Choice, Player, Designer: an Open Response.

This is an intriguing question you have raised, and the answers you find may be even more intriguing yet. In addressing it, I hope to resolve some of my own quandaries pertaining to the relationship between Choice and Game(s).

The simple question of whether or not to program a menu in a visual novel is, at heart, the question of whether or not to give the player a choice. Yet to give the player a choice or not to give the player a choice is in itself a choice on the part of the designer. Furthermore, to address one’s fellows for advice with regards to this choice implies another question: which choice OUGHT I to make? It is inescapably a moral question then, regardless of what moral scheme one subscribes to: how OUGHT visual novels to be designed?

One might presume, given this summary, that the answer might only be found where the question originated: within the designer. Since the designer functions as the “dealer”, he* holds all the cards; with him, the game begins and ends. It would apparently follow, under such a paradigm, that designers must decide the matter for themselves, by arbitration, that the question can have no definite, “objective” answer, and that by asking it one only invites a makeshift anthology of case histories and partisan, anecdotal accounts.

Yet this is not necessarily so, since such a paradigm (beginning and ending with the designer and his “Vision”/will) in itself is tragically one-sided, and one mustn’t forget that, just as the designer starts the game and the player finishes it, the answer to this question of design might properly be sought in the Player. Yet since one designs games for multiple players, most of whom are unknown to one’s self, this “Player” must be regarded not as an individual, but rather as a concept out of which the EXPERIENCE of the individual “player” (and, as such, the individuality of the experiencer) emanates.

 

*The generic “he”, for brevity, meant to imply any number of identities, chosen or given. I will employ more traditional pronoun usage for this text in the spirit of maintaining clarity and concision, without any ideological meddling or personal involvement.

 

When one asks, “should the player be given a choice?” one really enters into a complex, often self-referential and circular, yet thoroughly symbiotic and beautiful series of inextricably contingent relationships, mostly predicated upon one trinity: the Player, the designer, and the Choice. The relationship between Player and designer, as well as how each relates to Choice, circumscribes the entire inquiry.

In order to determine what choices to give unto the Player, the designer might start with a moral prescription for the Player; in other words, the designer asks himself: “what sort(s) of choice(s) do I want the Player to MAKE?” An undertaking of this sort is by no means pretentious for a genre which owes so much to both storytelling and adventure game design; both media have rich traditions of “educating” the player, and while the adventure game educates the player with regards to the internal workings of the fictional World, the story serves to educate the listener/reader/observer (the “audience”) about the external, “nonfictional” World.

It is precisely the combination of these two Worldviews that puts decision-based narrative games at the cutting edge of game development as an Art Form, as well as placing this Art Form at the forefront (the “avant garde”) of modern storytelling. It is also this delicate balancing act between the development of a Fictional Universe and a Relevant Allegory that produces most of the exciting and frustrating challenges unique to the development of choice-driven narrative games. The term “ludonarrative dissonance” is perhaps one of our generation’s subtlest contributions to the academic lexicon, and its scope reaches far beyond the mere conflict between “reading”/“listening”/“attending” and “having fun”.

When the designer has chosen what sorts of choices he wishes for the Player to make, according to the story’s “moral”, (i.e. its ethical message) he has begun to decide for himself what sorts of choices to make in creating choices for the Player. Yet how does one even choose what sorts of choices one wishes for the Player to make? Before we address this problem, we must first illustrate the nature of moral prescription in a game and its effects upon gameplay and narrative.

When one says, “I wish for the Player to make choices of this kind”, one creates the necessity for the Player to develop “agency”. At this point, the menu becomes necessary, except insofar as the player controls other factors, such as the pace at which he or she reads the text or the volume at which he or she listens to the soundtrack, both of which are normally of no consequence to the narrative, but only to the subjective experience of the narrative on the part of the Player.

A menu represents a branching in the narrative: on the most fundamental, brute level, it allows for the story to go “one way or another”. Some menus may create the “illusion of choice” by allowing the Player to exhaust secondary options within a closed loop until the primary option is selected, advancing the story only once the “right” choice is made. Yet such a structure does not in itself present the Player with a moral choice; the Player must simply find that answer which fits into an existing, deterministic framework. Such choices may ultimately be of no consequentialist value; they may have “consequence” for the player’s “experience”, (both in the sense of accumulated knowledge and immediate encounter with the media) yet in and of themselves they do not impact the development of the story and its characters. However, such a structure, like many other menu structures, may INCORPORATE an element of consequentialism by introducing hidden mechanics, such as a point system, a counter, or various flagging variables, which serve to ASSESS the Player’s choices as they are being made, usually without the Player’s conscious knowledge. For example, if the moral of the story is, “always tell the Truth”, the designer might confront the Player with a series of dialogue options, only one of which expresses the Truth of the Situation, and to such an extent as the Player AVOIDS telling the Truth by selecting other options from the menu, to that same extent a secret counter might assess the Player’s “Honesty”, quantified as a variable, functioning as a hidden “character stat” that might very well trigger a later event and thereby alter the course of the game, with or without the Player’s conscious knowledge, either “at the time” or “ultimately”.

In this manner we have established that the proper function of a menu is to create choices for the Player by providing the Player with options, many of which are alternatives to the “right” choice(s) which the designer desires for the Player to make. Yet of what relevance is this to the choices which the Designer makes, and how do we, as designers, choose them? Rather than imposing any binding moral law upon this discussion, at least so early on in its development, I should rather direct your attention from the relationship between Player and Choice to the relationship between the Designer and Choice as well as its inextricable corollary: the relationship between the Designer and the Player. At this point, you will notice that “Designer” is capitalized in the manner that “Player” came to be capitalized, since I am now referring not to a hypothetical individual but to an entire Category of hypothetical individuals, specifically with respect to the Category of Player and the phenomenon of Choice which manifests in various “choices”.

In deciding what sorts of choices one wishes for the Player to make, the Designer seeks to determine what choices the Player ought to make. Yet in order to make such a sweeping generalization as would warrant such a prescription the Designer must exist within a set of his own moral dictates. These are not necessarily “his own” in the sense of them being “of his own choosing”; in fact, any designer who publishes must note the limits of his own arbitration with regards to the content which he produces. Yet it nonetheless represents an intimate and often personal sphere within which the Designer navigates: a sort of middle ground between Vision and Social Necessity. The Designer himself relates to the Choice insofar as he is himself a moral agent and a “player” within the social game of Game Development.

Usually, the foremost secular appeal with regards to the Designer’s moral obligations concerns the relationship between the Designer and the Player. Egalitarian thought dictates that the Designer, as the Author of the Work, ought NOT to prescribe any ethic for the Player to follow which the Designer does not treat as binding also upon himself as Designer. Yet in this instance egalitarianism amounts to a stultifying dogma. Most notably, the relationship between the Designer and the Player is NOT one of identical reciprocity within the external World. The Designer often produces the work at the expense of his or her own resources, and the work is typically made available for a price that is arbitrated by the Designer and/or his conspiring distributors; the Player, on the other hand, expends no labour towards the development of the work, (usually) but must part with some sum of money, most often acquired by other means of the Player’s own choosing, in order to purchase the work. In this process, both Designer and Player are certain to expend only one resource: Time, and even that varies between Designer and Player, as well as from player to player and from designer to designer, depending upon innumerable and often incalculable and inestimable factors.

It follows, therefore, that in the external World outside of the microcosm of the fictional story and its virtual Reality, there is no a priori necessity for an egalitarian relationship between Designer and Player. Be that as it may, however, there remains the danger of the Designer becoming guilty of Hypocrisy. While neither the external World nor the virtual World** find the Designer and the Player on equal footing, (**for the Designer does not have to “learn” the game, typically) in the relationship BETWEEN the two Worlds a moral obligation persists. This is because, as mentioned previously, the moral of a story must serve an allegorical function which converts the content of the microcosm into a prescription for the macrocosm.

If, for instance, the Designer develops a game that can only be won by gathering certain privileged information, and if such privileged information can only be acquired by illicit means, and should such a crime stand to benefit the Designer at the expense of others, then the Designer has made an immoral choice by multiple if not all moral rubrics. Yet even if such a crime is not INTRINSIC to the design of the game, games may nonetheless present the Player with a moral prescription which he or she only ought to follow if they are so binding that the Designer ought to follow them as well, especially within the development of those games. To revisit an earlier example: if the moral of the story is to “always tell the Truth”, and if it is only by adherence to this principle that the game may be won, and if it is only by winning that the game may be enjoyed or “fully experienced”, (presumably: the Player’s intent for spending time and often money on the game) and if the game itself is programmed in such a manner, as illustrated previously, as to implement this system, then it would be poor form indeed were the Designer to lie to the Player either within the game or outside of it, especially in selling it.

Yet here, too, egalitarian ethics present a dogmatic imposition upon the Art, for there exists an entire pantheon of reasons to put the Player in a situation which one does not inhabit. For instance, if one wishes to illustrate a World wherein stubborn adherence to rules ultimately leads to despair and absurdity, a Designer might justifiably offer the Player superficial rewards for obedience with very long but binding strings attached. The challenge here is for the Player to look past what appears to be the prescription and to fathom the UNDERLYING message. Games like Portal and Braid, while they are narratively deterministic and therefore not “choice-driven”, per se, are excellent examples of this sort of subversion of indoctrinated common sense, and since such common sense remains within the external World, their designers arguably do a service by deliberately manipulating them.

We might tentatively conclude, therefore, that while at first it would APPEAR that the Designer’s relationship to Choice is contingent upon the Designer’s relationship to the Player, in fact the opposite seems to be the case. To some considerable extent, the Designer chooses the sort of relationship which he wishes to have with and to the Player. This falls under the purview of the Designer’s Vision. Whether the Designer is to function as a satirist, a master, a comrade, an investigator, or any number of available social roles, it is up to the Designer to CHOOSE which role to assume as both storyteller and Worldbuilder.

This brings us back to the final rung of the triangle: the relationship between Designer and Choice. While it was posited that the answer to the question of the use of the menu might be found in the Player, and while this position remains valid and essential, it would appear that we conclude our preparation for this quest on that rung of the triangle which excludes the Player: the Designer’s relationship to Choice.

It has been established that it is the Designer who chooses to determine the nature of the desired relationship to the Player. It follows logically from this conclusion that the nature of those sorts of choices which the Designer prescribes for the Player to make is contingent upon this arbitration; the Designer chooses how to “approach” the Player, and by that same token, often as a consequence, it is the Designer who chooses how the Player “ought to” play the game. This goes beyond merely an idealized projection of what an “infallible” Player would do, for it accounts also for every element of the Player’s experience and condition in making various “errors”; as Will Wright puts it, most of the time the player is failing, and the “job” of game designer is to make failure a rewarding experience (though “rewards” might include “punishments”, by extension).

Presented with so many choices, the Designer has no choice but to confront Choice Itself: the phenomenon of Choosing, specifically the phenomenon of Choosing Ethically.

We began our discussion with the question of when we ought to “give” the Player a Choice. Yet this word “give” may be misleading, and we must choose how we are to define it. When one “gives” someone else five dollars, for instance, one surrenders it TO that other person. On the other hand, when one “gives” another person an orgasm, this is not mutually exclusive with attaining an orgasm of one’s own. Ergo, we have not yet extricated ourselves totally from the intimate relationship (vulgar puns intended) between the Designer and the Player.

In the former category of giving – that is, wherein possession for one party is inversely proportional to possession by the other, as is “agency” as giving in this sense pertains to Choice – the danger morally is that of creating a parasitic/“codependent” relationship wherein either the Designer or the Player is limited absolutely by the other’s freedom. Yet not all relationships of this category are inevitably parasitic. If the Designer surrenders agency to the Player but manages thereby to acquire scientific knowledge from the Player’s choices, the relationship is mutualistic; if the Player loses agency but consequently enjoys the story during a linear, deterministic passage, the relationship is mutualistic. If the Designer gains nothing by removing a pointless fork in the road but this choice does not cost the Designer any time that the Designer does not wish to spend removing it, then the relationship is commensalistic, insofar as the Player benefits from the removal of the inconvenience and the Designer neither benefits nor suffers an inconvenience in removing it. At every stage of Development, we see the relationship between Designer and Player already developing alongside the game, so that the external World always represents some aspect of the virtual World, and the relationship between Designer and Player in both Worlds, as well as the relationship BETWEEN the two Worlds, may be assessed according to fairly standard biological and ethical sciences and various other lenses.

Let us turn, therefore, to the latter category of giving: the relationship wherein both Designer and Player acquire agency. Suppose that the Designer wishes to tell a story which follows the outline of classical Greek tragedy. While some writers might insist that Aristotle was not a game designer and that his formalism does not translate neatly into gaming, defenders of the ancient Greeks might contend that the structure is as valid as the spirit in which we harness it. As pertains to choice, the story may be truncated in a standard three-act or five-act play, wherein each act is concluded with the Player-Protagonist making one crucial choice which impacts later events, consequentialistically. Up until that point, the Player is presented with minor choices of no apparently substantial consequence, yet these serve to establish player agency within a fatalistic framework, so that not only will the player be prepared to make such choices at the end of the act, but also the pivotal decision may be obscured by the proliferation of inconsequential choices. Disguising enterprises of great pith and moment within an interactive World is undoubtedly advantageous to the “realism” of the work, though it does leave a lot to arbitration. Yet in this both the Designer AND the Player are arbitrary; the Designer chooses arbitrarily how to design the options from which the Player just as arbitrarily chooses. Suppose, now, that the Designer should recontextualize these arbitrary options within a scoring system, as previously suggested. The Designer might thereby determine this scoring system to be the TRUE arbiter in the development of the Story. While its consequences might not be presented immediately or even shortly, ultimately the Player’s performance is assessed and the Player’s experience defined by this rubric. The Designer now gains the freedom to make SEEMINGLY pivotal decisions secondary to the story without the Player’s conscious knowledge. Yet such a choice does not rob the Player of agency, and the Player ends up learning MORE over more stages of revelation as a result. In such a situation, both Player and Designer learn about a nuanced World which develops alongside their relationship, and the bulk of this development may be orchestrated within the confines of the Designer’s private thoughts and plans.

We conclude therefore that the question of when to create choices for the Player is neither one for which there are no right answers nor is it one for which there appears to be any one set of right answers. To decide how best to approach this choice, one has to evaluate one’s own relationship TO Choice: one’s Ethical Convictions, from whence emanates the desire to form a specific kind of relationship with the Player as a Category and a specific kind of relationship between the Player and Choice, as manifested both within the virtual World of the game and its relevance to the external World as an allegorical story. Yet in the absence of definite guidelines a lot falls under the purview of Vision and Social Obligation: a relationship between the Designer’s intent as an Artist and the Designer’s role as a producer operating within a specific marketplace. This relationship, as well, ought to be subject to ethical guidelines not unlike those which govern all other relationships we have so far discussed.

Thankfully, we have also established that the most subtle and rewarding games for all parties involved tend to be those which, while they are largely developed internally, within the Designer’s “own mind”, represent a relationship to the Player which is evolving and growing. Since the designer typically only approaches the task of Design as the abstract Category of Designer, and since he approaches players as the abstract Category of Player, such limitations are hardly pretentious or damning.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]