(I So Hate) Consequences

A lot of the think­ing I do about games-as-art relates to choice in games, and how to make those choices rea­son­able and inter­est­ing while pre­vent­ing them from derail­ing the game as an artis­tic expe­ri­ence. Today, I want to talk about the other side of choice: con­se­quence.

Without con­se­quences, choices, whether in real life or in games, have lit­tle to no weight. This is true at the most basic level, or at the most com­plex– the occa­sional non-branching dia­logue tree in Mass Effect or Dragon Age, where choos­ing one or another dif­fer­ent dia­logue options results in the exact same response from the per­son to whom you are speak­ing, is very annoy­ing. You won­der why you were given a choice in what to say– the other per­son obvi­ously doesn’t care what you said, and will carry blithely on regard­less of your feel­ings about the mat­ter.

That par­tic­u­lar exam­ple is usu­ally only a minor annoy­ance, but this can be a more seri­ous prob­lem if the choices in ques­tion are some­what larger. In the “Arl of Redcliffe” quest in Dragon Age, one is con­fronted with a sit­u­a­tion and sev­eral pos­si­ble ways to solve it: a lit­tle boy has been pos­sessed by a demon and is gen­er­ally wreak­ing havoc around the cas­tle and vil­lage of Redcliffe, and has to be stopped. There’s some chance the boy could be saved if a mage could be sent into the Fade (the dreamworld/realm of demons) to deal with the demon directly, but this would require a tremen­dous expen­di­ture of energy found only through for­bid­den Blood Magic and the will­ing sac­ri­fice of the boy’s mother or a tremen­dous amount of lyrium (the game’s catch-all mag­i­cal sub­stance) and the help of sev­eral mages from the nearby Circle of Magi.

So, The Warden has sev­eral choices: he or she can kill the boy out­right, sac­ri­fice the boy’s mother, or try to get help from the mages. The third option involves let­ting the demonic child ram­page through the town for at least another sev­eral days, and the char­ac­ters in the game repeat­edly state that such a move would be dan­ger­ous, as, while you are gone, Connor might well kill every­one around him, thereby negat­ing your attempt to avoid his mother’s sac­ri­fice.

This should par­tic­u­larly be a con­cern as, if you haven’t already done the mage’s quest, upon arriv­ing at the Circle of Magi, you find it in seri­ous dis­ar­ray and in need of some res­cu­ing of its own, a quest which might take sev­eral days in its own right. Nevertheless, if you choose the option to go for help, no mat­ter how long you take in your search for mag­i­cal aid, noth­ing hap­pens at Redcliffe Castle. No other NPCs are killed or harmed in any way, and the demon pos­sess­ing Connor is no harder to kill.

This effec­tively means that there is absolutely no rea­son not to go this route, as by keep­ing the boy and his mother alive, you ensure that all of the mem­bers of your party don’t take any approval hits, and no one impor­tant dies. This essen­tially means that what could eas­ily have been a very com­plex trilemma of a choice involv­ing the weigh­ing of lives and the moral­ity of dab­bling in Blood Magic loses its grav­i­tas. This is bad. Perhaps if you’ve already done the mage’s quest, such that it’s a rel­a­tively sim­ple mat­ter of just hop­ping over to Lake Calenhad and ask­ing for a bit of help, you should be able to get back in time for no seri­ous dam­age to have been done. But if you haven’t, and upon arriv­ing at the mages’ tower you have to spend sev­eral days res­cu­ing them, too, you should return to Castle Redcliffe to dis­cover that Connor has mur­dered all of the impor­tant NPCs in the cas­tle.

Choices can lose their weight if they haven’t any real, last­ing con­se­quences. This can hap­pen either through sit­u­a­tions like the exam­ple above, or sit­u­a­tions where one or another of the options in a choice results in a flat Game Over.

Death, in most video games, is about the least seri­ous thing that can hap­pen to a player. The player can sim­ply reload the game from a few min­utes ago and try again. It’s slightly annoy­ing, and if the player doesn’t remem­ber to save very often, can some­times cause him or her to lose a lot of progress, but has no last­ing impact upon the game itself. As a result, doing stu­pid or reck­less things in a game has no con­se­quence, and any choices which inevitably result in char­ac­ter death sim­ply become false choices.

An excel­lent exam­ple is a scene in Knights of the Old Republic where, after hav­ing been arrested by Selkath author­i­ties, the player char­ac­ter is forced to talk his or her way out of an imme­di­ate exe­cu­tion. There are a mul­ti­tude of dia­logue options, but nearly half result in imme­di­ate and uncer­e­mo­ni­ous elec­tri­cal death. As a result, half or more of the poten­tial role­play­ing options are not options at all– they sim­ply result in game overs.

This comes from an under­stand­able source: it’s prob­a­bly true that sass­ing off to one’s cap­tors in such a sit­u­a­tion would result in sum­mary exe­cu­tion, but here it’s sim­ply an exam­ple of giv­ing a player false choices, just as much as the non-branching dia­logue trees men­tioned ear­lier. Furthermore, it does not man­age to con­vey the appro­pri­ate feel­ings that should be asso­ci­ated with the main character’s death– rather than feel­ing shocked (hahah), or upset, we sim­ply feel cheated, reload the game, and say the “right” thing this time.

In short, death is not usu­ally an appro­pri­ate con­se­quence for a sit­u­a­tion. There are excep­tions, of course– the end of Half-Life, where you choose whether to end the game in some sort of stor­age unit, await­ing an assign­ment from a name­less and fright­en­ing employer, or die. The game ends either way, such that reload­ing and try­ing again does not seem as appeal­ing– you know full well that this choice will end in your death, and must sim­ply decide what to do.

The trou­ble with this fact is that since most video games are set in life and death sit­u­a­tions, the fact that death has lost its sting forces the game design­ers to be quite cre­ative in com­ing up with con­se­quences for choices. Planescape: Torment found itself in this sit­u­a­tion, as the main char­ac­ter could not be killed at all, thereby really ren­der­ing death-as-consequence moot. Consequences for reck­less or self-sacrificing behav­ior in Torment are thus han­dled rather dif­fer­ently, and can result in the per­ma­nent death of allies (if you feed them to the Pillar of Skulls) or the loss of up a non-trivial amount of the Nameless One’s max­i­mum hit points (if you feed your­self to the Pillar of Skulls), as exam­ples.

Several JRPGs have a habit of rein­tro­duc­ing death-as-consequence by remov­ing any save points from the games’ “secret dun­geon” areas. Star Ocean II  had no save points in its Cave of Trials, and FFX’s Omega Ruins were sim­i­larly sparsely-save-pointed. This serves to cre­ate an atmos­phere of real fear in the player when faced with death, as the player has likely spent the last forty-five min­utes col­lect­ing fan­tas­tic equip­ment and fac­ing ter­ri­ble foes, and the thought of los­ing all that work and going back through the har­row­ing dun­geon is wor­ri­some. This is an approach which, although it removes the “consequence-ness” of death in terms of in-game mechan­ics, at least aims to cre­ate an emo­tion in the player in response to the character’s death. You really don’t want to have to redo the last forty-five min­utes of your life and run the risk of find­ing another fucking Great Malboro that always gets the first turn.

This is a dif­fi­cult prob­lem– ensur­ing that the player takes chal­lenges in-game any­thing like as seri­ously as the char­ac­ter prob­a­bly would were it all real is very impor­tant to RPGs, in par­tic­u­lar, but with­out var­ied and last­ing con­se­quences, and some­thing like a fear of death, I expect it’s more or less impos­si­ble. It’s also a prob­lem more or less unique to video games. Books and movies (gen­er­ally, as I’m sure there are excep­tions) do not require the observer to make choices, and do not allow the observer to sim­ply “reload” and aim for a bet­ter out­come. But it’s a prob­lem that sim­ply has to be addressed. Nothing kills a player’s attach­ment to a char­ac­ter or involve­ment in a sit­u­a­tion like real­iz­ing that what appears to be a choice isn’t. In video games, just like in many the­ol­ogies, an illu­sion of free will sim­ply leaves the player feel­ing hood­winked and cheated, and with­out real and dif­fer­ing con­se­quences, any sup­posed choice will remain super­fi­cial and illu­sory.