Every week, sort of, features editor Anthony Burch discusses games and gamer culture in his "Rev Rant" video series. You can watch the previous rants here.
Firstly: spoilers for BioShock, Modern Warfare 2, and Portal. Though if you honestly haven't played Portal by this point, you are weird.
Secondly: this week's rant is about how games which are supposedly about control and slavery and experiencing a lack of free will effectively fall into two categories: those that require some subtle doublethink on the part of the player, but are still immensely satisfying (BioShock, Portal) and those that are thematically lazy and hide that laziness through BS statements about free will (Haze, Modern Warfare 2).
The two indie games I briefly mention in the rant are Judithand Edmund. I harbor an intense desire to see a crossover game including both protagonists. It would be called "Judith n' Edmund," and it would be an existential buddy cop game.
I love you Rev. I agree with everything you say. But Far Cry 2 sucks. I want to like that game, but every time I play it I always end up quitting after twenty minuets.
It's just you, because it's not ringing hollow for me yet. I haven't played Far Cry 2 and I'm not a game developer, but I think Bioshock handled the "loss of control" theme perfectly, because on your first playthrough I think you should be saying to yourself, why I am only allowed to do these certain things (e.g. Entering the lighthouse, Injecting the Plasmid, etc). Then when you get your answer, it all makes sense. I honestly can't really think of a better way to handle that than what Bioshock has done, not to say that there isn't a better way out there, but I can't imagine what it would be. Interested to hear your take.
If more games could have the sheer flexibility of who lives and who dies and even how you accomplish an objective as far cry 2 does, maybe he wouldn't use it as an example so much.
Games where your allies can be killed off at will without having to be scripted in advance are few and far between. So are game that force you to choose between 2 difficult options without heavily penalizing you for being "too good" or "too evil."
Good rant Rev, but do you think any developers will actually take the chance to improve on whats wrong with FarCry 2 and run with the ball on which was really fucking good about it? Or do you think if the possibility of a sequel to FC2 will just go and cater to masses and miss a great opportunity to do something unique?
I still enjoy "powerless" scenarios, but if I'm going to be powerless, I prefer it if the game puts me in a logical context. For instance, being powerless in the execution scene that kicks off COD4, or again during the nuke scene. It makes sense in these situations that I can't do much to change the outcome.
The powerless scene in MW2's No Russian fails because it's totally contrived videogame nonsense. There's no reason why you should be powerless to turn your guns on the terrorists, other than the game basically flat-out telling you "Hey! That's not how you're supposed to play! Start over!" It's exactly the kind of situation where you *should* have a choice, which makes it stand out as a poor design choice on the director's part.
Firstly, In golden sun, you get asked a question near the beginning of the game. It says something like "Do you want to embark on this quest, or not" If you say no, it says somthing (cant remember what exactly) then it goes back to the title screen.
Secondly, speaking of moral choice, Fallout 1 did it well(Fallout 2 probably did it better, but I havnt played it yet). I felt some of that same struggle. I had trouble doing anything "bad" in the game because I had control of this character.
Eeeh. I agree about how the 'you must do this' meta-memetic-etc has gotten a little stale, but using Portal as an example was a little weird.
To me, at least, escaping the fire wasn't about becoming free, it was more about not being in something else's control with the prospect of freedom. It was about breaking of the shackles of having to obey to survive, then trying to become free.
Besides that, yeah. The 'obey to continue' meta-message is stale now it's happened enough to notice it specifically. Good rant.
Have you played Suda51's Flower, Sun, and Rain on the Nintendo DS? It's an incredibly linear game but it's basically a very self-reflexive deconstruction on the nature of choice in video games. While it's about control it does it in such a surreal, critical way it becomes like a David Lynch-esque dream state. It isn't so much a statement about "free will" as it is about video games themselves. Definitely worth checking out.
Dude, honestly. With all your complaining about how even the best games suck in some form or another, you think you would have just gone and made your own game already.
I mean I can agree with you on games opening up so many options as far as evoking emotions and story-telling goes, but these games are linear because people don't have 20 years to work on a game. Take Bioshock for example, say you don't ever take the first plasmid injection because of "free will". Well guess what? You're going to sit in that fucking room for the rest of your life because you can't open the door. This is a cheap argument, but I think you get the point.
One last thing. Interactive mediums are very tricky as far as stories go. So let's take a movie that has been spoiled for us by a friend(someone betrays/kills someone). We go into this movie, and when the scene arises we know how it's going to happen and just kind of accept it. And be pissed at your friend.
*SPOILER*
Now take your second playthrough of Portal. You know GLaDOS is going to try to kill you, and you're pissed because instead of just seeing games as another form of story-telling, you think that the entire experience should change because it's interactive? So instead of progressing the story you just sit there because you know the next room is an oven, and you're for dinner.
Linearity tells a story better and easier, it makes crescendo events easier to create and often more satisfying, it overall heights an atmospheric experience better because the game designers can craft what you're going to experience to be great. If the game was truly open then they would have to create so many different situations eventually just making the game crap, or if it was semi open it would still not have a set idea of what you've experienced up to that point so it would still work the narrative less well than a linear one would. That's why those games all stay linear, the more events and experiences you must create the more your pool of ideas is absorbed and into more areas. The designers aren't god, they can't make every possible situation you can imagine satisfying or even good.
Also the comments on how you weren't able to wait for a boat or not use the plasmid in the beginning of Bioshock were kinda silly since you were brainwashed and genetically altered to be made to do what you did. Jack clearly had an inclination as to what to do since he hijacked the plane in the beginning to get to Rapture even if he and you weren't aware of it at the time. Also Jack is still a character, he is not you, he went to go kill Fountain for revenge, just because you as the player would rather do something else does not mean that the character feels that way. Saying that you should be able to anything as a character just ruins the character, the only way for that to work would be to make it you.
Didn't Ultima 7 Part I & II kinda do this already? I remember wanting to get at the treasury and the game allowed you to wait until dark, sneak into the official's home while she was sleeping, murder her, and then take the key.
I just remember those two Ultima games as being very open in terms of how you played them, and how the game allowed you to play them.
I'm getting the "League of Legends" ad on top of the video covering over half of it. And it's not getting away. This happened with the previous rant also
Whats with the adverts guys, fucking annoying! I couldn't care less about Stella Artois. And why are the dtoid videos covered with "Leage of Legends" ????
Is dtoid infected or is it my laptop????
I listened to the video behind the league of legends crap but couldn't really concentrate on it.
On Far Cry 2: If you played this on the console and not the PC you're in for a much less rewarding and far more frustrating experience.
I won a free copy of Far Cry 2 at PAX and I couldn't play it more than an hour due to AI seeing through foliage and the lack of a quick save button. It took all the fun out of the game. I gave the game away.
I recently picked it up on Steam during Black Friday and the game is infinitely better with KB+Mouse support in addition to being able to quick save and load when the AI pulls of cheap bullshit.
I guess I'll expand on my "jack is still a character" comment before getting blasted for it since you're allotted other decisions in the game. The choice of whether or not to kill a little sister is an act which is completely alien to him, as he also has the mind of a child (his body was engineered to grow up quickly so he could come kill shit quicker) so I don't think that he had a full understanding of the situation. For this reason the choice being given to the player makes complete sense, however the huge plot point of wanting to kill Fountain is not something so simple. Fountain has tried to kill him, he has controlled him against his true will his entire life, he was stolen from his parents and turned into more or less a monster because of it, and all the pain he has felt has been because of Fountain. This is clearly something that even a mutated child man would understand and show hatred for, something that as a character only makes complete sense to do.
There is a fine line between innocent choices, and large ones which would fully effect and or ruin what the character is supposta be. But that line needs to be made clear so that characters aren't made against what they're supposed to be, a game where you make the huge decisions needs a blank slate, not someone who already has motivations.
Man, Hostel 2 was probably the most misogynistic of the torture porn films I've sat through. For all the bullshit games get about violence and not having strong female characters at least there aren't any games made by a dude who clearly never got laid in high school and now wants to take that and all his unsolved mommy issues out on characters in his fiction.
Back on topic, giving a few quick outs for alternate endings that are clearly not the true ending but are neat ways to treat the story is something that was once in a lot more games. I'd love to see some quick alternate endings that are accessible at the very start and important forks in the story.
You mentioned being able to sit and wait to be rescued in Bioshock. That made me think of the point in Shadow Complex when you can just choose to drive the Jeep home rather than save the girl and they actually made a cutscene ending for if you decided to actually do it. Little things like that could go so far with what you're saying and eliminate the way that the player is trapped into the story. If game designers want to make a non-linear game, they should look to the Choose Your Own Adventure book series to see how best to do it. Some of the time, those books ended on the 2nd page with you dying, but other times, they'd have completely different, well though out, logical endings based on the choice of the reader, which made re-reading them so much more fun because making a different choice meant finding an entirely new path to explore (rather than just having healing powers/lightning powers. If we could extend this idea to games, I think we'd see some incredible games in the future.
I don't know if I'm just misunderstanding you, but it feels like you're saying that every game should be nonlinear. I love nonlinear games as much as the next person (Morrowind comes to mind), but not all games would work if they gave you a choice. Where would Bioshock's story be if you chose not to listen to Fontaine from the beginning, or had the option not to kill Andrew Ryan? Would the game carry the same depth or meaning?
It may come down to personal experience, but I've never become less immersed in a game because of a lack of choice. It doesn't necessarily cheapen the game for me or feel like a cop-out. It's just more of a story-telling device.
Games that give you a lot of options are great and there should be more of them, but games that tell a linear story aren't any less valid, in my opinion.
Great rant, I love watching Anthony's Rev Rants, but I never got that certain theme of free will from Portal. To me, that game's underlying message is about fighting the man, fighting a corrupt power.
You spend the first half of the game doing these things that an all-knowing overseer tells you to do because you think she will reward you later, while doing things that are slowly becoming more dangerous to yourself (like the "live-fire exercise") or more sadistic things to other people (like the Companion Cube... T-T), and when you realize that what's been happening this whole time was wrong, that the power you trusted this whole time is in fact evil, then you defy that power and go underground, behind the scenes to destroy that power much like a guerrilla resistance fighter. By going through the bowels of the Aperture Science building, you are escaping the overseer's line of sight, you are no longer bound by the man in any sense of the word.
I guess there is a semblance of a free will message intertwined within, but to me the tone I think Valve was going for in the first place was fighting the man, taking out a corrupted leader, and all that good stuff.
I hate to be 'this guy' but the fact is that if you boil games like Bioshock and Portal down far enough then they are just books on your T.V. They are telling a story, and yes there is 'interactivity' and yes there is the illusion of choice, but true to life it is just that, an illusion. I am a big fan of the rants but this one in particular seemed, as someone else put it, like you're trying to make Farcry 2 out to be the second coming. There is no true non linearity not in Farcry 2 and indeed not in life. You make it seem like every game should take into account every possibility, and that anything less is not living up the mediums potential. This is nonsense. It's like complaining that books don't read themselves out to you, or that the people on the T.V. don't respond to your cat calls. It's nonsensical to expect video games to have a path set for every possible player choice. Anticipating player reaction to that level is asking for the moon from game makers. If you want a game with 'freedom' go play an MMO then when presented with the choice to grind or mine for fish you can make the one that feels good to you. But when playing a game that is telling a narrative dont' expect the same level of freedom it's just not available.
I'm really glad you mentioned Bioshock. I felt like I was the only one who felt like the ending was kind of a cop-out. I think what it comes down to isn't how many choices you have in a game, but rather what kind of choices you have. Like, Farcry 2 didn't have that many choices, but it had the right ones, which makes it feel freeing and seamless. I think the source of that slave mentality you mentioned comes from the developer not knowing what choices they should give the player or how to implement them. I think a lot of times they get caught up in the breadth of human choice and get discouraged. We don't need existentialist considerations in our shooters. If we're playing a shooter then we probably already want to shoot things anyway. We just need the choices necessary to give us a pleasurable amount of variety. That's what bothered me so much about Bioshock was that the ending seemed to say that they had wanted to create a realistic city with meaningful interactions but they realized half-way through that they couldn't do that so they just made a Doom style shooter instead.
To me, choices and meaningful levels of interactivity in video games have never really amounted to much in my eyes because I was always aware that my options were created and laid out for me by a designer. And as such, they were necessarily limited due to the constraints placed on all human endeavors. To get to the point where we get a life-like sense of complete and utter freedom in a game, it would seem that we'd need to reduce the length of games to a single scene. Above D Sane mentioned Choose Your Own Adventure books and I'd really hate to see video games become more like them. I've read my share during my younger years and they all dwelt in this dead zone of mediocre time wasters with nothing to add to someone's understanding of the world. In my mind, to create a meaningful statement that actually conveys what a development studio or developer wanted to say, you have to make the gameplay experience largely linear. Giving choice is giving away authorship and that's something that I'm personally opposed to in the continuing growth of the medium. That said, I think your views on the repetition of this motif is getting long in the tooth and that your overall stance on this issue is intriguing. I'll also lament that Far Cry 2 put me off to too great a degree for me to continue playing. From what I've heard though, isn't the ending for the main character presented in an utterly linear fashion? So says the Wikipedia page anyway.
So what, a game is supposed to be able to predict what the player is going to want to do and the developers are supposed to accommodate that? That's not very fair.
Video Games may be about choice but that choice is always limited, no matter what. It's always going to be Choice A, Choice B, or Choice C.
It's not realistic to expect a game to change it's entire structure because you have decided on something that is outside the developers expectations of the story. There are a million possibilities and it would take quite a long time and quite a lot of work just to program all these possible branches while still trying to hold together whatever story is left.
I mean, this is an ideal kind of game. A game that will actually react to you as a player and give you almost infinite possibilities. Something that a film or book could never do is react to the audience - something very unique to games. But how do you propose doing that? How do we create events that aren't scripted, that can change on the spot when the player chooses?
I just don't think it's possible right now. Maybe the technology just isn't there yet? (real AI might solve the issue)
@ lastdual: I didn't play MW2, but if I'm correct, you're a CIA agent doing this in order to get closer to the big bad guy, right? Then the very fact that you (the character, not the player) are in the elevator means that you have already accepted what is going to happen next, which means that allowing players to kill the terrorists without repercution doesn't make sense in the context of the mission.
But I do agree that it looks (again, I did not play MW2) lame and poorly executed compared to MW1, because it's really scripted and this is a situation where you, the player, could have chosen to refuse the mission (Whereas in MW1, it's impossible to stop the nuke from exploding, and you obviously cannot escape your execution since you're a prisonner).
linearity is used because it's convenient, these game devs want to tell stories, and in order to truly bring a player into a game, you don't create a story, you create a theme, a mood, a setting, or some other word that you feel is appropriate. The story is formed by the player, the story is the experience that the player had and how the world interacted with him, the same is true in all great games, even linear ones like portal or "fun" games like halo or gears of war.
There is no concrete real story of portal other than the retelling of the game by the player, portal was mostly a theme but was linear, but the theme was so well executed, people will remember that game for a very long time. In the game, your character is a blank slate, so with which you place yourself over her, you become her, you're not playing as Chell, you're just playing portal, you're moving through this linear puzzle world and using the solutions that you came up with, the story is your's, despite being a linear game created by some devs at valve.
When people talk about halo or gears of war, they don't talk about the well executed story or anything like that, they talk about the multiplayer, which is just without story, it's just the thematic elements of the game and the player is told what to do in order to win, the rest of the story is filled in by the players, and a lot of people have great stories from these games, amazing headshots, embarrassing grenade kills, etc. These events are created by the player working within the world created by the developer.
In Far Cry 2, as you (anthony) went through that world, and going for a permadeath run, you were bound by rules, but you established yourself as your character, you were your character, when he died, he would not be coming back, the story was yours, this is what you did, the theme was the dev's.
In Modern Warfare 2, this is not your story, your story, you would have shot the terrorists and then the war would have been averted, Modern Warfare 2 is a linear game that's trying to tell a story, or more really, it's trying to be a movie. Then again, like halo and gears of war, no one is playing this game for the single player.
Except Chell and the characters from Far Cry 2 are all blank slates like I said, saying that you ALWAYS play as yourself in a game is just stupid. There are clearly games where you play as a character, which I'd say is probably the majority of story based games.
I certainly don't think MW2 was about control. But why are you attacking all these games for being linear when they never claimed to be otherwise? You seem to have this expectation that because it's a game it should be nonlinear and allow you to do whatever you like (regardless of the dev time, money, and testing time it would add to games that already take long enough to produce). While I do think non linearity can be good and is something fairly unique about the medium you seem to think that if a game is linear it isn't living up to its full potential. It would be like someone eating vanilla ice cream and bitching that it tasted nothing like chocolate ice cream.
The problem I have with your brand of criticism is something that literary critics and movie critics (by which I mean theorists who analyze movies in the same context you're attempting and not people who recommend whether you should see a movie or not) both avoid. You are not critiquing the game as it is. You're critiquing it as you think it should be, as if Game is a sort of Platonic form that these games fall shy of.
Instead, I think when you get to the level of criticism you're doing, where you're trying to derive meaning from games, it cheats the medium of the magic of interpretation that pervades other forms of criticism. I think when you approach it this way, you have to assume the author intended every aspect of the work to contribute to the meaning. If you don't you diminish the effect by emphasizing the process. It's like lambasting not seeing the shark more in Jaws only because the model-makers were incompetent at their jobs and the shark broke, as opposed to praising the effect the off-screen threat of the shark created. Happy accidents, sure, but that should not effect your interpretation of the work - the author's process and the end result are separate.
In that regard, it's not reaching to ask "If I still was forced to follow commands and continued on a linear path in BioShock, what does that mean?" as opposed to accusing th developer being lazy. To do so would be, in turn, lazy criticism.
Every Rev Rant of mine gets covered in League of Legends ads or something of the sort. No one type of video on the site makes this happen. What's the deal?
A solid rant, I agree, but the amount of funding and manpower it takes to create games that are completely or partially non-linenar, a la far cry 2, is astronomical. Portal was a student project, and bioshock was pretty short, and took forever to come out.
I've made games, you've made games, and you know it's hard to create even a 20 minute chunk of meaningful or effective emergent gameplay.
This is a market game. Company heads require a return on investment that is actually profitable. That means a 6-8 year development cycle, which is the amount of time it would take to make every game like that, is neither affordable, nor a good investment from a business standpoint. A single commercial flop could put a publisher out of business.
That puts the bag in the hands of indy devs. They have minimal manpower, minimal funding, and generally the rest of their life to deal with.
Artistically, yes, what you are saying is valid, but realistically it is not.
But that's not what he's saying. He's saying "Here's the message I have decided the game is trying to project. Here are some aspects which break that theory or support that theory only loosely. Therefore, the game itself is flawed." As opposed to seeing the game for what it actually contains, he's projecting a theory onto it. It's the reverse side of deconstructionism (itself the lowliest and most evil form of all literary critical thought.)
I don't think Anthony is over-analysing or doesn't enjoy the games enough. we relax and enjoy games/books/movies etc and then we reflect upon them, sometimes in depth if they had a big effect on us or we want to. it's a great and simple human process.
If you don't want to hear him discuss his thoughts then don't watch the video?
When i played MW2 i shot the terrorists the first time through which sucked for reasons the first rant mentioned.
But i don't think having the freedom to do that is necessary. I simply think CONTEXT would have fixed it for me.
The game hints lives may be saved later. it doesn't tell you how or from what or give any real sense of a known future threat.
eg: If the cutscene before had mentioned some nukes makarov was prepping for a big hit and left with a contact, i would have been more likely to maintain my cover because all of a sudden 100 airport lives would have been weighed against known nukes and the chance to learn where they are and who the contact is.. rather than weighed against a total unknown.
Anthony, it sounds like going forward you want every game to be open world because they're really the only type of game that offers the kind of choice you're talking about.
This guy is capable of complaining about Dragon Age: Origins because despite the hundreds of choices that you're given you can't let the Archdemon win.
I'm of the same mind as fellows like Bus and, in some parts, Kafkaesque. Personally I far prefer games that tell great stories, or have fantastic storytelling etc to games that prioritize player choice over these. Given arguments made here numerous times, the former games are (almost necessarily) linear.
It's a decision between exploring the medium and exploring the human condition (etc). The two seldom work in concert as a result of the constraints of the medium.
Now I didn't get that theme of taking control in Portal either, but it certainly holds some validity (unlike say the subversion of masculinity of Gears of War 2). Loophole Jumper, no doubt you're familiar with the intentional fallacy?
Nevertheless, the theme of choice does seem to be a popular one these days, and I agree with Anthony of the irony that this theme is nearly only explored in games that are linear; the method through which this theme is portrayed precludes the theme itself. In this way, games are relegating themselves to become other mediums, and in a very obvious way that can destroy immersion. Bioshock, for example, had an extremely heavy-handed approach.
That being said, this doesn't bother me too much because I prefer thematic exploration to medium exploration, as a general rule.
As a final question: Anthony, are you accustomed with David Hume's thesis on free will?
Chris Pasley, you see flaws in his argument, which is as valid as Anthony seeing flaws in the game..
in the end, this is just discussing something people feel like discussing. it's ok to feel something was a flaw and discuss it because sometimes we simply think something could have been better than it was especially when we see potential and so much that went right in our judgement of the experience. it doesn't mean we are comparing everything to some lofty 'perfect game' state.
Destructoid is an open discussion community. You don't need to "audition" to post a comment - just speak your mind. We respect differing opinions on the site, so have at it. Be smart, funny, insightful, clueless, or cute -- but back it up with substance. Keep your cool, keep it fun. We only ask that you act respectfully and above all: don't be a troll and ruin it for everyone else. Don't bring down gamers or we'll, you know, gently shoot you in the face and stuff you into a flaming mailbox. Each comment is your opportuntity to make this community awesomer. Is that even a word?
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Contest:
3:20 PM on 12.09.2009
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Other the that, great rant as usual.
Games where your allies can be killed off at will without having to be scripted in advance are few and far between. So are game that force you to choose between 2 difficult options without heavily penalizing you for being "too good" or "too evil."
I still enjoy "powerless" scenarios, but if I'm going to be powerless, I prefer it if the game puts me in a logical context. For instance, being powerless in the execution scene that kicks off COD4, or again during the nuke scene. It makes sense in these situations that I can't do much to change the outcome.
The powerless scene in MW2's No Russian fails because it's totally contrived videogame nonsense. There's no reason why you should be powerless to turn your guns on the terrorists, other than the game basically flat-out telling you "Hey! That's not how you're supposed to play! Start over!" It's exactly the kind of situation where you *should* have a choice, which makes it stand out as a poor design choice on the director's part.
Firstly, In golden sun, you get asked a question near the beginning of the game. It says something like "Do you want to embark on this quest, or not" If you say no, it says somthing (cant remember what exactly) then it goes back to the title screen.
Secondly, speaking of moral choice, Fallout 1 did it well(Fallout 2 probably did it better, but I havnt played it yet). I felt some of that same struggle. I had trouble doing anything "bad" in the game because I had control of this character.
Hostel 2 spoilers!! There was no warning about that! :(
:P
To me, at least, escaping the fire wasn't about becoming free, it was more about not being in something else's control with the prospect of freedom. It was about breaking of the shackles of having to obey to survive, then trying to become free.
Besides that, yeah. The 'obey to continue' meta-message is stale now it's happened enough to notice it specifically. Good rant.
I mean I can agree with you on games opening up so many options as far as evoking emotions and story-telling goes, but these games are linear because people don't have 20 years to work on a game. Take Bioshock for example, say you don't ever take the first plasmid injection because of "free will". Well guess what? You're going to sit in that fucking room for the rest of your life because you can't open the door. This is a cheap argument, but I think you get the point.
One last thing. Interactive mediums are very tricky as far as stories go. So let's take a movie that has been spoiled for us by a friend(someone betrays/kills someone). We go into this movie, and when the scene arises we know how it's going to happen and just kind of accept it. And be pissed at your friend.
*SPOILER*
Now take your second playthrough of Portal. You know GLaDOS is going to try to kill you, and you're pissed because instead of just seeing games as another form of story-telling, you think that the entire experience should change because it's interactive? So instead of progressing the story you just sit there because you know the next room is an oven, and you're for dinner.
Also the comments on how you weren't able to wait for a boat or not use the plasmid in the beginning of Bioshock were kinda silly since you were brainwashed and genetically altered to be made to do what you did. Jack clearly had an inclination as to what to do since he hijacked the plane in the beginning to get to Rapture even if he and you weren't aware of it at the time. Also Jack is still a character, he is not you, he went to go kill Fountain for revenge, just because you as the player would rather do something else does not mean that the character feels that way. Saying that you should be able to anything as a character just ruins the character, the only way for that to work would be to make it you.
I just remember those two Ultima games as being very open in terms of how you played them, and how the game allowed you to play them.
Is dtoid infected or is it my laptop????
I listened to the video behind the league of legends crap but couldn't really concentrate on it.
Shame, I enjoy Ant's Rants.
I won a free copy of Far Cry 2 at PAX and I couldn't play it more than an hour due to AI seeing through foliage and the lack of a quick save button. It took all the fun out of the game. I gave the game away.
I recently picked it up on Steam during Black Friday and the game is infinitely better with KB+Mouse support in addition to being able to quick save and load when the AI pulls of cheap bullshit.
I love you.
There is a fine line between innocent choices, and large ones which would fully effect and or ruin what the character is supposta be. But that line needs to be made clear so that characters aren't made against what they're supposed to be, a game where you make the huge decisions needs a blank slate, not someone who already has motivations.
Back on topic, giving a few quick outs for alternate endings that are clearly not the true ending but are neat ways to treat the story is something that was once in a lot more games. I'd love to see some quick alternate endings that are accessible at the very start and important forks in the story.
u must really really like mass effect from what u said
It may come down to personal experience, but I've never become less immersed in a game because of a lack of choice. It doesn't necessarily cheapen the game for me or feel like a cop-out. It's just more of a story-telling device.
Games that give you a lot of options are great and there should be more of them, but games that tell a linear story aren't any less valid, in my opinion.
You spend the first half of the game doing these things that an all-knowing overseer tells you to do because you think she will reward you later, while doing things that are slowly becoming more dangerous to yourself (like the "live-fire exercise") or more sadistic things to other people (like the Companion Cube... T-T), and when you realize that what's been happening this whole time was wrong, that the power you trusted this whole time is in fact evil, then you defy that power and go underground, behind the scenes to destroy that power much like a guerrilla resistance fighter. By going through the bowels of the Aperture Science building, you are escaping the overseer's line of sight, you are no longer bound by the man in any sense of the word.
I guess there is a semblance of a free will message intertwined within, but to me the tone I think Valve was going for in the first place was fighting the man, taking out a corrupted leader, and all that good stuff.
Sorry if that comes across as crazy rambling.
I'm really glad you mentioned Bioshock. I felt like I was the only one who felt like the ending was kind of a cop-out. I think what it comes down to isn't how many choices you have in a game, but rather what kind of choices you have. Like, Farcry 2 didn't have that many choices, but it had the right ones, which makes it feel freeing and seamless. I think the source of that slave mentality you mentioned comes from the developer not knowing what choices they should give the player or how to implement them. I think a lot of times they get caught up in the breadth of human choice and get discouraged. We don't need existentialist considerations in our shooters. If we're playing a shooter then we probably already want to shoot things anyway. We just need the choices necessary to give us a pleasurable amount of variety. That's what bothered me so much about Bioshock was that the ending seemed to say that they had wanted to create a realistic city with meaningful interactions but they realized half-way through that they couldn't do that so they just made a Doom style shooter instead.
Video Games may be about choice but that choice is always limited, no matter what. It's always going to be Choice A, Choice B, or Choice C.
It's not realistic to expect a game to change it's entire structure because you have decided on something that is outside the developers expectations of the story. There are a million possibilities and it would take quite a long time and quite a lot of work just to program all these possible branches while still trying to hold together whatever story is left.
I mean, this is an ideal kind of game. A game that will actually react to you as a player and give you almost infinite possibilities. Something that a film or book could never do is react to the audience - something very unique to games. But how do you propose doing that? How do we create events that aren't scripted, that can change on the spot when the player chooses?
I just don't think it's possible right now. Maybe the technology just isn't there yet? (real AI might solve the issue)
@ lastdual: I didn't play MW2, but if I'm correct, you're a CIA agent doing this in order to get closer to the big bad guy, right? Then the very fact that you (the character, not the player) are in the elevator means that you have already accepted what is going to happen next, which means that allowing players to kill the terrorists without repercution doesn't make sense in the context of the mission.
But I do agree that it looks (again, I did not play MW2) lame and poorly executed compared to MW1, because it's really scripted and this is a situation where you, the player, could have chosen to refuse the mission (Whereas in MW1, it's impossible to stop the nuke from exploding, and you obviously cannot escape your execution since you're a prisonner).
There is no concrete real story of portal other than the retelling of the game by the player, portal was mostly a theme but was linear, but the theme was so well executed, people will remember that game for a very long time. In the game, your character is a blank slate, so with which you place yourself over her, you become her, you're not playing as Chell, you're just playing portal, you're moving through this linear puzzle world and using the solutions that you came up with, the story is your's, despite being a linear game created by some devs at valve.
When people talk about halo or gears of war, they don't talk about the well executed story or anything like that, they talk about the multiplayer, which is just without story, it's just the thematic elements of the game and the player is told what to do in order to win, the rest of the story is filled in by the players, and a lot of people have great stories from these games, amazing headshots, embarrassing grenade kills, etc. These events are created by the player working within the world created by the developer.
In Far Cry 2, as you (anthony) went through that world, and going for a permadeath run, you were bound by rules, but you established yourself as your character, you were your character, when he died, he would not be coming back, the story was yours, this is what you did, the theme was the dev's.
In Modern Warfare 2, this is not your story, your story, you would have shot the terrorists and then the war would have been averted, Modern Warfare 2 is a linear game that's trying to tell a story, or more really, it's trying to be a movie. Then again, like halo and gears of war, no one is playing this game for the single player.
Except Chell and the characters from Far Cry 2 are all blank slates like I said, saying that you ALWAYS play as yourself in a game is just stupid. There are clearly games where you play as a character, which I'd say is probably the majority of story based games.
I certainly don't think MW2 was about control. But why are you attacking all these games for being linear when they never claimed to be otherwise? You seem to have this expectation that because it's a game it should be nonlinear and allow you to do whatever you like (regardless of the dev time, money, and testing time it would add to games that already take long enough to produce). While I do think non linearity can be good and is something fairly unique about the medium you seem to think that if a game is linear it isn't living up to its full potential. It would be like someone eating vanilla ice cream and bitching that it tasted nothing like chocolate ice cream.
Instead, I think when you get to the level of criticism you're doing, where you're trying to derive meaning from games, it cheats the medium of the magic of interpretation that pervades other forms of criticism. I think when you approach it this way, you have to assume the author intended every aspect of the work to contribute to the meaning. If you don't you diminish the effect by emphasizing the process. It's like lambasting not seeing the shark more in Jaws only because the model-makers were incompetent at their jobs and the shark broke, as opposed to praising the effect the off-screen threat of the shark created. Happy accidents, sure, but that should not effect your interpretation of the work - the author's process and the end result are separate.
In that regard, it's not reaching to ask "If I still was forced to follow commands and continued on a linear path in BioShock, what does that mean?" as opposed to accusing th developer being lazy. To do so would be, in turn, lazy criticism.
And head shaking.
I guess would make the two...siblings. Or half siblings at least.
I've made games, you've made games, and you know it's hard to create even a 20 minute chunk of meaningful or effective emergent gameplay.
This is a market game. Company heads require a return on investment that is actually profitable. That means a 6-8 year development cycle, which is the amount of time it would take to make every game like that, is neither affordable, nor a good investment from a business standpoint. A single commercial flop could put a publisher out of business.
That puts the bag in the hands of indy devs. They have minimal manpower, minimal funding, and generally the rest of their life to deal with.
Artistically, yes, what you are saying is valid, but realistically it is not.
if this were a college class on video games and not a video game blog i would totally agree that his critiques are out of place.
as it is he's using examples from specific games to show how all games could move forward. it's not meant to shoot down the merits of those examples.
But that's not what he's saying. He's saying "Here's the message I have decided the game is trying to project. Here are some aspects which break that theory or support that theory only loosely. Therefore, the game itself is flawed." As opposed to seeing the game for what it actually contains, he's projecting a theory onto it. It's the reverse side of deconstructionism (itself the lowliest and most evil form of all literary critical thought.)
If you don't want to hear him discuss his thoughts then don't watch the video?
When i played MW2 i shot the terrorists the first time through which sucked for reasons the first rant mentioned.
But i don't think having the freedom to do that is necessary. I simply think CONTEXT would have fixed it for me.
The game hints lives may be saved later. it doesn't tell you how or from what or give any real sense of a known future threat.
eg: If the cutscene before had mentioned some nukes makarov was prepping for a big hit and left with a contact, i would have been more likely to maintain my cover because all of a sudden 100 airport lives would have been weighed against known nukes and the chance to learn where they are and who the contact is.. rather than weighed against a total unknown.
It's a decision between exploring the medium and exploring the human condition (etc). The two seldom work in concert as a result of the constraints of the medium.
Now I didn't get that theme of taking control in Portal either, but it certainly holds some validity (unlike say the subversion of masculinity of Gears of War 2). Loophole Jumper, no doubt you're familiar with the intentional fallacy?
Nevertheless, the theme of choice does seem to be a popular one these days, and I agree with Anthony of the irony that this theme is nearly only explored in games that are linear; the method through which this theme is portrayed precludes the theme itself. In this way, games are relegating themselves to become other mediums, and in a very obvious way that can destroy immersion. Bioshock, for example, had an extremely heavy-handed approach.
That being said, this doesn't bother me too much because I prefer thematic exploration to medium exploration, as a general rule.
As a final question: Anthony, are you accustomed with David Hume's thesis on free will?
in the end, this is just discussing something people feel like discussing. it's ok to feel something was a flaw and discuss it because sometimes we simply think something could have been better than it was especially when we see potential and so much that went right in our judgement of the experience. it doesn't mean we are comparing everything to some lofty 'perfect game' state.
also- Far cry 2 rocked!!!!