The Meaning of Choice

Let's get some housekeeping out of the way, first. I haven't written anything here in a long time, due to some personal circumstances. I'm mostly better, now, and ready to write some more.

Today I want to talk about choice in videogames. Janet Murray defines agency as "the satisfying power to take meaningful actions and see the results of our decisions and choices". We've more or less unquestioningly accepted this definition, and mostly agreed that agency is a good thing. But it's about time, now, that we look at exactly what it is that makes an action meaningful. Questions such as "What is meaning?" are philosophically interesting, but the questions are a little too vague - and the answers a little too ambiguous - to be of any practical benefit.

I keep going back to what Susan Sontag said about authorship and "the truth of fiction". She said:-

I think of the writer of novels and stories and plays as a moral agent. In my view, a fiction writer whose adherence is to literature is, necessarily, someone who thinks about moral problems: about what is just and unjust, what is better or worse, what is repulsive and admirable, what is lamentable and what inspires joy and approbation.

Sontag later, in the same essay, observed that moral issues are not necessarily only concerned with what is good and bad, but also with what is important and unimportant. What she says is easily observable in Aesop's Fables, or in the parables of Christ, but she contends that it is present in all stories. If we realign our expectations to the thinking that the moral problem at the core of the story is not necessarily very deep, and not even necessarily consciously considered by the author, I think I can agree with this. And this, to me, is what meaning is. To be meaningful in the context of a story, choices necessarily have to have a moral component.

Dungeons & Dragons' alignment system

There have been no shortage of games that have attempted to leverage this moral component into their decisions. In such games, choices are usually cast as a choice between 'good' and 'evil', often written into the game mechanics with a metric of just how good or evil your character is. Lionhead's games, such as the Fable and Black & White series, are fundamentally based on the idea that you get to choose between good and evil. The Fallout series likewise has its 'karma' system, as does The Elder Scrolls series have its own metric of morality. The Neverwinter Nights games used Dungeons & Dragons' biaxial alignment system (above), which was an improvement, but not much. The problems with these choices are several. For one thing, the notion of 'good' and 'evil' is rather oversimplistic, which is why Fable III inconsistently conflated 'good' and 'evil' with 'popular' and 'unpopular'. For games to look at mature moral issues as other media do, we have to do away with looking at morality on a linear scale. Perhaps more importantly, though, they're false choices. We, as the player, are told up-front what the 'right' choice is and what the 'wrong' choice is. Why would anyone co-operating with the game's fiction pick the 'wrong' choice? (Parenthetically, it can be fun to play an evil character, but it comes at the expense of sacrificing our covenant with the narrative. "Good and evil" choices can therefore create a false dichotomy between story and fun, which no game should ever do. Ever. It's absurd.)

Authors of stories in traditional media have essentially two choices, and they choose one of these far more often than the other: they can present to the reader a solution to a moral problem, which the reader can then accept or reject, or, less frequently, they can present a moral problem to the reader and leave its solution as a challenge to the reader. Games are different. They can present a moral problem to the player and then react to the player's solution, following through on that line of thinking. In essence, I think of traditional stories as "moral rhetoric", and video games as (potentially) "moral dialectic". By telling us which choices are 'right' and 'wrong', game designers deny that potential, and limit games to the "moral rhetoric" of other media.

Fable III's choices failed because it told us which choices were 'right' and 'wrong'.

One way around this is the notion of subjective judgement. In games which employ subjective judgement, the game itself doesn't measure how good or evil the player's behaviour has been, but rather relies on the approval or disapproval of the characters (who will not always agree with each other) to provide that feedback. Subjective judgement has been tried a few times, but it rarely works. It rarely works not because subjective judgement is a bad idea, but because subjective judgement alone is not enough to make a choice meaningful.

Deus Ex employed subjective judgement to great effect. Complete the Castle Clinton mission non-violently, and Sam Carter would praise you, while Anna Navarre would criticise you. Go in guns blazing, and those characters' reactions would be the opposite. (At least, that would have been the case if not for some poor scripting which would, under some circumstances, cause a non-violent approach to be flagged by the game as a gung-ho assault.) The sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War attempted the same trick, and pretty much failed. While DX:IW certainly presented the player with a lot of choices, the meaning of those choices was supposed to be imparted by the approval or disapproval of several characters, all of whom were equally unlikeable. Because it was hard to care what those characters thought, it was hard to care about the choices presented to the player, and those choices ultimately felt meaningless - a situation not helped by the fact that the player was free to switch allegiances at any point right up to the end of the game, no matter how badly they had pissed off a certain faction previously.

Deus Ex: Invisible War's choices failed because their meaning was contingent on the opinions of unlikeable characters.

BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins also did away with previous BioWare games' linear moral systems and introduced subjective judgement. With somewhat more compelling characters than Invisible War, it was a lot easier to care about gaining these characters' approval. And yet, DA:O's choices still felt arbitrary and meaningless. DA:O's failing was not in failing to provide strong characters to judge the player's choices, but in failing to provide proper motivation and contextualisation for those choices in the first place. It's obvious that, before loading the game for the first time, the player has never visited Ferelden. A lot of the choices the player is asked to make in the game (particularly early in the game, when a new player) are informed by things which the player character, as an inhabitant of that world, would know, but which the player herself, as a visitor to that world, certainly does not know. A lot of pressure is put on the player to decide what her character is like, and even then, to make uninformed choices. A choice in which we can't make reasonable projections about the likely outcomes is a meaningless choice. (Choice was further undermined by approval being a transparently mechanical thing: it's ok to pick a choice of which a character disapproves if you have a nice gift in your inventory to give them afterwards. It was a little upsetting to see the effects of my moral choices immediately overridden by my companions' rampant materialism, but that particular manifestation of ludonarrative dissonance is gab for another day.)

Dragon Age: Origins' choices failed because they were informed by things the player couldn't know.

To summarise, then, for a choice in a video game to be meaningful, it needs to be:-

• Not pre-judged by the author of the game,
• Judged by the approval or disapproval of characters whose opinions we can care about, and
• Based on information the player has, so that she can make an informed decision based on likely outcomes.