It invariably happens every year. A new school semester starts; the leaves start changing colour. It's like the last vestiges of the warmth and promise of summer are evaporating before my eyes, and all I want to do is play games that are familiar. I almost always turn to one of my favourite games, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Overrated or not, this is easily one of my favourite games of all time (I vacillate between this one, Majora's Mask, Chrono Trigger and Loom), and it's a game I never get sick of playing. For me, it's the very definition of a desert island game. Weird, then, that I came to a part very early in the game yesterday that I'd never really thought about. Watch from 4:50 –
In the overarching plot of the game, the scene where Link first meets Zelda is of course pivotal, but there are some really inane little details in this scene. For instance, unlike most instances in the game, this portion allows you to "make a choice" so to speak about how you're going to react to Zelda. I've always, without fail, just gone with the standard "affirmative" options given to Link. It's perhaps just a really silly little thing that Shigeru Miyamoto threw into the game (and doesn't really jive with the rest of the game), but it got me to thinking about these sorts of supposed moral dilemma questions that games often ask of you, and what the role of the player really is in these situations.
More specifically, if I give the "asshole" answers here, refusing to help Zelda or to give her the Spirit Stone that she requests, does this reflect on me as a person? Am I supposed to be Link, or is Link his own person? And to what degree are my responses and decisions tied into my moral outlook in the real world?
I'm going to stop using Ocarina of Time as an example from here on out, as this isn't really an issue that crops up in the game outside of this one instance. This is really a problem that's quite specific, mostly, to RPGs and open-world games, and it's a question that's rarely answered concretely in gaming. Namely, who are we as players? Is Niko Bellic supposed to be a reflection of myself, my choices, my decisions? If so, then why does he still seem so different from me despite playing the game as close to how I would operate under similar circumstances? Or is Niko supposed to be his own entity? If that's the case, then why am I allowed to influence his decision-making process at all?
It's this moral grey zone that creates the plethora of hooker-beating videos on Youtube, I think, because sure, open-world games like GTA IV allow you to do basically whatever you want; but there's still that distance, that feeling that, "oh, that's not really me on the screen." I've always been wary of this type of thought process. In any game that gives me these sorts of choices, I try to play as straight and narrow as possible. For instance, I've been picking up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on and off these last few weeks, and it's certainly a frustrating prospect to not be able to go to sleep in the game because I don't have any money. The conventional video game logic would be to kill someone and take their gold, or rob someone's house, but as a moral reflection on myself, I'm completely incapable of doing so. It feels wrong, even in a virtual world.
So I wander from town to town, trying to find a job and make a decent living. Or I carry on with the main storyline because I haven't got much else to do at the moment. It's a little boring, but the alternatives seem awful to me.
Why give gamers the choice? I'm not at all for whitewashing potentially morally bankrupt proceedings in games; such devices can give a game's themes some heft. But to leave these things up to player choice seems really strange to me. Either the game is making a point about its moral decisions, or it's not, and the willy-nilly attitude towards it in gaming development circles seems to suggest to me that most people don't associate their gaming actions with real-world moral decisions. All the more power to them; it probably allows them to psychologically deal with torturing, killing, and maiming all sorts of digital creations.
I can't for the life of me remember where I read this (and I really wish I could, because it was a terrific article), but basically, the jist was that the No Russian scene in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 wasn't a terrible idea in theory. In practice, of course, No Russian ended up being totally superfluous to the experience, and highlighted a lack of foresight and consideration into design principles and the meaning of the game in general. But leading players through an experience that seems morally repugnant and not giving the player the chance to change anything about it is a really interesting idea in gaming. Linearity seems to be a watchword for gaming reviewers, but linearity gives the chance to construct a solid meaning. Gaming, like film, is a construction. Linearity doesn't have to destroy a player's agency, but in the best of cases, can highlight the importance of interactivity. Killer7, for instance, is completely on rails, and pretty much completely linear – but it absolutely would not work as anything but a game. Your interactivity is integral to the proceedings.
I'm guessing that a player's feelings of moral responsibility would be better served if there weren't so many games that include these options in their games without considering the consequences. Likewise, I'm also guessing that feelings of moral responsibility in gaming is different from person to person. Nevertheless, there's no way that giving me the choice to be a ruthless asshole is going to appeal to me, not without a solid reason for doing so.