The Art of Making Choices (Excerpt) – Vicky Gavin
Vicky Gavin is a recent transfer into the Technical and Professional Writing program and lives in Pittsburgh, PA. Her essay was written in Fall 2020 as a final project for Prof. Jean Harper’s ENG L260, who described it as “one of the clearest explications of the workings of a game that I’ve ever read…Smart, clear, interesting.”
The Art of Making Choices
Given that the various artistic aspects of narrative, visual art, and music composition are all present within video games, why is there debate about whether video games are an artform? Game studies researchers began using the terms “ludologist” and “ludology” to refer to themselves and their work, which contributed to a conversation about narrative scrutiny and pitted so-called ludologists and narratologists against each other (Frasca). The crux of the issue seems to be that ludologists will scrutinize a game based on the mechanics as opposed to utilizing narrative theory. However, Matthew Kapell notes that, “each scholar in game studies could use the perspective of the ludic to uncover further meaning of the narrative” (10). Amy M. Green argues that video games are a form of storytelling, further bridging this divide (Green 6). She goes on to point out: “Generally speaking, the study of storytelling tends to be conflated, usually exclusively, with the study of literature. What becomes forgotten in such a single-minded focus is that the study of literature is, at its core, the study of storytelling” (Green 6). The hesitancy about applying academic-level scrutiny to video games seems to come specifically from concerns about the “ludic” aspect which comes from Latin meaning “to play.” However, every celebrated and confirmed artform or medium has unique merits on which it alone can be judged. Literature and visual art meet this condition, as mentioned above. Scott McCloud makes this same argument in favor of comics in his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art where he discusses how all of the different mediums contain content and that, “the trick is to never mistake the message — — for the messenger” (McCloud 6). In other words, the gameplay aspects of video games should not disqualify it from academic scrutiny, and instead those aspects should be considered one of the unique features of the medium to be analyzed.
The gameplay aspects in question that set video game narratives apart from other mediums include player input, which contributes to interaction and, hopefully, immersion. In an article discussing video games as an artform, notable video game researcher James Paul Gee asserts that the narrative of the video game is incomplete without the player’s decision-making (Gee 59 – 60). What order does the player accomplish the tasks within the game? Does the player stop the internal narrative in order to achieve side goals? What level does the player get to before defeating the final boss? What strategies does the player employ in order to do so? These questions help shape the narrative which makes each playthrough different. For instance, Gee uses the example of Castlevania to explain that the character of Alucard in his personal game would be different from any subsequent playthrough simply because of the choices made during play. Gamers tend to measure the quality of repeat playthroughs as “replay value,” and a major aspect of replay value is that each time is unique. This unpredictable nature of how the narrative of each playthrough unfolds contributes to scrutiny at an academic level, as well. What does it say when a game has significant replay value?
A Case Study – Detroit: Become Human
Exploring Detroit: Become Human can help to answer the questions surrounding studying video games as a scholarly artform. For background, Detroit: Become Human is a story set in the near-future of 2038 in the city of Detroit which has become the “Android City” as opposed to the “Motor City” it is in modern times. The internal narrative follows three androids during crucial points that intersect – Kara, a domestic android whose job it is to clean the house, cook the meals, and care for the child; Connor, an investigative android who is assigned to work with the police in search of androids who have gone “deviant”; and Markus, an android who struggles with his position in life after his world is demolished in the blink of an eye. The game is played by the player making character choices – many of these choices are on a countdown and the player is pushed to react quickly and organically – which then determine the outcome of the story. Following the in-game flowchart, the game contains 85 different individual endings, depending entirely on player choices throughout the internal narrative. The number of unique paths through the game to get to each of those endings is difficult to determine but could be estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
A representative section of the game’s approximate 10-hour playthroughs would be the introductory scene for Connor titled “The Hostage.” This serves to set the stage for the kind of android the player will be controlling in the Connor chapters. The game begins with Connor, the investigative android, entering into a hostage situation. This scene alone has six potential outcomes visible on the game’s internal flowchart, all depending on tiny choices the player makes including how quickly the player progresses. Connor is left to investigate independently with orders to talk down a deviant android and save the child being held hostage on the rooftop at gunpoint. If Connor spends too long analyzing the evidence in the apartment, one of the SWAT team is shot, adding to the body count. This choice is an invisible one because there is no indication beforehand that Connor is working on a time limit before this event takes place. It’s only revealed once the event has happened.
The entire scene is designed to feel like a police film with structural build up as Connor pieces together the fragments of what happened – the android realized that the father was going to purchase a replacement android – until Connor goes out on the roof to confront the deviant android. This scene is very tense with subtle and direct choices to be made by the player. Do you approach him slowly? Do you help the officer who is injured outside? Do you lie to the other android? Do you use the gun you found inside to shoot the android? These are all choices the player makes within a very small timeframe with timed choices throughout. The anxiety that comes with the scene is one that could induce a state of being “white knuckled” – in this case meaning the player is so tense that they’ve gripped the controller hard enough to make their knuckles white. These choices help to frame who Connor is to the player in a powerful way that shapes their perspective of his character specifically. Is Connor compassionate, despite his programming, or is he cold-hearted and callous? The player’s interactivity with the choices in the game help Connor to emerge as a different persona each time the game is played, which helps strengthen the narrative experience.
Of those six endings in this very first scene, only two end where Connor lives through the scene. The game is designed where at any given moment, the android the player is controlling could die, and the story would continue on. This is especially disconcerting to the player the first time they learn of it. As an anecdotal contribution, I was unaware that Connor was able to die in the first scene until I began the playthrough for this analysis. It was certainly a shock. This highlights the point Gee was making in that each time the game is played through, each character emerges slightly different. It changes the overall narrative and focuses the themes differently. Kara, for instance, has multiple happy endings at the end of the game, though some are happier than others. Sometimes, she escapes the domestic abuse situation with the child and a potential friend made along the way, and sometimes she only gets the child to safety, sacrificing herself in the process.
These tiny choices that the player makes throughout build to overall major changes, and the player needs to think quickly and decisively about the choices they make. The player is never given enough time to think these choices through, and it is not possible to pause the game to force enough time to do so. In this way, the game designers have emulated life. We are not generally given the liberty to pause and think our decisions through. There is pressure and we are encouraged to act quickly and decisively because if we don’t, the worst may happen. Were this scenario built into, for instance, a “choose your own adventure” novel, there could be no such time constraints. This level of intensity and pressure in decision-making is unique to this medium.
This extends to the framing of the game as a whole, also. When booting up the game, the menu screen introduces you to “Chloe,” an android assigned to the player on the menu where the options to change game settings, start a new game, continue an old game, or look at game extras sits. She seems like a flavored menu screen extra that is not wholly uncommon in video games. If the player leaves this screen up, Chloe will continue to talk to them. She quotes Jean Giono, “The most important thing is not to live, but to have a reason to live.” She discusses the player’s interior design and sings a gospel song, among other bits of entertainment. If the player allows Kara and the child Kara is trying to save to die, Chloe admonishes the player and reminds them that the lives of the androids are in the player’s hands. When the player completes the game, Chloe reflects on what’s happened, and she voices that she feels different and wants to go find herself. She asks the player, directly, to free her. The player is then given the option to either do so or not, and if the choice is to not free her, she informs the player that she will reboot herself to forget everything she has learned.
Chloe’s character subtly brings the player into the world of the game, turning the player into an active character within the story. Her actions make the game reach out into the real world where the player is no longer making the choices for other characters, but for themselves. This framing narrative draws directly on the themes of the internal narrative of the story by allowing the player to determine what kind of person they want to be. This blurs the line between the game world set in 2038 and the real world in which the player resides, and the weight of this one choice is not something that can be fully replicated in any other medium due to the relationship the player has built with each android protagonist and with Chloe herself. The game draws the player into a strong sense of investment in not only the lives of the three protagonists, but also themselves. Chloe essentially is asking whether the player has learned anything from playing the game since her question is reliant on the themes and ideas being presented in the game’s internal narrative. Her behavior intensifies any already pre-existing attachment the player has since she manages to remove what is essentially the fourth wall from the game.
The game’s internal narrative is rich, complex, and deep. The themes are comparable to other narratives in examining a form of discrimination, the question of humanity and personhood, and how difficult it is to boil a problem down to simply “good” and “bad.” The game aspect takes it a step further and allows the player to take agency in these regards, both figuratively and literally. In the internal narrative surrounding Kara, Connor, and Markus, the player makes choices as though they are those androids and learns the consequences of those choices, both big and small. This is not insignificant, as shown with “The Hostage” chapter, since these choices are immersive and relevant to the player from the very start of the game. With the framing narrative based on Chloe, the game pushes the character to reflect on their own role in these larger thematic questions and choose what kind of person they want to be.
This story would not have the same effect if it were told in a literary form because the player interaction is necessary for the game’s message to truly shine. A similar story could be told, and Connor, Markus, and Kara could be the main characters. Even Chloe could be present in her framing narrative form. However, it could not be the same story that is being told in Detroit: Become Human because there is no agency from the player who is, as defined by Chloe, another character in the story. There is no true way to give the player character agency if this story were told in any other format.
Precisely because video games showcase players’ unpredictable agency throughout a game’s playthrough, video games should be considered a scholarly artform. Video games offer perspectives into not only the pre-determined internal narrative of the stories they tell, but they also provide insight into the player themselves through exploration of how the choices they make change how those internal narratives unfold. Detroit: Become Human illustrates this explicitly in how the game design facilitates exploration through choices, but it is far from the only example of a video game worth analytic scrutiny.
Bibliography
Frasca, Gonzalo. Ludologists love stories, too: notes from a debate that never took place. 2003. 8 12 2020
<http://digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/05163.01125.pdf>.
Gee, James Paul. “Why Video Games now? Video Games: A New Artform.” Games and Culture 1.1 (2006): 58 – 61. Document.
Green, Amy M. Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative. Ed. Matthew Wlhelm Kapell. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2018. Book.
Kapell, Mathew Wilhelm. “Introduction.” The Play Versus Story Divide in Game Studies: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. 1-15. Print.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding comics: Writing and art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994. Book.