When It's No Longer The Player's Story, Video Games Will Become Literature
If you grew up with your nose in a book, it's likely that you've read at least one ‘choose your own adventure’ novel. If you were like me, after you made a choice, one hand never left that page...just in case.
When choose your own adventure novels hit the peak of their popularity in the mid-1980s, another storytelling medium, video games, was still in its infancy. The graphics were crude, and few games attempted to tell an interactive story. Yet even then, video games were on their way towards becoming the choose your own adventure format of the late 20th and early 21st century.
‘You’
Choose your own adventure novels are written in the second person. The ‘You’ is never given a name as to allow readers to put themselves in the protagonist’s shoes. Every half-dozen pages or so, readers answer one of two basic questions that writers can ask a million ways:
Where do I go?
What do I do?
Even the earliest video games included these basic questions. Do I move the spaceship right or left? Do I wait until the space alien is a little closer until I fire my particle cannon? Yet in the 1970s/early 80s, the technology was not there for video games to branch their stories beyond ‘Continue? Y/N’ after you died. Even graphically impressive games such as 1983’s Dragon’s Lair could not expand upon these simple decisions. Until the processing power caught up, choose your own adventure novels were still the preferred format to deliver consumers the illusion of control.
Yes, control was an illusion all along, and readers 30 years ago knew it. No matter the sequences of choices they made throughout the book, readers irrevocably landed on one of the book's handful of predetermined endings. The knowledge that their choices didn't matter was not an upsetting proposition.
Although many modern video games employ the same storytelling techniques as choose your own adventure novels, players routinely feel disappointed upon realizing that their choices were meaningless. From Fallout 4 to the Mass Effect trilogy, internet message boards are full of gripes regarding scripted endings. Why is this the case, and how does the answer affect the debate over video games as literature?
The Illusion of Control vs. The Delusion of Control
Though a unique way to tell a story, choose your own adventure novels are rooted in the literary tradition. After all, when people pick up a novel, they expect the author to take them on a journey.
Video games, a relatively young storytelling format when compared to books, TV shows, and movies, create fewer assumptions within consumers’ minds. It's easy for players’ imaginations to run wild about the experiences they will encounter, the effect they will have as the player. And with video game advertisements leading them to believe that anything is possible, they expect video games' endings to truly reflect their choices.
These assumptions have led to the delusion of control, the belief that because the story is well written and the virtual world stunning to behold, a truly unique, personalized, and meaningful ending is possible. (Two out of three is a rarity in even great video games.)
One game in recent memory that quickly led players to this assumption is 2015’s Life is Strange. The game’s complex decision trees had the effect of planting the delusion of control in players' minds. When these decision trees, so complex and life-like in the game’s early stages, imploded into a binary ending, players left the game with a bitter taste in their mouths. In summary, it is the very nature of the open and breathtaking worlds these games create that breeds within players the belief that something beyond technological possibility and common sense - something ‘more’ - is waiting for them at the end.
If this dilemma sounds familiar, it closely mirrors the narrative arc of Westworld's the Man in Black. Excellently portrayed by Ed Harris, the Man in Black spends decades returning to Westworld time and again in the hopes of finding the park's deeper meaning. That meaning, whether it exists or not, is not for him...
But It Could Be
A deeper meaning, in fact, does exist for the player. It just involves something many players thought they wouldn't need: an active imagination. When reading a novel or short story, mental engagement is a requisite. It is up to the readers to visualize characters, setting, plot, conflict etc. When the story ends, the readers, in a moment of quiet reflection, impart personal meaning to an experience that was not theirs.
Playing a game, the fingers and eyes may be moving at light speed, but the mind has taken a back seat. When the final cut-scene fades to black, the mind is left in the lurch. Wait...After all that I did...all the choices I made...that's all there is?!
I don't belittle this reaction. I've had it myself, especially at the end of the aforementioned Mass Effect trilogy. There is nothing worse than investing 100+ hours, feeling like the hero the entire time, and then having the rug pulled out from under you at the last second. In these cases, it’s much harder for the player to impart personal meaning to a resolution that feels hollow.
“We are the custodians of life’s meaning.”
Player Expectations Are Key
The pre-release media for Detroit: Become Human advertises the player's ability to make dozens, if not hundreds of meaningful storytelling decisions. Will all this choice result in more than 2-3 different endings?
The fine line between video games and literature has nothing to do with the games themselves. It's all about players’ perception. The players should know it’s a roller coaster ride. There may be a few unexpected twists and turns, but the ride always ends the same way. Commander Shepard will make one of three predetermined choices. The Lone Wanderer will walk into the sunset with his dog. Chloe will die or the tornado destroys Arcadia Bay. That’s it, and that’s all that ever will be. Future offerings may change this dynamic, but until then, players must adapt.
However, a change in players’ expectations is not a free pass for game developers to become lazy writers. Players still need to feel the "You" and have the opportunity to lose themselves in characters, vast worlds, and open-ended storytelling that encourages multiple playthroughs. Also, there still needs to be (admittedly superficial) choices that affect the player on an emotional level. For all the faults associated with its ending, Mass Effect 3 posed one of the most conflicted choices in video game history: whether to destroy the Geth or Quarians. (There is a way to save them both, but I didn't get that option on my first playthrough.)
None the player's choices matter...
and that should be okay for players. This mindset is essential so that players may impart their own meaning into the games they play. As players evolve, so must developers; video games, even those set in open worlds, must have strong, singular narratives if the medium is ever going to be regarded as literature.
I am confident that there will come a day when video games will take their rightful place as literature. And on that day, when a great game ends, players will set down their controllers and think:
I played this game. I was the hero. I felt the the thrills, the passion, the agony and the ecstasy. But this wasn’t my story.
And that's just fine with me.