Choose your own (inevitable) adventure.

Haven't been as prolific as I should be around here for quite some time. Thanks to Kittydog for holding down the fort. On to business...

Reading Kittydog's post on The Walking Dead spurred a long time discomfort with modern games with a prominent element of 'choice'. That is to say, you have none at all. And nobody seems to notice, or mind, whichever is more appalling to you. Games like Mass Effect, Walking Dead, Deus Ex: HR or dare I say, even Bethesda's Fallouts and Elder Scrolls are praised for their storytelling and emphasis on player decisions having meaningful impact on the progression of the game, but they are all overstated.

What does it mean to have CHOICE in a game? That the next three lines of witty, snarky dialogue will be different? That you'll be graced with a slightly different ending slide? Maybe that a few NPCs later on may regard you with disdain. I can sum up my feelings easily: apathy. These choices barely incentivize me to reload a save to satisfy my curiousity, let alone replay the game for a new experience. Everything is so predictable, and it's still the same game, with some minor flavorful tweaks. Inevitably, you will still finish the game, you will still get more or less the same main-story ending, and you will still be YOU. Even juvenile Choose Your Own Adventure books had less predictability and wider variance in outcomes. Even 'choice' games a decade ago had more branching, where your specific dialogue choice mattered less compared to how you carried about in the game world.Instead of leaving the outcome a result of wordplay, the manner in which you appeased them in terms of timeliness, worth and effort was more important.

1. People don't like variance and unpredictability. A consistent and stable universe is more immersive, and less abrupt and jarring when unexpected things happen. Also, modern audiences don't tolerate sudden deaths and unforeseen consequences very well, which is typical of a spoonfed era.

2. People don't want to be punished, and feel like they've wasted their time, even if they've committed to poor choices. Choices can be made casually and on a whim, and should decisions have too much weight in them, the players may feel regret. Instead of stopping the players to heavily deliberate their decisions, developers have reduced their impacts and supplemented them in quantity.

3. People want the story to not end. Even after a terrible decision, the developers want to retain a steady pace and flow of the plot and action. So the story cannot come screeching to a halt even if the player consistently demonstrates he's a mouthbreathing fool who is incapable of making reasonable decisions on behalf of his role-played character. The best way to curb this, is again, to limit the extremities of decisions and their impacts.

4. Devs want all their content to be seen. Nowadays, games are judged immediately and quickly. Too much so, and it pressures devs to make a player's first playthrough, or even first impression, to be as best as it possibly can be, regardless of how the experience of repeated playthroughs suffer. This has created a diorama effect, where the player is shuffled from theatre to theatre, experiencing each set piece and respective characters, but is mostly a linear experience. Adding a few dialogue branches suddenly seems like freedom for what has become an on-rails theme park game. Mass Effect has side missions that you can do before your linear main-story missions to distract you into thinking it's not a linear game. But replays quickly disappoint and show you didn't miss much that a 30 second Youtube video would not have demonstrated. Developers have masked their games so that the first playthrough is as deceptive as possible.

5. Extra content costs money. Publishers may be largely to blame, but regardless, time, money and effort are restrictive constraints. Creating content that players may not see, or discover for years is no longer the norm for games. Anything that is missed by the player scores no points, so developers have been forcibly making sure unperceptive gamers see everything that happens, even to the detriment of immersion. Explosions are huge and flashy, flashing icons popup to tell you something is happening, and camera control is forced to look directly at events. Players have no incentive to try to be perceptive or on guard, since they can just lazily wait until the game tells them something will happen. It's no surprise then, when developers don't want to create player choice branches that branch out too far. It will be content that will potentially be missed, and the further branches go, the more exponentially different the rest of the game becomes, requiring more potentially unseen work.

Walking Dead is entirely linear with dialogue choices that ultimately land you in the same place, with different characters that are all substitutes for each other. Eventually, when the devs feel like it's time to wrap up loose ends, these characters are quickly cut off so they can still produce a similar ending for all branches.

These traits, partially the result of the complacent and spoiled characteristics of the modern gamer, have led the appeal of these games to ruin. There's no challenge of making the right choice. One either gets an ending with all the characters satisfied and a short slideshow of congratulations, or gets something slightly more bleak. How about a completely different ending where the player fails and is tormented in oblivion instead? Or maybe someone he jeered way earlier comes back and cripples him in vengeance and robs him without resistance? These games should be about making one of the dozen right choices, amongst hundreds of bad choices. Start by slamming the player in the face and reminding him that he needs to WORK for the good endings, and that nothing will be happily given to one without deep contemplation for his choices. As it stands, such games are dead, and  though adventure games from the past are returning, sadly, their traditional brutal choice mechanics are not.