In Defense of Small Choices

Tadhg Kelly over at What Games Are recently penned an article calling The Walking Dead a "Great Story" but a "Bad Game". By now you all know how fervently I adore Tell Tale's adaptation of The Walking Dead comic/television series. I believe it is the best piece of The Walking Dead franchise period. Naturally, I have some problems with Kelly's assessment.

However, I have talked enough about The Walking Dead. Instead, I want to focus on this statement right here: "I want the experience to only be about the big choices, and for those choices to make sense. I want to feel as though there is a way to find the true course, and for every conversation to be important."

I actually agree with Kelly on many points in his article and I do not mean to undermine all his arguments. He states at one point that "games are bad at storytelling, irrespective of the quality of their writing." I disagree, but I think his sentiments are based purely on personal opinion. Kelly, it seems, would prefer a nodal form of interaction with The Walking Dead, bypassing the mundane fetch quests and interrogative Q&A sessions to get right to the meaty decisions: who lives and who dies. For some, the big choices are the ones that matter, but we miss out on the minutiae of relationships and meaning in games if we so willingly set aside small scale decisions.

Heavy Rain perfectly represents a game saturated with silly choices in between matters of life and death. In a game ostensibly about a serial killer, a few moments stand out in particular: Sword fighting with Ethan's kids and letting his son win, trying to fix a shoddy dinner in a run-down apartment for his surviving son, and collecting the materials needed to chop off Ethan's finger.

While cutting your own finger off is certainly a momentous moment, the most compelling aspects of that scene has more to do with the slow pace immediately preceding the decisive act. Finding a knife, disinfecting it, finding a bandage, all the pieces that went into the painful moment felt like a ritual. The slow pace heightened the tension and made the amputation so much more powerful. The "big choice" was never very hard. If it were my own loved one, of course I would chop off my own finger if it brought me closer to saving them. The small moments, however, emphasize the natural hesitation, fear, and doubt I would have in the process.

In an idea adventure game, the small decisions provide a pillar upon which the big decisions take place. If I hadn't fumbled the simple task of pouring orange juice early in the game, the tension I felt at Heavy Rain's climax would have been far less powerful. The same can be said for the simple act of finding chalk in The Walking Dead. When I made the apparently mundane choice to talk to Duck and Clem before the adults, my decision altered the relationship I formed with the characters. I defined Lee's priorities. When these priorities are tested, when these established relationships become strained, these small choices reveal themselves to be the makings of big ones. They make up the small portions of a much larger system that could not be possible otherwise.

Limited Pleasure

It is easy to think of games as portals through which to experience a world unrestrained by the limits of our own. A game can make something as spectacular as interstellar travel feel effortless. Banal activities like driving a car become exciting again: “Shall I stay in my lane and obey traffic signals, or shall I instead use the car in front of me as a makeshift ramp and hop over a drawbridge?” Games not only show us these worlds that flaunt the rules we live by, they allow us to participate in the fantasy.

This sense of freedom in games accounts for some of their appeal, but it also obscures another important factor that draws us to them. For all their grandeur, even the most empowering and complex games create limited worlds. Unlike the chaos and infinite complexity of our lives, games are governed with systems that can be learned and mastered. This simultaneously satisfies our desire to understand the mysterious while soothing our fear of the unknown. Viewed this way, almost all video games are exercises in pleasure of limits.

Games serve our desire to collect and explore the unknown while also providing us specified parameters for measuring success. The Pokemon trainer can take solace in the fact that their Pokedex will always be able to tell them how close they are to “catching them all,” but the field biologist must live in perpetual uncertainty as to whether every species in a single forest has truly been studied. Convenient mini-maps and readouts showing the percentage of possible activities we have explored in Liberty City allow us to definitively measure our knowledge of the town. The city’s virtual denizens and hollow buildings are crude facsimiles of the real things, but their simplicity allows us to grasp the city and its workings.

The limits built into our virtual avatars allow us to chase and achieve the fantasy of ultimate mastery over skills. Since the earliest days of RPGs, we have expressed such complex terms as vigor, agility, and wisdom in numerical terms that are then used as predictors for success. Only through rigorous training or outstanding circumstances can we begin to guess at the extent of our own abilities. Games allow us to dispense with the guesswork: Once Link gets twenty full heart containers and powers up his magic meter, he has reached the pinnacle of his abilities, and so have we as players. No amount of extra training could possibly improve him, which is comforting because it is something about which we are always uncertain. Would another couple minutes jogging help that twinge in your back?

The systemic limits in games also provide us with idealized versions of social interactions. When we deal with artificial intelligence in games like The Sims, we can recreate recognizable, yet manageable reproductions of familiar social situations in a way such that they are unambiguous. Feelings of love, jealousy, and happiness are reduced to simple numbers and graphs from which we can make informed decisions. By placing a limit on the consciousness of others we can inhabit a world devoid of missteps and irreversible errors. We know these virtual constructs more thoroughly, more absolutely than those we meet in our daily lives.


Limits act as an equalizer in terms of social interaction when playing multiplayer games. While the rules of Halo, or Star Craft may be nuanced and complex, they are standardized. Everyone interacts by using tools made available for the entire population. Players can be more or less adept in using these tools, but the social rules have defined parameters that can be learned. When we step away from these limited worlds, things quickly become overwhelming. A game like Sleep is Death is intimidating because its complexity stems from its potential for variety. Without a prescribed framework, it begins to take on the frightening openness of the world from which video games usually allow us to escape.

Every marvelous power a game grants comes with limits that make exploring the experience manageable. Because they are structured in terms of basic rules, games can never truly reproduce the complexity of our lives; they can only approximate it in ways that are inherently more simplistic and understandable than the outside world. They provide us the ultimate fantasy: through their limitations, games grant us respite from the awesome, terrifying chaos of our normal lives.

The Sin of Hotel Dusk

There are amazing adventures found in the pages of books, and you don't have to take LaVar Burton's word for it. Oh literature! A medium with a collection so vast its a wonder we've had time to hone storytelling in any other form. When novels are adapted to film, there is frequently something missing, a certain 'je ne sais quoi' lacking from visuals alone. "The book is better" has become so incessant its almost become a mantra for literary snobs around the world. There are so few contrary cases, we might as well just presume the book is always better and leave it at that.

Thus, it is no surprise video games frequently look towards literature for inspiration and guidance, for better or worse. Some go so far as to present themselves as a close kin to literature, a cousin born into the video game family but with such brilliant red hair there must be a touch of novel in him. Which brings me to Hotel Dusk: Room 215, developed by Cinq, published by Nintendo and first launched in Japan. The is played with the DS on its side, resembling how one holds a book. This devotion to its format lineage belittles its successful literature-videogame half-breed brethren.

A portable noir videogame set in a shady 1979 Californian Hotel intrigued me the way only a dark mystery can. Perhaps the game would be a serious drama with puzzle elements I thought, a procedural cop drama meets Prof. Layton. It was not.
Allow me to get the flaws out of the way: The secrets of Hotel Dusk unfold at an aggravatingly slow pace. The vast majority of character interaction is through cliche ridden dialogue, which scrolls far too slowly for fast readers or any literate readers intrigued enough in the story to set their own pace. Without the ability to enable instant text, the plot crawls along slowly regardless of story elements. Dialogue nodes are merely breaks between unchanging or dead-end conversations and the available puzzles in between chatter are rare and childishly simple. To make matters worse, the game insults the player by giving them an easy multiple choice test at the end of every chapter. To top things off, the story reads like a vapid airport mystery novel.

After struggling with Hotel Dusk, I'm inclined to agree with the videogame segregationists, whose flag reads "Books are books, games are games, and never the two shall join." Reverting to my tendency of making food based analogies, this meshing of the two mediums creates more of a "liver and pancakes" than "chicken and waffles" combination. Yet some games combine aspects of the mediums remarkably well. Why does Hotel Dusk fail where others have forged a brilliant path?

The aforementioned Prof. Layton, possibly my favorite DS game, tells a compelling and comical story interlaced with puzzles which seem at first to have little relevance to the story. Given, Layton is more akin to a cartoon than a novel with its animated cut scenes, but the example is important none the less. Layton maintains a well paced story bolstered by gameplay, although its puzzles could have easily been collected into a game with no narrative at all.

On the visually opposite spectrum are interactive fictions (IF), experiences that exist in the borderlands of gaming. Many of these text-based adventures, such as Emily Short's Galatea, are completely devoid of visual elements. Regardless, there are those designers still creating surprisingly fun and intense games that far surpass the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels of the early eighties and nineties. These IFs frequently push the boundaries of the medium and can be incredibly innovative, particularly with dialogue. Like 'escape the room' puzzles, many games in the IF genre reveal a hidden depth far more intriguing than what Hotel Dusk provides.
Both Layton and Galatea share many characteristics with literature, yet succeed where Hotel Dusk fails. What these games have that Hotel Dusk does not is interactivity through meaningful choice, or at least the illusion of meaningful choice. The element of video games that makes the medium so unique, and the most important element to keep when blending it with literature. Unfortunately, the puzzles are too simple to feel interactive and the dialogue is linear, only incorrect responses alter the story occasionally by ending the game.

The interactivity of choice in interactive fiction takes the form of narrative control. The player drives the story forward, changing pacing and outcome on a whim. The narrative is defined by the players, not regurgitated to them like a book on tape. But even if the story is fixed, involvement in gameplay is choice enough to envelope the player in the experience. Solving puzzles in Prof. Layton is rewarding by itself, but these become even more meaningful when tied to the story, setting the pace without being restrictive.

It is easy enough to find parties of contrarians eager to debate the definition of "videogame." I am comfortable with keeping the term nebulous. Even so, I have a hard time considering Hotel Dusk a videogame because it is an empty invitation to play. There is space for more literature-based videogames (Dante's Inferno and Tom Clancy's Splintercell don't count), but wrapping a poor piece of fiction in the guise of game without choice is a sin, belittling both crafts.