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!