“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” – Sid Meier
Coincidentally, a story is about choices too. Choices define a character. Most stories – if not all – explore characters based on their choices in high stakes situations.
According to that games and story should be a natural fit. Yet, there is the problem that most stories are carefully curated into the last detail and every aspect is intertwined. That includes the personality of the character with the theme of the story. If the game lets the player call the shots, this intricate net of connections falls apart.
One of the greatest challenges in designing a story-based game is to deliver a meaningful story while providing the player with meaningful choices.
A lot of games, that tell a meaningful story disconnect their gameplay from the plot. In God of War 2018 the player has interesting choices in upgrading their characters and in combat but have no influence on the story. Similarly in the Naughty Dog series Uncharted and The Last of Us, the gameplay happens besides the story and not with it.
The more freedom the player gets, the less meaningful the story can be. Strategy games, as the extreme, provide dozens of choices, but tell no meaningful story. They can still tell a story in form, as I explain here, but less so in content.
Of course, Role Playing Games are those games that try the hardest to combine meaningful choices with meaningful storytelling. But most of the time, the choices aren’t really that meaningful, they are simply aesthetic. They affect the style of the story, but not its core. In Cyberpunk 2077 for example, one can choose one of three backgrounds for the character. That lets the player express their preference of the setting of the story, but the anti-capitalistic cyberpunk theme doesn’t change. Even if you start as a corporation employee. Most RPGs let the player have agency in the form and pacing of the story – which also causes some challenges but that’s for another article – but never truly the story’s message.
Yes, there are good or bad endings to certain games, but they don’t necessarily mean that the choices impacted the story in a meaningful way. Mass Effect is about leadership and no matter which ending you get, Shepard’s style of leadership is always deemed the right one. The player cannot decide upon the moral message.
The question is however, do we want to let the player decide on the moral message? Are we willing to give up so much control over the story, that the opposite of what we believe in could be interpreted into it? What would that change about the purpose of story? Is that not to experience something outside our usual world, to broaden our horizon and see our own views challenged by somebody else’s experience? What if in the future of interactive storytelling the story would adapt to the player’s worldviews? If we assume that stories are what culture is made of, what happens if everybody has their individualized experience of the stories being told?
I’m aware those are some far fetched dystopian thought experiments. But the interactive element of storytelling in games does upset the power hierarchy between storytellers and consumers, which is an interesting development to ponder upon.
To get back to the question of meaningful choices in meaningful stories, there is at least one other way coming to my mind, how that can be handled. Undertale lets the player decide if they want it to play like any other game – fight, level up and become stronger – or be peaceful and don’t progress while the game gets harder and harder. The choice offers two sides of the same coin. It lets the player explore the theme of the story from two different angles.
Maybe offering choices on how the theme is approached, can be meaningful in both player freedom and story being told.