TimTek Industries » On the Redundancy of Player Choice

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Tim Colwill is a 22 year old human male who resides in Perth, Western Australia. Inventor of the cardboard toaster and the car-powered car, Tim is also an accomplished author, having penned such notable works as Romeo and Juliet, Clifford The Big Red Dog, and The Bible. In his spare time, Tim directs movies under the nom de plume Steven Spielberg and maintains his own standing army of genetically engineered watermelons. Truly it is said that Tim has had an illustrious career, matched only by its ludicrously unbelievable exaggeration.

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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

5 Comments »

Tinkling Koala says:

March 1, 2007 at 11:56 am

Resident Evil 4, anyone?
Grey says:

March 3, 2007 at 2:17 am

Ah but dodging in resident evil 4 didn’t always resolve in death, but prevented loss of health, eg the suits of armour. Plus it was more about reflexes more than anything else, especially in later parts.
t3h (h4r says:

March 4, 2007 at 2:51 am

“like a peppered ferret”

..oh, Tim. I
RanmedThePottyTrained says:

March 13, 2007 at 7:53 pm

The bad thing is Tim, most people don’t think about it enough to complain or boycott or really do anything to encourage games companies to do anything about it. Many games seem to patronise you with “choices”. Sadly I still buy them then curse like mad at these silly thoughtless sections of cyber stupidity. Love your twisted sense of humour by the way… peppered ferret!!! Priceless
Jim(i) says:

March 26, 2007 at 11:38 pm

“!”. “!” I say, and I’ll say it again. “!”.

I was just, in my usual endearing manner, composing an unneeded and catty message to the effect of ‘you have too much time’, ‘who the hell cares’, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about’ and ‘peppered ferret, that’s a good one’, which was to be headed with George Taylor’s final words from ‘Planet of the Apes’ to eloquently parody your disproportionate sense of injustice, and showcase my incredible wit and muscular thighs. I was so impressed with this bit of waggishness, I whacked “Damn you all to heck” in the search engine to get the full quote and make sure it was right, and lo and behold I got a link back to your webpage. Good, in and of itself, but as I followed the link out of interest and pondered holism in my deep and ineffable way, the reference from your page turned out to be from me: grudgingly giving you praise, and then cursing you for it. Delightful!

“But James”, I hear you say, “Doesn’t that just show how quickly you recycle through what little material you have, which you stole from someone else and got wrong, anyway?” To which I say firstly, “Hey man, that’s pretty harsh” and secondly “I cut you”, most likely in a bad Mexican accent ‘cos that’s just the way it is.

Incidentally, the actual line turns out to be “You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”, which is fun, but a line I didn’t remember makes me even happier:

George Taylor: Doctor, I’d like to kiss you goodbye.
Dr. Zira: All right, but you’re so damned ugly.

Ahhhh Dr. Zira, you ol’ sweet talker, you.

P.S. You know Tim, if you just designed, constructed, maintained and edited-at-my-whim a webpage of my own I could post on like I asked you to, I wouldn’t clog up your page with my inexplicably long-winded ramblings about how excited I got finding myself on Google by accident. Probably.