WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Fable III, Spec Ops; The Line, and Life is Strange.

One criticism that has been leveled against certain video games is that they don’t let you choose to not do some thing you don’t want to do. It’s understandable where this criticism comes from. Unlike other mediums, video games are uniquely able to handle input from the person experiencing it (excepting things like Choose Your Own Adventure books and certain types of live theater). However, this leads a lot of people to think that the lack of choice is failure of game design.

Economics of game development

Game development is expensive and takes a long time. Certain types of player choices would necessitate fairly extreme amounts of work in order to follow through properly. Even in games which rely extensively on player choice often will steer apparently branching choices back into being a single path.

Obviously some games do feature choice heavily, but economics still play a part. Games with extensive branching choices often make those choices be independent of one another or make each individual action matter less. These games also sometimes eschew voice acting to allow more pieces of dialogue.

Themes and character action

In movies and books, character motivation is extremely paramount on how characters act in the story. And those actions feed into the theme of the work. When you allow player choice, you must be careful to make sure that the theme can come through with whatever choice the player makes. There’s lots of games which make good use dilemmas.

However, one way to make sure that this isn’t a problem is to remove choice entirely. This makes the game more similar to a movie or book in terms of plot structure, but it stil allows the use of the medium’s specific parcipatory experience. Even in games without player choice, the inherent participation of video games means that you have a different emotional relationship to the work than you would in a book or a movie.

Examples

All of this is pretty abstract, so I’d like to get into some specific games and show how they use player choice and how different ways of handling it do or don’t work.

Fable III

Fable III, in the tradition of its series has a fairly simplistic morality system at first blush. You can choose to be virtuous and good or callous and evil and the NPCs will react to your player in particular ways. The main plot is pretty straightforward at first: you must depose your tyrannical brother, who has been bleeding the kingdom of Albion dry with taxes for years. However, once you reach what would be the climax of a typical game, instead you are told by your dying brother that there’s an impending invasion of monsters from across the sea. If you can’t raise the money to defend Albion, your people will all be killed.

So the next section of the game involves a series of choices where you must choose from two options: one which will make money but decrease quality of life for your subjects and one which will cost money but increase their quality of life. The one choice that sticks out in my mind is to either fix up the orphange or throw out all the orphans and turn it into a brothel. This cartoonish choice actually gets context enough to show the trickiness of making the “right” choice all the time.

But you know what I did? I bought every house in all of Albion and left the game on overnight, accruing rent. I was able to get enough money to save the kingdom and pay for all the improvemens to make my subjects happy.

Fable III was committed to making choice first and foremost in the game, but in doing so allowed their own theme to be undermined.

Spec Ops: The Line

On the complete other end of the spectrum is Spec Ops: The Line. In this game, you play the leader of a 3-man squad of Delta Force in Dubai after a sandstorm devastates the city. Over the course of the game, you clash with the “Damned 33rd” US Army Battalion who have gone rogue.

Partway through the game, you gain access to the ability to use white posphorous on the 33rd. White posphorous is an extremely cruel weapon which indescriminately burns flesh and equipment. Your squadmates question the decision to use it, but the player character says that there is no choice. You must then shoot the white phosphorous using a thermal camera controlled through a computer. You keep attacking until you shoot it into a large crowd. You then walk through the destruction you’ve caused, of soldiers who are burned and dying. And then you come upon the large group before. It’s a group of refugee civilians trying to get out of the devastated city.

Complaints were levied at this game for not allowing you avoid shooting the white posphorous at the civilians at least. However, the game’s theme is heavily informed by the actions that the player character make. Even though the player has no say in it, their participation (and oestensible control) has an emotional impact that is undeniable.

Life is Strange

Life is Strange is a great game with lots of neat ideas. Like many games in its subgenre (Telltale-style adventure games, we really need a better name for that), choice is a core mechanic. Unlike a lot of games with choice as a core mechanic, you actually get to see the immeidate consequences before you do so, as player character Max has the ability to rewind a short period of time. But, the wider-reaching effects of your decisions aren’t fully known to you yet.

Eventually that time-travel mechanic gets expanded, but you also realize that through the butterfly effect you are causing your hometown of Arcadia Bay to be threatend with destruction from a hurricane. You realize the only way to undo it all is to go back in time to before you used your powers. The catch is that would lead to the death of your best friend and probably soon to be girlfriend, since you undid her death with those powers. The choice is known among fans as “Bay or Bae?”

This choice really succeeds in setting up an emotional dilemma. This is an example of a choice that actually succeeds in telling a story properly.

Why you should care

The point of writing this, for me, is to show that choice in games needs to be appropriately considered, just like every other aspect. Deciding what types of choices you can make and the implications of those choices is both a practical and narrative choice. It’s very easy to see games as being “about” your own choices, and when that choice is not given it can feel like a game is “forcing” you to take a certain action. But I think it’s important to engage with video games with an understanding that sometimes a choice is not appropriate for a game’s story. If you don’t, you’re going to miss out on a lot of great pieces of art.