up to the very end of the game.

It was meant to be confusing and get you wondering what was going on, but I fail to see, from a narrative standpoint, what that has to do with my character jabbing a needle in his arm. I mean, considering that BioShock intentionally sets you up with a blank-slate style character like Gordon Freeman, it's very risky to then have that character do something like alter his DNA with an unknown substance. It worked for you, as a participant in the narrative, but it completely ripped me out of it. Taking an unknown drug is the LAST thing I would do after having just crashed into the ocean, ridden in a spherical submarine, and arrived as a place that is falling apart around me. So to have my character do that removes me, the player, from the equation and plants me in the position of being an observer, someone who is watching the choices my character has been dictated to have made, and only being given control when he needs to kill something.

Gordon Freeman picking up the Crowbar in Half-Life made logical and rational sense - If my office had just exploded, and hostile alien creatures are now killing my co-workers, I'd grab whatever I could too. What the BioShock protagonist did does not make logical and rational sense, to me at least.

ExitPursuedByBear wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

BioShock did another fantastic job of screwing up what could have been an interesting avenue with the protagonist. The game hypes being all about choice, and it's story is based around a civilization that tore itself apart through mass drug addiction. Yet you start the game, supposedly able to choose your path, and you have NO CHOICE in whether or not you start taking plasmids, the very things that brought about the fall of Rapture. I was really getting into BioShock for the first 5 minutes, until that event occurred - it served only to rip me out of the narrative, tell me to my face "you have no choice in this game", and make me thoroughly disinterested in whatever came next.

My take on BioShock is completely different. Rapture destroyed itself not because of mass drug addiction, but because of too much freedom (freedom to alter yourself, freedom for doctors not only to heal, but also to try and improve people, etc.). The game plays out the freedom vs. control dichotomy continually by giving you choices that seem significant (which plasmid do you equip? which weapon do you upgrade? do you save the baby or eat the baby?) but which turn out to be mostly an illusion (because you're being led down a specific path to learn that you do not have the freedom to answer the question "would you kindly?" with "no").

That's a very interesting take on the game, and actually makes me interested in going back to see it for myself. However I disagree on the choices you are given even seeming significant. To me, the choice of what plasmid to use, or what weapon to upgrade, is inherently insignificant - Regardless of what I choose, the end goal is still to kill things more effectively, so to that end it does not matter at all what choices I make, thus rendering the choices themselves insignificant. All that matters is what I choose *something*.

What you're describing makes for a very interesting narrative, one that I would like to see or be a part of. The reason this didn't come through for me with BioShock is that the narrative attempts to mingle itself with the actions of the player character, and also attempts to make that character a blank-slate style character, and that's where it falls apart.

ahrezmendi wrote:

Gordon Freeman picking up the Crowbar in Half-Life made logical and rational sense - If my office had just exploded, and hostile alien creatures are now killing my co-workers, I'd grab whatever I could too. What the BioShock protagonist did does not make logical and rational sense, to me at least.

I'm not sure how much of BioShock you played, but once you get to The Big Twist™, why you did that is explained. In the end, it's a game about lack of choice more than it's a game about choice. Though, like I said, that's not what makes it great.

Switchbreak wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

Gordon Freeman picking up the Crowbar in Half-Life made logical and rational sense - If my office had just exploded, and hostile alien creatures are now killing my co-workers, I'd grab whatever I could too. What the BioShock protagonist did does not make logical and rational sense, to me at least.

I'm not sure how much of BioShock you played, but once you get to The Big Twist™, why you did that is explained. In the end, it's a game about lack of choice more than it's a game about choice. Though, like I said, that's not what makes it great.

Yea, but thing about Bioshock is that the game reaches that moment, and then proceeds to basically ignore it for the rest of the game, instead sending the player off on some ridiculous kill-the-boss quest.

Bioshock is a fun game but the story really falls apart in the last third.

Switchbreak wrote:
ahrezmendi wrote:

Gordon Freeman picking up the Crowbar in Half-Life made logical and rational sense - If my office had just exploded, and hostile alien creatures are now killing my co-workers, I'd grab whatever I could too. What the BioShock protagonist did does not make logical and rational sense, to me at least.

I'm not sure how much of BioShock you played, but once you get to The Big Twist™, why you did that is explained. In the end, it's a game about lack of choice more than it's a game about choice. Though, like I said, that's not what makes it great.

I didn't get that far, but like I just said, that's fine if the narrative wants to do that, and in fact I enjoy those kinds of twists. However, what failed for me was that they tried to do this AND make a blank-slate style protagonist like Gordon Freeman.

The reason I never finished BioShock, and probably never will, is that I was disappointed in what it provided compared to what I expected. I expected a game about choice, and that was taken away. It may have been the intent that choice be taken away, but it ruined the game for me to the point that I no longer wanted to play it. That's just me though.

jlaakso wrote:

Interesting. I did not run rampant through the city while wearing the shoes of Niko Bellic. Rather, because I empathized with the character, I was very careful not to ruin my sense of narrative. No shooting innocents, no running over pedestrians. It didn't feel like a constraint to me - I was making a choice.

Same here. I find it interesting that several people in this thread have complained about Niko's psychopathic behaviour when they consciously chose to make him act that way. I chose to play Niko the way I expected him to behave, and was rewarded for it.

Faceless Clock wrote:

That's fine, but you have to go out of your way to play in that manner and nothing about the gameplay mechanics reinforces this method of play.

Actually, I'd argue that the game strongly reinforces this style of play. You can drive around like a madman but the game never rewards you for doing so and in fact frequently punishes you in the form of wanted ratings, accidents, and both character and vehicle damage.

In fact, one oversight in GTA IV which I thought stunningly stupid was how the game world continues to treat the player as a hostile intruder. Go grab a car and then try to obey traffic laws - you'll see what I mean pretty quickly.

I'm really not sure what you mean by this.

muttonchop wrote:

I'm really not sure what you mean by this.

The game world does not accept Niko and through him the player as normal parts of the world. If you take a car and you try to drive normally you will get into all sorts of trouble. For example, if you stop at a stop light drivers behind you will start yelling or screaming and may ram you. They do not see you as a normal part of the world stopping at a stop light like any normal person would. They see you as the player and thus obstructing their path.

Pedestrians are the same way and will run out in front of the player constantly. But that may be just general AI stupidity.

In any case, I don't know how you can say the game reinforces civil play with a straight face. The game world offers the player nothing nice to do and does not recognize the player's actions when trying to be civil, because that isn't the point of the game. What happens if you side-swipe someone on accident and a cop sees you? Two stars. It isn't as if you can just stop and exchange insurance information, because GTA IV is a game about running over people and shooting gangsters, not driving Miss Daisy to the supermarket. There game defaults to seeing the player as hostile because the player is supposed to be hostile. That's the entire point.

Clemenstation wrote:

Is it strange that, looking back at my historical experiences with games, the most emotional and moving moments were ones that were 'railroaded': either a cut-scene or a might-as-well-be-a-cut-scene?

Storytelling requires a captive audience and a deft handle on narrative controls. I can't remember feeling much about things I actually did, of my own free will, in games. Hilarious experiences, sure. But I don't generally feel bad about destroying towns (Megaton) or ignoring children who are enslaved or anything like that. It feels somewhat like Sims syndrome, where the 'people' feel more like digital experiments than actual... people.

This thread and grobstein's front page article have pulled me out of lurking. I've been thinking lately about how or if games affect me emotionally, at least more meaningfully than thrill/frustration/awe/hilarity. Something like the Oasis quest in Fallout 3 I think was supposed to make me feel something as a consequence of my choice (I chose Laurel's solution) but failed to follow up with that "Look what you did" backhand.

I have to agree with Clemenstation, in that I can't recall any moments from any morality-system open-world games I've played that impacted me emotionally. In fact, there are only two instances of genuine emotional connection to a video game that I can confidently say I've had, and those are Alyx, over whom I have no control and can't even interact with. But she's so well-realized, technically and acting-ly, likeable, and useful that her presence became a huge boon to Episodes 1 & 2 especially. (Which is what Clint Hocking seems to fear--"it will make everyone cry when he dies in their arms in exactly the same irreversible, inevitable way"--and maybe rightfully so, but Valve sure pulled it off.)

The other is the Weighted Companion Cube. I know, I'm not stretching, but you know what, it worked on me. Again, another situation with no choice, not even the illusion of choice, just an unreliable narrator and the suggestion that maybe Chell is a bit disturbed, but maybe this cube can talk, maybe somehow I can bring it with me. And when I couldn't, and had to "euthanize"--faster than any previous test subject--damn but that game actually made me feel bad.

And that's been it. Mind, I haven't finished SotC yet (playing it right now), so we'll see. And that's meant a lot of strategic skimming in morality/emotion/narrative threads and articles.

Faceless Clock wrote:

In any case, I don't know how you can say the game reinforces civil play with a straight face.

I didn't. I only argued that the game punishes you for acting like psychopath. Driving quickly but carefully is much more effective than careening around wildly and driving on the sidewalk. Randomly killing civilians gains you nothing but a wanted rating.