The wrong thing: The procrastinating protagonist

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In my lifelong career as a gamer, I have saved the world countless times. I have saved it from aliens, I have saved it from Nazis, I have saved it from nuclear war, and I have saved it from long-haired mama’s boys. But if one thing has been consistent in my genre-spanning heroic romps, it’s that when saving the world, I’ve taken my sweet-ass time doing it.

Nothing is ever urgent. The games may lead us to believe the situation is dire, but it rarely is. Huge meteor threatening to collide with Midgar? It’ll hang in the sky indefinitely. Ophelia is in danger and needs help? She can wait for Eddie Riggs to find some sweet jumps in his hot rod. There is a friggin’ castle collapsing from naval bombardment around Sgt. Gary “Roach” Sanderson? He can still take the time to look for dubiously unexplained “enemy intel” laptops. Such is the life of the procrastinating protagonist. 

Despite putting the player in a state of emergency, many games actually reward dawdling, lollygagging, postponement, and otherwise dicking around. Why get revenge on Sephiroth as soon as possible, when spending six hours breeding and racing chocobos can net the party the Knights of the Round summon, making the final battle a cakewalk? Why kill Ganon and save Zelda right away, when going out and exploring every remote corner can get Link a larger health bar, bigger bomb bags and quivers, or precious jars? Why go after Lucien, when Albion’s real estate system rewards the Hero with gold just for passing time, even with the game turned off?

Simply put, most games give absolutely no reason to take a threat seriously. Even if the player is doing the right thing in saving the world, he is almost always doing the wrong thing in his execution. But it is not the player who is to blame; it is the game.

As a storytelling medium, videogames have done some interesting things with providing the player with consequences for his actions, but something that is rarely, if ever, explored, is showing the player consequences for his nonactions.

Role-playing games tend to be the biggest offenders in this sense. I recall that during my first playthrough of Final Fantasy VII, I felt an urgent panic when the Meteor appeared in the sky. “Holy crap,” I thought, “I’d better do something about that thing post-haste!” But then, a few hours later, I noticed that it hadn’t budged from its apparently geosynchronous orbit. And at that point, I made my way back to Gold Saucer to play some goofy minigames and battle in the arena. And despite my apparent apathy for the planet-destroying chunk of flaming rock threatening the world, the game patted my back, told me I’d done a good job, and gave me a new Materia that let me summon twice in one turn.

Lost Odyssey, another JRPG I adore, is also guilty of this. It is usually pretty clear where Kaim et al need to go, but rather than take the most direct route, I made sure to hug every wall, check every corner, and furiously hammer on the A button to make sure I wouldn’t miss a Seed or a Dream or some other ultimately insignificant morsel. If you want to satisfy all of the Pipots, or go play with musical blocks, Gongora will wait to execute his dastardly plans until Kaim feels like triggering him.

Open world games also reward the player for neglecting his duties as the Chosen One. Inherent in the design of this type of game is a world with things to do, and developers seem to feel that adding more of these diversions lets them put another bullet on the back of the box. But when I’m told that a rival gang is closing in on CJ’s brother, or Lionwhyte’s army is marching toward Bladehenge, or Alex Mercer needs to hijack a particular tank in a particular convoy, the fact that the player can opt instead to fly stunt planes through floating hoops, go hunt for eleven Raptor Elk, or try to glide from the top of a building into an arbitrary target, does that not take away from the flow of the narrative? Does it not break the connection between the player and protagonist? Or, when put in these situations, would you truly go off and play games instead of tending to the allegedly urgent matter at hand?

Even first-person shooters, the polar opposite of RPGs (because I said so, just now), have shown elements of false urgency. The aforementioned gulag sequence in Modern Warfare 2 comes to mind. On my first playthrough, I was feeling the adrenaline flowing. When the walls came crashing down, I sprinted my heart out to escape that dungeon, and it was fantastic. But my second time through, I was going for the elusive intel items, which serve no purpose other than to pad the campaign for another playthrough, and even detract from it, by breaking up these tense moments and showing that truly, the game is waiting for you to do whatever the heck you want before the events actually move on.

The revered Valve shooters have made an art of this. The heart-pounding silo defense sequence near the end of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is a masterpiece in making the player feel like he survived with just the skin of his teeth, but in reality, tailors itself to how quickly Gordon Freeman dispatches the Striders. He can do doughnuts in his car, hunt for any of the many health and ammo replenishments, or just sit in a corner, and the Striders and Hunters will allow him plenty of time to tend to the task at hand.

Not every game has got the whole “rewarding inaction” thing wrong though. In a few games, there is a glimmer of a good idea, waiting to be more fully fleshed out. Splinter Cell: Double Agent (I apologize if you are sick of hearing me talk about it, especially since it’s not even a particularly good game) had an interesting system which imposed a twenty minute time limit on Sam Fisher while he was in the JBA headquarters, giving him more possible objectives than he could reasonably achieve in that time. Choosing to attempt one thing necessarily meant choosing not to do something else, and while these choices almost never had any major impact on the outcome of the narrative, a lazy player may have missed one of the most thought-provoking choices presented in this generation.

Final Fantasy VII, a game that appears earlier in this article for its nonsensically stationary Meteor, actually has a cool bit related to this topic near the beginning. On one of the bombing runs in Midgar, right after setting off the timed explosive, Cloud and the rest of AVALANCHE have to run to escape with their lives. A timer appears on screen (overtly letting the player know that, yes, this time we actually mean you need to hurry), and Cloud gets to running. He might be so caught up in it all that he misses Jesse, a fellow AVALANCHE member, standing still on a rafter. If he goes on without checking on her, he later comes to a door he can’t open, and must frantically figure out what to do. It turns out that her foot was caught, and she is the only person who can get the party through the door.

Now, I realize that this is almost exactly what I am arguing against. The player is again rewarded by stopping and making conversation when he is supposed to be getting the hell out of there. But what I really find interesting is the consequence of actions and nonactions when under duress. It perhaps would have been more poignant if, instead of simply barring progress, leaving Jesse in the rafters still allowed Cloud to escape, but resulted in her death, a permanent effect of the player’s doings.

So the next time you’re taking time off from the “main quest” to enjoy the little things around you, think about what it means. Sure, you may have the purest intentions in the long run, but are you really doing the right thing by searching for the biggest fish in the pond?

Footnote: It should be noted that I haven’t played Dead Rising or Mass Effect, but I’ve been told those have interesting (if not frustrating) time-sensitive game mechanics.