Variety Friday: Batman Arkham City - Not All Games Need Choices

While playing Arkham City, there were a few moments when I thought to myself “What if I wanted to kill him?  Why couldn’t the game have let me choose?  It didn’t have to affect the story...” and that got me thinking about the differences between games that offer moral choices, and those that don’t, why sometimes one way is better than another, and why all games don’t just use moral choices in the first place.

Now, starting with “why all games don’t just use moral choices” I’m not going to bring into the argument anything about development time/cost, I’m going to keep this strictly design based.  Now some of the pros of having moral choices include being able to have a deeper connection to your character, since you get to shape him how you see fit, you also get to have a more impactful story.  Now, what if you’re playing a character that isn’t supposed to be the player, instead it is a narrative of someone else and it’s trying to tell their story.  Games like this really relate more to TV and Movies, since the original Star Trek was you simply watching the events of the Enterprise, you couldn’t actually affect them (as awesome as that’d be).

Games without choice really need to have good gameplay, so that the players can get the same type of immersion from simply controlling the character, and frankly, there is no problem with this.  While you may not have as much control of a character, I’ve always wanted to see an RPG with choices that aren’t presented in dialog, and instead are all portrayed through actions. But, back to the question at hand, games don’t always use moral choices, because it isn’t always necessary.  Some games don’t want you to have that connection to character(s), and instead want you to try and predict what happens next, like in any good novel.  It’s less about choices, but more about the experience of “going along for the ride”.

While Arkham City was initially what got me thinking about “why doesn’t this game and similar ones have moral choices”, I didn’t actually find an answer until I played the Dragon Age: Origin’s DLC “Leliana’s Song” earlier for the first time.  This DLC takes a turn from everything else Dragon Age in that you play as one of the well known characters in a prequel, and Leliana is a voiced character unlike the character you play all throughout Origins/Awakening.  While at first I was iffy about the character actually being voice and me controlling her, I finally realized that it was actually for the better, since I was reliving a story from the character’s past, which had a deep moral lesson embedded with it, ultimately I didn’t need the choices or the feeling of it being my own character, because in the end I “went along, on a ride from the past”.  This allowed me to get a deeper understanding of that character which was really interesting, after already knowing some things about her.

I think this actually comes down to two things.  If you know of the character you’re playing as, it allows you to enjoy the game with the mindset of further understand whoever that fictional (or on rare occasions, non-fictional) character may be.  Or, if you’re living through a specific flashback or experience(s).  These are perfectly valid reasons to why a game without choices may actually be the better route.  But this doesn’t mean the game has to sacrifice narrative, one great example of this is Bastion, you don’t really have moral choices, it is instead a story of survival (and of rebuilding) which presents its narrative in a different, yet interesting way which takes the “try to understand the character” approach, even though you don’t know anything about him.

Now to get back to the actual question at hand, not all games have moral stories, because, frankly, it would be bad if all games were like Mass Effect.  Games need to tell stories, immerse in stories, immerse people in worlds, aswell as simply letting the player have fun.  This brings up another problem, in that every gamer experiences fun differently, but I digress (possible future article?)  In a past setting, the player shouldn’t be able to affect the past, unless that’s a gameplay element.  Besides, sometime game designers aren’t trying to immerse players with the character, but instead with the world and the overarching story, like TV Shows and Movies do.  Now there are a lot of times when moral choice are good and make a game much better, but this isn’t always the case, because in the game industry there are so many different ways to portray narrative, there can’t be one precise way, it depending on the game, the setting, and the situation.

Happy Halloween Everybody!  PS: I would have made this Halloween themed if I didn’t just realize Halloween (AKA Nightmare Night) was in 3 days…because I already wrote this article.