Commitment, Choice, and Consequences, Deus Ex, Alpha Protocol, and Mass Effect

Recently, I posted a really long, but unedited look at choice and consequences on Reddit’s “Truegaming” subreddit.  It’s hot right now, one of the highest upvoted articles in the young subreddit, so I thought I’d present it here as a second draft. Also, consider this a SPOILER WARNING, as there are some minor spoilers for these games below.  Tumblr doesn't have a simple way to hide them.

This article looks at how games look at the other side of choice.  While choice in how one plays enables greater player agency and immersion, player choice without much consequence can also be an immersion breaker.  This isn’t just about moral choice, but about the gray area with no right answer.

I was reading this playthrough diary of Deus Ex: Human Revolution (note: minor spoilers), and it had brought to mind meaningfully punishing consequences in games.  In the diary, Joe Martin - the author - refers to initially treating the game like a game, and being punished for it.

After a short recovery during the opening credits of the game, Adam Jensen is brought back to Sarif Industries early.  When he arrives, his boss urges him to a helicopter as quickly as possible.  Joe Martin decided to play around the Sarif Industries office building for awhile instead.

That’s when the bomb goes off, killing several hostages.

This didn't happen in my playthrough.  It didn't even occur to me as a possibility.  I listened to my boss and went straight to the Helipad.  I had no idea that my Adam Jensen was doing anything “right” thing here, and people would have suffered if I didn't.  What a great way to indicate this to the player early on in the game.  I’d also add that there really isn’t a “right” answer - you’re a morally gray character.  It’s an old cyberpunk trope, the corporate security agent that’s really a spy with his parent company’s best interests are his interests.  It’s in his best interest to save valuable employees, but an experimental product is the top priority to save.

This brought to mind Alpha Protocol.

ALPHA PROTOCOL - WHAT IT DID RIGHT

Amongst the many things that the game is consistently criticized for is the lack of autosave and its outdated checkpoint system.  "Checkpoints are an old idea,” said console and PC gamers alike.  “We could save to a hard drive now.  Save now and save often."

This frustrated me initially as well.  Why?

I kept replaying the first mission from the checkpoint that left me at 5% of a health bar while entering a room full of terrorist bodyguards. My run and gun strategy just didn't work as planned.  It was loud, and not particularly covert.  Eventually, I gave up and replayed the entire mission from the beginning, more carefully this time.  That’s when I got it.

Commitment.  Alpha Protocol is designed for commitment and the checkpoints were a part of that.  If you make a decision, from dialog (Human Revolution does this as well) to what guns you take, to how much damage you've taken before entering that room - that is your decision and your consequence.  In the game, the player becomes Michael Thornton because he is more focused on his survival than replaying the same story from the autosave.  Thornton’s death means much more now, as well as his choices.

This is what is amazing about Alpha Protocol, that made it one of my top games of last year.  This was a game that was not afraid of cutting out entire branches, plot points, and characters if you decide to do some other thing instead.  It was not afraid of letting the player make mistakes.

It’s not without its problems that went against this design, a problem that Deus Ex: Human Revolution shares with it, in fact.

Mass Effect and Mature Decisions

In Mass Effect, there were only two truly consequential decisions I truly felt as a player.  I found this disappointing.

The first was easy - Ashley or Kaiden?  After all, Max Shepard and Ash were an item at the time.    Even though the character was quite wooden and uninteresting, he was a regular stop in my dialog sweep around the ship.  So when the elevator opened up and he wasn't there, I *"felt** that absence.  The game had somehow managed to make me feel for a character that didn’t connect to before, and worse, make me feel guilty for choosing selfish happiness over another’s life.

In Mass Effect 2, some decisions seemed to have far more consequence than the first.  When I arrived at the final mission, I watched Yoeman Chambers die.  In a similar mechanic to the above situation with Kaiden, this was a character that Shep would talk to on a regular basis, and the perfect choice to show what it means to lose half a crew.  Why did this happen?  In a mirror to the above Deus Ex playthrough diary, I was fucking late.  I was busy doing side missions, when the time limit came up, and I had one loyalty mission left.  This mission?  It was Legion’s, one of the final characters to join the crew.  Worse yet, the consequences of not doing this would be astronomical, and so there was no choice in the matter for Max, renegade though he was.  This is one of those decisions I hope carries over to Mass Effect 3, or Max’s sacrifice would be for nothing.  That said, it’s emotionally draining for me to continue as Max, since he can't walk the bridge without feeling loss.

That being said, promised consequence of game to game in Mass Effect didn’t feel like it was there.  Aside from a few portions that were designed to be dilemmas, well, there weren't many which represented these choices.  The two examples above are the only shining examples of meaningful consequence.

Where Choice Breaks Down

Alpha Protocol and Deus Ex: Human Revolution both break down in the boss fights.  In a game that emphasizes player agency and choice, the design breaks down when it brings in unavoidable fights that don’t allow for specific other playstyles to get around.

Alpha Protocol actually does have a dialog system - if your reputation with certain factions are at a certain level you may be able to talk a boss down - but not all the time.  The requirements for these incidents are so rare that it’s surprising when this happens (this happened for me on the final boss battle).  As dialog and reputation are also emphasized as weapons in your arsenal, this made perfect sense in a gameplay perspective.  However, since it’s so rare, many players didn’t experience this.  Further, some boss battles were infuriatingly hard.

Deus Ex on the other hand, allows for some some stealth mechanics and environment manipulation - but you can’t simply escape the boss battle like you can a gun battle.

It’s here where Boss Battles are treated like story points, but they really shouldn’t be.  They are, as Ben “Yahtzee” Crohshaw puts it, Final Exams.  They should be the culmination of how you played so far.  So if you’re able to sneak past a set of guards by hacking cameras and hiding around pillars, it stands to reason that you should be able to sneak around a boss by hacking turrets and turning them against it.  If you emphasize multiple playstyles in the game, you should emphasize them as tools in boss battles as well.  Just Cause 2, a sandbox game with minimal story, allows for this sort of thing in nearly every mission.

Conclusion

Mass Effect will explicitly tell you what a consequence might or might not be.  For the most part the moral dilemmas amount to either adopting or shooting a puppy.

Alpha Protocol locks you out of portions of the game if you chose a certain route.  Mike cannot backtrack and try to do it another way.  Once a mission is done the way its done, the story moves on.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution represents consequence without explicitly telling you that you were going to miss out on something.  It requires Adam to improvise from now, to live in the moment while planning out A and B plans, and never treat the game like a dream.

In Mass Effect 1 and 2, I found myself gaming the system despite myself, even though I prefer not to do that.  Playing with systems rather than people, the actual choices in game seemed forced and inconsequential in the larger scheme of things (particularly the romance choices).  Max felt like someone I created, but the story felt forced upon him, like he was just along for the ride, with some control here in there.

In Alpha Protocol, I was awed by how much I felt like Mike and less like me. This was about how I wanted to play, but more committing to how I have already played.  Sure, I could switch it up for Mike from time to time, but Mike was someone I played as, not someone I created.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, so far I feel like Adam.  Swept in a story by other powers and forced to do things that he doesn't want to do, but hey, it's a violent world and life is cheap.  I feel like I'm playing Adam Jensen the Security specialist / corporate hit-man.  Even though some are playing like Adam Jensen the serial killer or Adam Jensen the pacifistic ghost, or even Adam Jensen the commando, Adam Jensen still feels like a fully realized character partially created by both the player and the developers.

UPDATE

Here, Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage breaks down Choice and Consequence with some similar game choices.

Horrible Delight: The 7th Guest

Disclaimer: I spoil 7th Guest pretty hard in this article.

Trilobyte's The 7th Guest is a game that routinely makes top ten lists for 'Scariest Games of All Time'. I wonder, though, if they've played through the game recently or just place it on these lists out of a sense of respect and history. Certainly, it is a PC gaming's milestone. It's clear that Trilobyte made 7th Guest with the very goal of being a technology pioneer that would awe its players with a cutting edge multimedia event. That was exceeded beyond their wildest imaginations; it's just too bad that making a great game wasn't as important to them.

7th Guest's place in the annals of computer lore is well-deserved. The leap to integrate full motion video with rendered 3D graphics is an inspired one. Its CD only format pushed computing into the CD-ROM age and gave designers the freedom to make a game that was like a movie, with sweeping camera movements, actors, and a soundtrack. Graeme Devine, one of the founders of Trilobyte and one of 7th Guest’s visionaries, was the first to ever compress digital video and designed the tools to do so from scratch (if you ever find yourself streaming low quality video from Starz Play on Netflix, you know who to thank). Graeme, along with Trilobyte’s co-founder Rob Landeros, developed the story to go along with the dream of a next generation multimedia experience, though their ambitions to become a weaver of tales might have outmatched their talents.



The story revolves around a diabolical toy master named Henry Stauf. Though not spelled out, I gather from the Faust anagram that Stauf sold his soul for wealth and ended up with more than he bargained. Your character, who is nameless in the game but is supposedly called Ego, wakes up at the front door with amnesia (sigh) and the game begins! Throughout the game, you're treated to full motion video flashbacks of a dinner party thrown by Stauf (although he doesn't actually attend) where he asks the six guests to solve the grand puzzle of his mansion. The winner of Stauf's game is granted his or hers greatest desire. As the game progresses by solving puzzles and watching vignettes, you discover that Stauf is manipulating the guests in order to harvest the soul of a young boy who broke in the house on a dare, the 7th guest. You see, Stauf's toys actually steal the souls of children and he needs just one more childsoul to bring his evil mansion to life (or something, it's pretty vague). You spend the whole game discovering this basic back story with no real arcs for various guests or Ego. After you complete the last, best puzzle, there's a painfully obvious twist that you are the child, the 7th guest, that Stauf was hunting in all the cutscenes. Then Stauf explodes in a burst of holy light for absolutely no reason and the game is over.

The story was further developed from the initial concept by a professional writer, something I will credit them. Still, the full motion video segments are hurt by shoddy characters, low production value, and creative talent overmatched by challenges presented using the new technology. At the time, it was forgivable because there was nothing else to compare it to, but looked upon with a critical eye in a modern context, it’s a bit baffling. If you’re going to innovate with video, why not make it the best you possibly can instead of treating like a chore and an afterthought? When they set up Trilobyte in a quiet Oregon town, I’m sure it seemed like a great idea but it was ultimately a selfish one. I have no doubt it was a more pleasant to live in west Oregon than southern California but Oregon just isn’t going to have the resources that would benefit what amounts to an experimental film shoot. Inexperienced actors and silly costumes hamper a promising but hackeneyed story. Now, it’s not like I expect the 7th Guest to be written with the same level of complexity and depth as literature, but the emotional experience of the game leaves me little else to focus on.



Gameplay in 7th Guest, outside of the exploration of the house and story, boils down to puzzles. The puzzles are a mixed bag and, while plentiful and varied, left me wanting. Their lack of innovation is a major felony here, Halloween party versions of the most common brain teasers or word games. I enjoy a good chess challenge but they go overboard here and the knight-switching puzzle is one of the most awful and tedious puzzles that’s ever been forced upon me. A few of the puzzles make absolutely no sense unless you check out the clue book in the den (which will actually solve puzzles for you, I discovered way too late). There were puzzles I enjoyed, especially the insanely difficult game of Ataxx versus Stauf on a microscopic level (which took me longer to beat than the rest of the game combined), and I appreciated the level of polish to the puzzles. A lot about the puzzles can be forgiven with the limitations imposed by the game design. For a reason I don’t understand but accept, they could only have one button to interact with the world and I imagine that posed a challenge when creating unique puzzles. Still, what I can’t get past are the haphazard nature of the puzzles. Why are we solving them? To what end? Why does solving all of them make Henry Stauf explode into purity dust? They try to explain, at the start, that the puzzles are created by Henry Stauf for the six guests to solve as part of his dinner party game but they drop that after the first few rooms and don’t connect it to the story. Since there’s never anything to threaten your life and the puzzles are abstract filler, the only emotional draw is the full motion video segments, which, as I’ve already said, are less than compelling.



Part of me hates to harp on all of this, it is clear Trilobyte spent a ton of time and effort on the game and it’s one of the few PC games that transcend the world of your usual gamers. The house looks fantastic, seventeen years later, and even if the technology has moved on, the artistry has not. The music and sound design are, frankly, outstanding and shoulders most of the responsibility for creating an effective mood. Every guest has their own little theme that is woven into the overall music that adds more to their story than anything that appears on screen—it's clever and I'd put it on iPod if I could only figure out how. Even a cursory glance at the game shows they weren’t myopic programmers interested only in lines of code, there’s a real love there for the game and a real passion to tell its story. The problem lies in a deeper cognitive dissonance.

Graeme Devine stated that he wanted 7th Guest to be a family game, which is strange considering the content. There’s nothing outright offensive but it’s still a horror game with a brutal stabbing, Stauf’s weird demon tongue, lascivious sex moans, a strangling, and the stealing of children’s soul by their own toys--it’s not exactly a Pixar movie. It explains the silly Halloween party nature of most of the horror, though: the cake with cartoon skulls and gravestones, a painting that grows fangs, the relentless and degrading use of puns throughout the experience, it’s all haphazard and seems the product of an ADHD “Wouldn’t it be cool if...” style of game design. There doesn’t seem to be any real love for horror or at least an attempt to understand the genre. It’s like a Scooby Doo episode that lasts hours and hours, except Fred pulls off Stauf’s mask at the beginning to discover a hissing lizard demon and Shaggy spends the whole time hilariously weeping with terror as he tries to spell six different words with no vowels. The demonic presence that holds sway over Stauf isn't even addressed, really. Sure it can give Stauf a really long tongue to impotently lash at people but they don't try to have any perceptible rules to its power or any mystery to its existence—it's just a means to an end. There’s a powerful vision for a game but it’s just not very well thought out. In my opinion, Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros were men of vision. It’s just that the vision seemed to be more about the glory of making a great game than it was about making the great game.



The 7th Guest is a truly innovative and remarkable game that deserves its place in history but, at the end of the day, it’s not good. After 7th Guest was released, the company spent a long time spiraling down into financial oblivion and I think the cracks are already showing in their touchstone product. The truth of Trilobyte seems to be a story of aimless projects costing millions and infighting between a stressed Devine and a disgusted Landeros. It.sounds exactly like the problems in the 7th Guest: unfocused and at war with itself. I think the issue of implementing a game’s vision is one of the most primal struggles when making a game. What is it that makes a game fun? What is it that makes a game inspirational? It isn’t number of units sold or the groundbreaking technology used to make the game. The only game I think think of that tries to ape 7th Guest is Shivers (a game that is superior in every way) but mostly games took the technology and went their own way before full motion video died a quick death. Making a game is difficult and it takes a special talent to make a good one. It requires patience and a willingness to adapt to the problems at hand. There’s just no guarantee that the game will turn out, so the more thought you put into your game before you put the money into it, the better off you’ll be.

7th Guest is a victim of poor planning. Dazzled by the tech and what could be, Graeme and Rob didn’t consider the journey. They relocated to the idyllic Oregon coast where there were few actors, fewer programmers, and certainly no one familiar with new technology of digital video. Graeme and Rob’s vision went unquestioned, by all accounts they seemed men of large egos and the writer they hired to flesh out the story didn’t do a good job at challenging them. The tone and game design are muddled, relying on the wow factor that certainly delivered at the time. Shock and awe is cheap and immediate, though, and it’s a terrible foundation for game design. 7th Guest could have been the Nosferatu of video games, something future generations could look at and appreciate as an important work in the art and history of video games. Instead, it's more of a footnote, the game that opened the door for better games to walk through. A cohesive and compelling game experience is the key lesson of game design that separates a great game from a good game and a good game from a bad game. Themes aren't just for books and movies, kids, they’re for any story, regardless of format. Something like Castle Crashers, one of the most ridiculous games ever made, resonates so deeply because its wild and silly tone is demonstrated in every aspect of the game, most especially the gameplay. I'd argue that themes are harder to implement in a video game than in any other medium because they have to be felt in the gameplay as well in the story and art direction. Left 4 Dead isn't just about shooting zombies, it's about the balance of four people fighting the zombie horde—the co-operative gameplay reinforces and elevates the feelings of isolation and horror exquisitely. 7th Guest just didn't get it, in the end, and that's too bad. How much more could it have inspired if it had? How many more lifelong gamers would it have left behind?



Epilogue

I tried to play 7th Guest’s sequel, the 11th Hour, for a follow up article but the game keeps crashing and I’m tired of troubleshooting it just to play a more polished version of the 7th Guest. Apparently it’s not a new problem; the joke is that the greatest puzzle in 11th Hour is getting the game to run. It’s too bad, because the game looks even better and the video elements have a fun Twin Peaks vibe (by that I mean they’re basically ripping off Twin Peaks but it’s still a good thing for this series) that I wished was present in the original. The puzzles I did play were better designed and, from what I understand, had a lot of AI involved that was cutting edge at the time. The look and feel of the game is more coherent as a whole, spookier and less stupid. It’s just too bad they released an MS DOS game in a world that had switched over to Windows 95. Technical failures are always worse than conceptual ones and, coming from a game company that redefined computing, are unforgivable.

I recommend checking out this article about the history of Trilobyte. It’s a cautionary tale of game design that I hope every developer keeps in mind when they build a game experience. Most importantly, it is a fascinating story and a great read.

The Rise and Fall of Trilobyte

Mass Effect 1: Death of a Marine (SPOILER)

I hope to get a more formal post, soon, but this would be a good sample of what it is this blog is taking aim at. I'm playing Mass Effect 1 at the moment, yes, late to the game, and I hit the "Sophie's Choice" scenario. What I find interesting is that a) I made my decision, rather quickly, based solely on gameplay mechanics, and b) I had an emotional reaction to the outcome.

SPOILER

At a certain point in the game, you're asked to make a choice. Save one character or another, and you do not have the power to save both. One is setting a bomb for a suicide mission, the other is being overwhelmed by geth. It really doesn't matter where you assign them in the beginning because the choice will still come up in the end.

I chose Ashley because I'd spent considerable time developing Ashley as a romantic interest. There was also a somewhat strategic decision, as I needed a character with weapon expertise to keep around over biotics and tech ability. Someone superior to Garrus and Wrex, in effect. Story wise this also made sense, though I admit I surprisingly didn't spend much time thinking about that.

Kaidan Alenko is, unfortunately, Kaidan. While he was the senior member of the crew, my character, Max, and I has only known him for the length of the game itself. I also figured that I could finally get his migraines to stop. You see, unlike Ash, there wasn't too much to Kaidan outside of some sort of angst that existed soley as a backstory. I took him along on biotic themed missions, and still, no commentary, no connection was made to this brother in arms. To me, at the time, he was just a gameplay mechanic.

The choice was made, I went back to Ashley and a boss fight with Saren himself. One that felt pretty epic. The consequences were interesting. I angered Ashley when I picked her over Kaiden, and she calmed down quickly when I let her know that it wasn't a fair choice no matter what I did.

Then, after the conference, I ran out the conference room, turned around and went downstairs to do my usual round of character discussion.

And there was no Kaidan. None. He was gone. No longer in that spot doing, well, whatever it is he does when he's on the ship.

And I felt it.

There's something to that. I, as Max Shepherd, made a decision, and the consequence of that decision was right there beside me. No longer do I talk to the man. I can't ask for his advice and assessment of the situation. I can't talk to him about his much belabored backstory.

Goodbye Kaidan, you will be missed.