Choice Background Expansion in the Name of NPC Awareness and Respect

            If we’re talking about choices and consequences this week, let’s talk about choice making video games. Because what better way to prove that I’m a mature person than by taking a potentially serious topic and body slamming it back down into the mat of childhood immaturity and giving it a rug burn of utter…something to do with stereotypical assumptions of videogame player’s inherent immaturity.

Oop, never mind; here’s what I was thinking of.

            But in any case, some of the best videogames I’ve ever played were ones where there was an aspect of choice and player determination that felt like it affected the story behind it. I’ve never really gotten into PC games such as World of Warcraft, Mount & Blade or the Sims because the world is too open. Does that make sense? No, of course not. After all, whoever heard of a thing as too much choice?

            Don’t get me wrong; if you want to play god, those games can definitely let you delude yourself into believing it for a day. Or six. But ultimately, they have so much choice that all the choices you make start to feel the same, that it becomes too much like real life where many infinitesimal choices ultimately end up weighing you down like a thousand pounds of feathers that never seem to matter until they all lump together in a giant congealed…pillow…thing.

            Games like Alpha Protocol, Heavy Rain or inFamous on the other hand try to find a balance between linear and open. In Alpha Protocol’s case, the freedom is expressed in the player’s choice of background and interaction with a fairly linear settings both within the context of the characters and the story that makes it feel like part of a true espionage rpg. 

In Alpha Protocol, you can choose Thorton’s background and make him as awesomely stealthy or cringingly brazen as you want but either way, you are a part of something bigger than yourself in every aspect that while you affect and have a stake in, ultimately cannot end on your own no matter how great you are. It leaves itself wide open while never allowing the player to become paralyzed by indecision of how to piddle around with the tranquilizer gun in order to make unconscious enemy soldiers wake up in compromising positions.

In Heavy Rain, the interaction between their characters, how quick their reflexes are and how much the one who controls them believes they deserve to suffer or be rewarded is like taking a microscopic look into a miniature drama between characters in the sims if the sims could speak English and were significantly more memetic.

And in inFamous (1 and 2) how the player controls Cole McGrath aka “The Electric Man” aka “The Demon of Empire City” aka “The Glitter Explosion that still lost to the Biology Experiment Riding a Unicorn” directly affects what powers they can use to further their own play style, their electricity turning either bright ocean blue or dark bloody red depending on whether they decide they’ll treat the game as a hero fantasy or grand theft auto with electricity catharsis.

All of these games have a world, that while fairly linear and enclosed when viewed objectively, create an atmosphere and background of underlying depth that allows the player to feel as though they’re part of something bigger without overwhelming them with choice and decisions. Just the way life could be…if that weren’t such a terrifying prospect for everyone who’s Not the main character of the world videogame.

Maybe you’d be the main character in a videogame, maybe you’d be an npc. Personally, I love the genre, but that’s not really the kind of world I’d want to live in. After all, as Danial O’Brian, regular editor and writing contributor of cracked.com once said: “You wouldn’t be the 17 year old lesbian cult leader, you’d be the water tower painting peon.”