One-play video game.

Something I approached briefly in my essay on agency and consequence was the effect restarting a game had on the nature of agency as a meaningful and satisfying capacity to act within video games.

As I’m stuck for what to write about considering I missed a majority of Thursday’s lecture (my unquestioned faith in Auckland’s public transport system was finally shattered after a 50 minute break down and subsequent detour,) I feel there is much to be said about this relationship outside a hopefully poignant statement to back up my argument.

Steven Poole discusses the paradox in Trigger Happy – (in discussing the game Outcast, and the way players can redeem their actions)

“Enriching this idea, if attempted, will not be a trivial design task. It would only come to work properly if the paradigm of replayability were abandoned, for as Alain and Frédéric Le Diberder argue, if you are able to wind back to a stage before your error, you have not made a moral decision but simply explored a branch of a system.”

-Trigger Happy page 224.

The basic principle is that because players are able to restart a game in its entirety or replay parts of a game from a save point – there is no responsibility garnered for choices made by the player as consequences are erasable.

Knowing that an undesired outcome will occur if the player chooses to undertake an option means that the player is able to remake the decision and explore the possibilities of both choices.

This is obviously problematic.

A decision may be made by the player which is active, and which is meaningful as it changes the game in a dramatic way as a result and so on the outset there doesn’t seem to be a limit on the agency of the player.

But is this type of game-play offering the player optimum satisfaction?

Games like Silent Hill and Heavy Rain pass themselves off as relatively choice based; multiple endings are possible based on choices made by the player.

In Silent Hill 2, if the player makes pessimistic decisions, doesn’t heal themselves often when they get hurt and keeps observing a knife in their inventory which really has little functional purpose, the game offers an ending where the protagonist commits suicide, suggesting that the player’s actions lead to this sort of behaviour.

The player then is responsible for his actions and rewarded with the ‘bad ending’ of the game because of it.

But even this situation, which is entirely constructed by small incidents in the game narrative (each time you look at the knife, each time you do not heal) – there is no sense of responsibility because you can replay the game and get a different ending.

People are arguably guided to perform a certain way in order to get the most out of the game by witnessing all the endings, and therefore their actions are not based on consequence and responsibility, but the desire to witness all endings.

It’s an issue which, if overcome, would mean that games could only be played once – that all decisions made would be final, and all consequences for actions irreversible, heightening responsibility and therefore the affect such games have on their users.

It’s an interesting concept, if they could do it with that Agrippa poem why not a video game?

Thoughts?

Ben Walton