Participation Concrète

This is a post I've been wanting to write for a long time. It's an important thing to talk about for me, since it really sums up what I'm all about as far as games and interactive stories are concerned, so I wanted to get it right. I did touch upon it a little in an earlier post called The Meaning of Choice, but I really want to expound on that idea.

I was listening to a talk that Braid creator Jonathan Blow gave at the Montreal International Games Summit a couple of years ago. While it's definitely worth listening to, I couldn't help but feel that there was something he was missing. He was talking about the meaning of game mechanics. After a while, it struck me: he was considering games as rhetorical devices.

Thinking about art-forms in rhetorical terms is nothing new. See the Susan Sontag quote that I used in The Meaning of Choice. Lajos Egri made a similar point far earlier when he talked about the 'premise' of a drama. The premise is a statement that the drama is a process of 'proving' or demonstrating, much like a logical premise is proved by an argument. Very simple and neat. And, ultimately, all stories have this. It might not be anything profound, but there is a moral statement at the core of every story.

The problem I had with Jonathan Blow's application of this to games (if it indeed can be called a problem) is that while games are interactive, rhetoric is not. How can you offer a player a choice while trying to impart some moral statement to her? It doesn't seem to make sense. Egri suggested that drama must go the only way it can go to demonstrate its premise. How does that fit in with interactivity? The answer is: it doesn't. Rhetoric is not interactive. Rhetoric does have an interactive counterpart, however, which we call dialectic. It's a revolutionary new thing that those young firebrands Socrates and Plato are using against those musty old Sophists. Those crazy kids.

Let's talk about BioShock, since that was the game Blow criticised. The intended 'message' of BioShock appears to be that cooperativism is better than Objectivist individualism. Blow quite rightly pointed out that that message was lost in the interests of achieving game balance. And that's fair enough. However, if we change BioShock's premise from a statement ("Cooperativism is better than Objectivist individualism.") to a question ("Is cooperativism better than Objectivist individualism?"), BioShock suddenly amply (albeit unintentionally, as far as I'm aware) provides a space in which the user can have a "dialogue" with the game to try to answer that question. This is a rudimentary form of video-game-as-dialectic.

One of BioShock's creepifying Little Sisters. Harvest her for resources out of self-interest, or save her to gain her cooperation.

I see the video-game-as-dialectic working very well for moral problems that are subjective or ambiguous. These themes are what are all too often missing from games, and this is the reason 'mature' in gaming terms is a shorthand for what is really a juvenile fascination with blood, guts, sex and swearing. This is strange, because a video game is theoretically far better-equipped to tackle these themes than any other medium. Authors of traditional stories who flirt with ambiguity can only really propose a solution and have the reader accept or reject it, or else leave the solution open-ended and let the reader think about it. A video game, however, can assist a player in working towards a solution.

I don't want to get all prescriptive here, and definitely I think that rhetorical games are worthwhile (particularly in serious games, and extra-particularly in serious games for pedagogy, a research interest of the lab - I certainly don't mean to tell educators how to do their job!). However, from an artistic perspective, this is, for me, an important facet of the medium. I want to see games the moral premise of which is not a statement, but a question, and the process of which is not rhetorically trying to prove the statement, but dialectically guiding a player towards answering that question.

Consequence-free

I've been thinking about the notion of consequentiality in games. Of course, we all know that it's important for a player's actions to have consequences. You do something, and it changes something in the world. That's basic agency.

However, I am unconvinced by recent arguments that players should have to deal with the consequences of their actions. A classic example of this is the permadeath game; you get one life, and when you die, you can't play any more. A less extreme example would be a game that only offers one save slot, and saves over it each time you make a decision, disallowing backtracking to see what happens if you make a different decision (short of starting the game again).

I used to think this was a good idea. I, too, was fooled into the thinking that allowing the player a do-over somehow cheapens the impact of their decisions. I thought it was a bad thing that I could choose to disarm the nuclear bomb and destroy Megaton, because if I did both, where was the choice? What meaning did a decision have if I could just reload and try something different?

Megaton, what will become of you?

But recently, I've sort of come to the conclusion that it has more meaning precisely because of that. When we play a game, even a game with the most simplistic of stories, we divide our experiences into those that are canonical, and those that are not. Getting killed by the first Goomba in World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. is not what really happened, right? What really happened was defeating Bowser and rescuing Princess Toadstool. Since being killed right at the start is not what really happened, it's unimportant, right?

We're quick to dismiss the path not taken because it's not what 'really' happened, but surely nothing gives more meaning to our actions and decisions than these glimpses of how it could have been otherwise. These abortive tendrils of narrative thread that will never be followed through - but that nonetheless hang around in our consciousness - offer us insight into what our 'true' decisions mean. I can only guess at what saving Megaton really means until I've actually seen it destroyed. In the end, I do both. My decision is not of which action to perform, nor of which action is right or wrong, but, in retrospect, of which action was 'true' and which was 'false'. Which action was 'canon' and which was just a look at an alternate possibility.

Did that just happen?

We don't want linear games; we want choice. We say that a game should not be linear, and yet we still hold fast to the idea that our path through the game should be linear. After all, stories are linear, right? I don't know about that. Perhaps such adherence to the linear structure of the experience of traditional stories is dismissing the power of the video game medium just as much as adherence to the linear structure of traditional stories themselves is.

Long live quickload!