Identity and Choice-Based Gaming

Who are you? What gender are you? What ethnicity are you? Are you comfortable financially? What did your parents teach you, and did you even listen to them? Have you ever had a crime committed against you?Are you a parent?

Many games are now drowning in options of ‘choice’. Mass Effect, Fable, Heavy Rain, Dragon Age, Fallout, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto or inFamous all offer ‘choice’. What choice is, of course, ranges from game to game and can mean vastly different things with different consequences depending on what game you play. Choice seems to be a buzzword, with very little meaning when plastered across press junkets. Choice in games is not a monolith. They are binary constructs where you are forced between a ‘good option’ and a ‘bad option’. As games branch out and try new things, there are more complicated choices: do you choose yourself and your own health over that of an innocent? Which teammates will survive under your command and which ones will die? What sort of person is your character, and what values do they hold?

The protagonist in games can change the way we look at games. During Grand Theft Auto IV, I found myself unable to ‘connect’ to Niko Bellic. He’s an aging war survivor, an immigrant, and a criminal. I’m a young female student and the worst I’ve ever done is stay at a Tim Hortons past the recommended 30 minutes without buying something. Niko was driven by desire to help his family and a need to correct a devastating betrayal. I can’t relate to that, and so Grand Theft Auto IV never pulled me in. Alas.

We project who we are onto characters, choices, and games. We associate more strongly with characters who mirror us, or go with gut decisions based on our own life experience. Stephen Tolito wrote in a piece for Kotaku how being a married, older man changed the way he played games, noting Heavy Rain especially, where you play a devoted father protecting an endangered son. He writes:

“I’ve learned that fatherhood is mostly about caring for someone who is fairly helpless. In that way, dadness in video games appears to be a good motivator for searching for something that can’t just save itself. You’ll be more motivated to find your lost daughter than a bunch of dead crows or even a heart container, perhaps? It’s also a good shorthand for making the player be a capable protector. As a Big Daddy, I was more motivated to protect my daughterly Little Sisters in Bioshock 2 than I was to protect the annoyingly incapable President’s daughter in Resident Evil 4.”

It’s only when a protagonist is a blank slate, and I can decide my motivation, my values, and my morals that I get sucked into a game. I often make pale brunettes named Cassandra and agonize over whether I should have hit that Renegade interrupt or whether I can truly devote myself to Alistair or maybe whether I can afford to give that old man my purified, radiation free water. I am part of the game world, and I am fully immersed in the story and world. I don’t need to try to relate to the struggle of a war veteran trying to make it in corrupt Liberty City, or a father trying to protect his innocent dependants.

Of course, there are difficulties to this. This Dark Legacy Comics strip illustrates one challenge of creating a character in your own image. (www.darklegacycomics.com)

http://www.darklegacycomics.com/190.html

Even if you make a character to your perfect specifications, you may still have your immersion broken quite suddenly. The perfect example is in Dragon Age: Origins. The races are elf, human and dwarf. You can make yourself a human of any color. In the Mage Origin, this works perfectly fine. Your character is in the Mage Tower, about to begin their Harrowing. Their family is long out of the picture and will never be seen, as mages are taken to the Tower from their families, and the chance of reconciliation is very close to zero. The issue arises in the Noble Origin – no matter what, your entire family is white. Your black character suddenly looks very suspicious, like Lady Cousland was a bit of a harlot while married to your dad.

Compare this to Fallout 3, which handled this issue expertly. You never see your mother’s face, and your father’s appearance is directly based on yours. In your travels out of the Vault and into the Wastes, you meet a wide assortment of people. You may feel like an outsider because of your Vault Dweller suit or your refusal to help slavers or because you slaughtered some merchants, but you will always ‘fit’ naturally into that world.

The difference between a straight narrative and a game where the character has an impact on the world through their decisions can be a small one. No matter what, Commander Shepard will save the galaxy from the Reapers. No matter what, Niko Bellic will navigate the criminal world of Liberty City, face his demons, and defeat his antagonists. For some players, choice-based games has a greater emotional investment. We do what we feel is right (or sometimes we choose on what will just be satisfying). And we see the differences in who we are as people from the different results we choose. We choose to spare as many lives as possible, or we decide that the people in danger probably deserve it. We make sacrifices to achieve our goals. We hold onto our goods out of selfishness or merit or need to survive, or we help out every homeless bum we see. And of course, we are often forced to choose neither perfectly good or perfectly bad option, but from a gradient in-between.

As the writing and depth of this medium evolve, no doubt these choices will become more complex and involved. Heavy Rain is a step in this direction, and hopefully it proves to be a trailblazer. The more variety and conflict there are with choice in gaming, the more we’ll have a chance to see ourselves in games, and find our own path, despite who we are or how we identify.

© 2009-2010 LMB Productions. Template by GhostPool Designs. In the time you have spent reading this, Google has acquired all your details.

• Home