We all know that video games offer us the chance to do things we’d never dream of doing in real life – robbing banks, slaying dragons, sorting falling shapes into the right position to make them disappear. Crazy stuff.
But in structural terms, games are nowhere near as rebellious and anarchic as they appear. Most are packed with rules and frameworks which are specifically designed to restrict the player – and there is usually a central narrative that you have to follow if you want to see the end. This is fine in a lot of genres, where rules are obviously necessary to create a tight play structure. But only a select few titles labelled as “open world” or “sandbox” adventures let you completely and utterly shatter the experience intended for you by the developers – or at least punish you in an imaginative way.
Look at the role-playing video game (RPG) genre. Most modern RPGs now opt for a non-linear open-world approach to design, which ostensibly allows players the freedom to explore and experiment. Presented with this sense of freedom, the first thing I tend to do is see who I can attack – and in an RPG, that’s usually the initial quest-giver; the non-player character (NPC), tasked with laboriously welcoming you to the world. So while some over-earnest high elf is telling me all about the 1,000 year war that has plagued the land of Graxitor, I’m just trying to decapitate him.
Most games will pretend this isn’t happening by having your attacks simply rebound harmlessly off your target while they carry on with their exposition. This is because there’s normally an overarching narrative and a carefully constructed backstory that the writers are desperate for you to uncover. Much more interesting though are the games that go beyond passively ignoring you and actively punish you for being a jerk. Some slightly bolder titles, for example, will have the quest-giver immediately destroy you in retaliation – which is the game designer’s equivalent of a slap on the wrist for being naughty.
A very, very small number will actually let you kill the character and then quietly work out what to do about that. These games don’t so much smack your wrist as breathe a heavy sigh and mutter, “OK, that’s how it’s going to be, is it? Fine, let’s see how you like it now”. My favourite example of this is Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind where you can openly and brazenly slay anyone who is trying to help you. It’s not until after you’ve committed the deed, however, that the game tells you the world is now doomed (oops) and that saving the file will mean you’re unable to complete the adventure. The core narrative is only a comparatively small part of Morrowind though, so you can still enjoy what is now an openly doomed and nihilistic existence.
Later Elder Scrolls instalments carried this on to a point. You can rough house critical story characters in Oblivion for example but they don’t die, they fight you until you knock them down – then they simply get back up and talk to you as though nothing has happened. When Sheogorath, the all-powerful Madgod of the Shivering Isles, is giving you a quest, you can go ahead and attack him if you like – but he’ll smirk, freeze you in place and then teleport you into the air where you fall to your death. This is a fantastic (and contextually relevant) way to tell a gamer off. Unfortunately, The Elder Scrolls Online dispenses with this entirely and, while you can attack unimportant NPCs in towns (often by accident), key characters are immune to damage and all attacks simply warp through them.
Bioware’s role-playing classic Baldur’s Gate allows you to kill your foster father in the prologue. He is far, far stronger than the player character, but it is technically possible and results in bringing the game’s story to an abrupt halt. Unlike in Morrowind, there is no “you’ve just broken the game” warning dialogue box – your character is simply stuck in the prologue forever. That game’s recent spiritual successor, Pillars of Eternity, carries this mechanic to a degree but if you kill a key character, it basically states that, once again, the world is completely doomed – at which point the game ends.
Older titles, particularly point-and-click adventures, carried this feature more prominently in a way that’d be simply untenable with modern-day audiences. Forgetting to pick up an item, or carrying out tasks in the wrong order, wouldn’t only result in a game being impossible to finish, the game also wouldn’t tell you it was impossible to finish. You could make a mistake in the first act, not realise, spend hours getting through the rest of the adventure and then unceremoniously die when you reached a pivotal moment in the story. Kings Quest, a lauded, brilliant series, would spring this on a player quite often and with its inane puzzles and baffling challenges it was easy to miss a mundane item that would turn out to be game-breaking later.
The X-Files full motion video (FMV) game, which came out in the 1990s when the genre was considered The Future, is another interesting example. For all its faults the adventure did a lot to pull you into its world: you had a realistic PDA to check, you could use various items on people to get different reactions out of them – and you could pull a gun on any of the bureau staff, including Assistant Director Skinner, who would say “don’t do that”, like a parent telling you to stop sticking your butter knife in the toaster. You didn’t have to listen to him; indeed, you could pretty much shoot anyone and the game would (realistically, to be honest) end right there with a scene of your arrest. And there you were as a gamer, back on the naughty step until you played properly.
Perhaps in the future, developers will allow more of the game experience to be governed by procedurally generated narratives and AI-assisted characters that can react in real-time to whatever you do. The random quests generated in titles like Red Dead Redemption and Skyrim hint in this direction, as do the real-time personal rivalries in Shadow of Mordor. One day, then, we may well get the freedom to be the players we want to be – even if we want to be assholes.
