On the Redundancy of Player Choice

// Filed under: Video Games on Wednesday February 28th 2007, 11:46 am

I’ve been thinking recently, about some of the things I experienced while playing Splinter Cell: Double Agent a couple of months back.

The level in question begins with Sam Fisher hurling himself out of a helicopter, to parachute down onto a glacier. Simple stuff perhaps, for a veteran agent of an elite black ops unit. Not so. In fact, his parachute gets stuck, and who should come to his rescue? Why, me of course. Tim! I hear you cry. You’re an unfit nerd! How can you possibly help? Ah, but the answer is simple, my friends.

I hit the space bar.

Yes, seriously. I hit the space bar. If I don’t hit it, veteran black ops agent Sam Fisher will plummet to a loud, sudden and above all cold death. So here, as a player, is my choice. Hit the space bar, or die. That’s it. If I do not hit the space bar, my mission will end messily before it has even begun.

Some levels later, I am in a helicopter being airlifted to the roof of a skyscraper. Gasp! The pilot collapses with no explanation given. Once again it’s Tim to the rescue, as Sam Fisher rushes to the controls of the aircraft. But Tim, you pipe up once again. You’re not qualified to pilot a helicopter! Ah, but I am, my friends. Because you see, all I need to do to make sure I can actually get on with my mission and not die, is this:

Wildly hit the directional keys.

Like a peppered ferret, I smack the directional keys until the helicopter rights itself and I can actually begin my mission. If I don’t, of course, I can gleefully sit and watch as the helicopter fireballs into the side of the building and I die. The first time, this happened, with the parachutes - I didn’t really think about it. The second time, with the helicopter, I stopped the game for a second, and I thought to myself - what the fuck is going on.

If I do not hit the space bar - if I do not wildly smack the directional keys - I will die. As a player, I can choose to perform a menial action, or watch my character die and be forced to reload and face the same choice again. Because that’s what it is all about, you see. It’s about choice.

When you offer a player a choice, you are saying to the player: you are in control. What you are about to do matters. This is what creates immersion. This is what creates great, memorable experiences that people will talk about.

When you make it abundantly clear to that player that their choice is not only irrelevant to the outcome - but that there is only one viable outcome - you throw all that back in their face. You are saying to the player “I don’t need you”. Why give a player this choice if you can only end up insulting them? Why would I ever, ever, choose to die. Why do I even have the option to choose to live?

I can see the merit, when a player must use their reflexes, memory, skills, strategy etc, to forge the difference between life and death in a video game. I can see the merit when I die and I know that if I was just a little more skilled, I could have made a difference.

Where I can’t see the merit is in making a player perform a menial, unskilled action just so that they can actually play the game they just purchased. Wouldn’t it have been easier to incorporate this into a menu choice? Begin level? Y/N? Y. Open parachute? Y/N?

While I was discussing this on the Gamer’s Quarter forums some time back, Harveyjames mentioned the game Just Cause as an example of what a reasonable parachute-opening choice should mean. While parachuting in Just Cause, for example, the time at which you open the parachute will determine where in the level you land, meaning you can make an actual difference in how you expedite your goals within that level. In Double Agent, the result is not quite so variable. You land at the same place, regardless of whether you open your parachute or not - it’s just in one of these scenarios, you hit the ground a with a bit more finality.

Of course, it would be naive to think Double Agent is the only game guilty of this. In X-Men: Legends, any sort of chasm or cliff ledge is a guaranteed death-trap for a player anxious to test their supposed flying skills. In Golden Sun, sweet Golden Sun for my GameBoy Advance, every second conversation with an NPC offered you the chance to agree or disagree with their sentiments. Of course, the only change this made was in the immediately subsequent dialogue, as they ended up convincing you to do what the story wanted you to do anyway.

But in Double Agent - shiny, new herald of the Splinter Cell line, promising me unrivalled immersion and the ability to play both sides in a dangerous game where the lines of morality are blurred and every choice I make determines one of a number of outcomes… I find myself having to press the space bar so that I can open a goddamn parachute.

This is not immersion. This is not player choice. This is a player being forced to acknowledge that what they are contributing is token and unnecessary. A freedom that you can never choose is not a freedom. It is an insult, it is a frustration and most of it all it is plain bad design.

// 5 Comments

The Mathematics of Denial

// Filed under: Politics on Saturday February 10th 2007, 7:47 am

“Now, Peter argues, Peter says all the Kyoto work has reduced the growth of emissions by 5 per cent by the countries involved. I gave some reasons as to why that growth is masked by collapses in economic activity in Europe. But just think of this. Peter is proposing that by 2050 and the Labor Party’s policy is, in fact, 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 – and that is a very, very big reduction; now, if we do that by ourselves it will make no difference to global warming, unless the rest of the world plays a part. Because this is a global problem. We can deal with water ourselves, within our own country. But global warming has to have a global solution. It’s obvious, isn’t it? A tonne of carbon put into the atmosphere in Sydney has as much impact on the atmosphere as one put into the atmosphere in Shanghai. So everybody’s got to be in it together.”

What you just read was a man saying this: That because global warming is a global problem, anything Australia does on its own is useless. What you just read was a man saying: Australia shouldn’t bother doing anything at all about global warming, because nobody else is doing anything.

Who is this man, ladies and gentlemen? Well, let’s set it up with a few clues. He’s obviously heavily in denial, and clinically retarded. Yes, you guessed right. He’s Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s Federal Environment Minister, live on the 7.30 Report Thursday night, having his face verbally caved in by Peter Garrett.

Let me walk you through some simple mathematics, Malcolm. I know you’re a regular reader.

Let us assume the amount of emissions currently globally is, for abstract purposes, 100. Let us then assume that Australia’s part of that emission is 10. Now, let us assume Australia cuts its emissions as planned, by 60 percent. We are now contributing a total of 4, 6 less than before. So let’s do the maths.

100 - 6 = 94

So we can see that the total amount of emissions in the world has been (very slightly) reduced. Now, let’s do the global warming mathematics, Malcolm Turnbull style.

100 - 0 = 100

As you can see, the results are simply astounding. Under Malcolm’s radical plan of doing absolutely fucking nothing for fear that it might damage the Howard government’s precious economy, the amount of reduction in emissions has changed by absolutely zero. But hey, at least the economy is still good, right?

“…we have to remember that there is an economic cost. However you do it, whether you do it through taxes, whether you do it through subsidies which are funded by taxes, whether you do it through carbon trading, when you put a price on carbon, you impose a cost on the economy, and the higher that cost, the more impact that has… If you impose a massive cost on the Australian economy you will do enormous damage to jobs. And that’s why all this week interviewers have been saying to Peter, “What is it going to cost?” Three times on another channel he was asked and he would not say and, finally, the interviewer in frustration said, “Does this mean that consumers will have to pay more?” Peter said, “I don’t know what ‘pay more’ means.” Really, is that the sort of recklessness we can expect?”

Because I’m feeling so fucking generous, here’s another freebie for you Malcolm: It doesn’t fucking matter, what the cost to the economy and to jobs are, because any children any of us plan on having won’t have a planet to fucking live on by the time you’re done.

Roll on the election year.

// 9 Comments

The Insane Feces Of The Indonesian Bat

// Filed under: Politics on Friday February 02nd 2007, 3:15 pm

In what is only the latest in a series of batshit-crazy political one-up-manship with Australia, the Indonesian Government has claimed intellectual property rights to the Indonesian strain of H5N1 avian influenza. Yes, you read that right - the Indonesian Government is asserting that it owns the rights to this strain, and moreover, since Australian pharmaceutical company CSL recently developed a vaccine for avian influenza based on this strain, the Indonesian Government is entitled to a share of the profits.

Despite the fact that this strain of which the vaccine was based was delivered by the World Health Organisation, and despite the fact that there is no legal precedent for IP ownership over a naturally-created virus, and despite the fact that the vaccine was produced under contract with the Australian government so any profits will be minimal in the extreme… Indonesia believes that it can own this virus.

Completely. Batshit. Insane.

Here’s a thought - if Indonesia owns this virus, and believes it is entitled to a share of the profits from a vaccine against it, are they then entitled to be sued for damages when their virus destroys poultry, livestock and livelihoods? Who comes up with this? Seriously, do they all get together in the Indonesian cabinet every month and have a brainstorming session to see who can come on air and say the most retarded thing they can think of to try and one-up the Australian Government?

At least they’re coming up with new and interesting ideas, I guess. Instead of the Australian Government which, as far as I can tell, just throws darts at a board to choose what to centralise under Federal control next.

// 1 Comment

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