Warning: Major spoilers for TellTale's Walking Dead Season 1 and The Wolf Among Us in this piece.
As would be evident to anyone who's read this blog for a decent amount of time, I'm a huge fan of story-based games. I don't even mean the RPG brand of story-based here, where the story is just one of the two main draws of the game, the other being a solid mechanical base, but something a lot less gamey: think Ace Attorney, Katawa Shoujo (Even if I don't think of it as a game per say) or the latest TellTale adventure games.
I was talking to a "layman" (someone who doesn't really play any games beyond the latest Call of Duty and FIFA) about that last specific example, namely the first season of their Walking Dead games. As you know, I'm a big fan of that particular game, seeing as to this day I still consider it my second favourite game of all time. After a fairly in-depth description, including how despite the huge amount of choices in these games there's actually practically no branching, they came up with a point that really stumped me for a while:
"Why not just make it a movie then?"
They have a point. After playing a TellTale game twice, you'll know there's no real changes that you can instigate in the story, and you'd be rather foolish to expect this to have massively changed in future games. Why would you write four dialogue choices that make no difference when you could write just one? Furthermore, wouldn't just having to write the one mean that the time spent writing three redundant exchanges could instead be spent on making the one exchange more compelling? At a first glance, it definitely seems so. Yet even after playing Walking Dead Season 1 twice, I found the choices in Wolf Among Us massively compelling, despite knowing full well that I was likely not changing anything past the next few minutes.
One explanation for this is simply getting caught up in the moment. Despite me having my share of complaints with it, I can't deny that Wolf Among Us is an enthralling story, even without the choices. Perhaps I just got so into it that I forgot to think about how unimportant my choices really were? This would basically be the same as successfully maintaining that illusion of choice. It's certainly a possibility, and not one that I can easily refute, but I like to believe that I'm enough of a sourpuss that I wouldn't fall into this. So, let's ignore it for the sake of argument.
The second explanation, this being both the one I find more likely and more interesting, is simply context. There's a moment in Walking Dead that's used as an example of "how badly" TellTale games handle this that I believe to be exactly the opposite: Lily, a member of your motley crew of survivors, kills another member of the crew. You get to make a decision: you can leave Lily on the roadside to get killed by the approaching horde, or take her with you on your caravan. Doing the second results in her soon stealing the caravan and driving off, at a moment in the story where the party wasn't going to use it anymore anyway due to it being practically out of gas. The result for both is ultimately the same: Lily's out of the story, likely dead, and the party is stuck at a train depot without any real means of transportation.
The most obvious point to make is "Well, you killed Lily in one outcome, and in the other she betrayed you and went off into her death through lack of knowledge of the situation". That's true, but it's a very small piece of the relationship of your relationship with Lily.
You see, you originally meet Lily with her father Larry, and absolutely massive man, and both of them are really confrontational. You soon come into Larry's bad books, and at one point he leaves you to die, being saved by Kenny, another survivor who's at odds with the two. Later on, when Kenny and Lily are butting heads over how to lead the survivor colony, you can support either of the two, resulting in you gaining or loosing approval from both parties. The entire time, Larry's still being confrontational, which you can choose to ignore as an old man's ramblings, further gaining Lily's approval. Eventually, you're trapped in an enclosed space with Lily, Kenny, your child protege Clementine, and an apparently dead Larry. It's clear that if Larry raises up as a zombie, you're all dead. Kenny encourages you to destroy Larry's head to prevent him from rising up, whereas Lily begs you to try and revive him. Depending on your previous choices, you can further gain her gratitude by trying (and failing) to protect him, shock her by betraying her trust, earn her hatred by killing her father in what she sees as revenge, or further instigate the feud between the two of you by killing him in what she acknowledges you thought was self-defence. The way her killing of the member of your party happens also depends on a choice you made much earlier, where it's either an intentional killing of your implied love interest in the heat of the moment born of unjustified paranoia, or an unfortunate but lethal accident.
None of the choices you've made along the way matter. Ultimately, you end up being leader of the colony despite not vying for the place, Larry ends up getting his head smashed in whilst unconscious in front of Lily, Lily kills whichever of the two people you saved much earlier on and ends up dying for it. However, the story you've navigated through ends up being radically different. On my first playthrough, I butted heads with Lily and Larry until, by mistake, I smashed Larry's head in when he was alive. Lily saw this as me taking revenge, and held a grudge against me, making my life difficult at every turn. Eventually, she shot someone dear to me, and I left her to die on the roadside.
On my second playthrough, whilst I disagreed with Lily's leadership, I saw her doing her best and tried to stay as friendly as possible with Larry, even trying to forgive his leaving me to die. I eventually unsuccessfully tried to prevent Kenny from smashing his head in before attempts at recuperation, which led to Lily and me being friendly. Through a complete accident, she shot a close friend of mine. I did my best to keep her alive, but she betrayed my trust by stealing our only means of transport, simultaneously accidentally dooming herself to the very fate I'd convinced the group not to leave her to a few hours prior.
I was still leader of the colony. Larry still died at our hands because he was unconscious. A friend still ended up dead. Lily still wound up MIA, with practically zero chances of survival. But don't tell me those aren't two completely different stories. The first is fraught with anger, resentment, and mistrust, whereas the second is a tale of what appears to be an unlikely friendship blossoming ending with a foolish and painful betrayal. It's not what happens in the story, but the choices you made and how that affected how you and the people around you understood the events that made this sub-plot of Walking Dead enthralling.
However, this isn't the only thing that choice does. It's not just a choice to write out branching paths and storylines, but also a tool to put the weight of them on your shoulders, be it the case that it's your fault or not. At several points in The Wolf Among Us, you encounter a ring of prostitutes who physically cannot disclose certain information. Eventually, you discover that this is due to a ribbon tied around their neck that contains a charm, tied to one of them. For all the girls, removing the ribbon results in the head being severed. You end up talking with the "key", the girl whose ribbon the enchantments on all the other girls is tied to. There's practically no history between you two, you've met once or twice before, fairly briefly. However, you get the option to force her to untie the ribbon: This will sever her head, but release the enchantment from the rest of the girls. This is the option I chose. However, at a later point it becomes important that the enchantment has been released. Unless this game changes more than I give it credit for, I can only assume that the other option is she elects to untie it herself, committing suicide for the good of her coworkers.
This alone is a huge emotional change. I felt really conflicted about forcing her ribbon undone, but I justified it in my head by arguing that this enchantment had already cost several lives, and was likely to cost more if it wasn't undone. Furthermore, she'd willingly and knowingly tricked her friends into having the charm placed on them, which made her liable to suffer the fate she'd put others to in order to spare them from it. At several later points in the game, whenever the consequences of the charm being broken became important, I felt pangs of guilt about it, and changed my behaviour accordingly. If she'd chosen to take her own life in my version of the game, I'm not sure it would've made my heart any lighter, but it certainly would've alleviated most of the guilt, as well as made me less resentful of her in the long run. Even though the outcome would have been the same, my emotional reaction to it would have been completely different because the guilt wouldn't have lay on me.
That's an emotion that I think games can bring out to its fullest extent, better than any other story-telling medium, and that's why I think story-based gaming works well with stories as dark Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us. Context, in both the long and short run, can make a story feel radically different, even if the overall structure of it is the same. Whilst TellTale has repeatedly fallen flat on its promises of hugely diverging stories depending on player choice, I believe the company has mastered the art of contextualizing the same story event through choices that don't change anything.
As would be evident to anyone who's read this blog for a decent amount of time, I'm a huge fan of story-based games. I don't even mean the RPG brand of story-based here, where the story is just one of the two main draws of the game, the other being a solid mechanical base, but something a lot less gamey: think Ace Attorney, Katawa Shoujo (Even if I don't think of it as a game per say) or the latest TellTale adventure games.
I was talking to a "layman" (someone who doesn't really play any games beyond the latest Call of Duty and FIFA) about that last specific example, namely the first season of their Walking Dead games. As you know, I'm a big fan of that particular game, seeing as to this day I still consider it my second favourite game of all time. After a fairly in-depth description, including how despite the huge amount of choices in these games there's actually practically no branching, they came up with a point that really stumped me for a while:
"Why not just make it a movie then?"
They have a point. After playing a TellTale game twice, you'll know there's no real changes that you can instigate in the story, and you'd be rather foolish to expect this to have massively changed in future games. Why would you write four dialogue choices that make no difference when you could write just one? Furthermore, wouldn't just having to write the one mean that the time spent writing three redundant exchanges could instead be spent on making the one exchange more compelling? At a first glance, it definitely seems so. Yet even after playing Walking Dead Season 1 twice, I found the choices in Wolf Among Us massively compelling, despite knowing full well that I was likely not changing anything past the next few minutes.
One explanation for this is simply getting caught up in the moment. Despite me having my share of complaints with it, I can't deny that Wolf Among Us is an enthralling story, even without the choices. Perhaps I just got so into it that I forgot to think about how unimportant my choices really were? This would basically be the same as successfully maintaining that illusion of choice. It's certainly a possibility, and not one that I can easily refute, but I like to believe that I'm enough of a sourpuss that I wouldn't fall into this. So, let's ignore it for the sake of argument.
The second explanation, this being both the one I find more likely and more interesting, is simply context. There's a moment in Walking Dead that's used as an example of "how badly" TellTale games handle this that I believe to be exactly the opposite: Lily, a member of your motley crew of survivors, kills another member of the crew. You get to make a decision: you can leave Lily on the roadside to get killed by the approaching horde, or take her with you on your caravan. Doing the second results in her soon stealing the caravan and driving off, at a moment in the story where the party wasn't going to use it anymore anyway due to it being practically out of gas. The result for both is ultimately the same: Lily's out of the story, likely dead, and the party is stuck at a train depot without any real means of transportation.
The most obvious point to make is "Well, you killed Lily in one outcome, and in the other she betrayed you and went off into her death through lack of knowledge of the situation". That's true, but it's a very small piece of the relationship of your relationship with Lily.
You see, you originally meet Lily with her father Larry, and absolutely massive man, and both of them are really confrontational. You soon come into Larry's bad books, and at one point he leaves you to die, being saved by Kenny, another survivor who's at odds with the two. Later on, when Kenny and Lily are butting heads over how to lead the survivor colony, you can support either of the two, resulting in you gaining or loosing approval from both parties. The entire time, Larry's still being confrontational, which you can choose to ignore as an old man's ramblings, further gaining Lily's approval. Eventually, you're trapped in an enclosed space with Lily, Kenny, your child protege Clementine, and an apparently dead Larry. It's clear that if Larry raises up as a zombie, you're all dead. Kenny encourages you to destroy Larry's head to prevent him from rising up, whereas Lily begs you to try and revive him. Depending on your previous choices, you can further gain her gratitude by trying (and failing) to protect him, shock her by betraying her trust, earn her hatred by killing her father in what she sees as revenge, or further instigate the feud between the two of you by killing him in what she acknowledges you thought was self-defence. The way her killing of the member of your party happens also depends on a choice you made much earlier, where it's either an intentional killing of your implied love interest in the heat of the moment born of unjustified paranoia, or an unfortunate but lethal accident.
None of the choices you've made along the way matter. Ultimately, you end up being leader of the colony despite not vying for the place, Larry ends up getting his head smashed in whilst unconscious in front of Lily, Lily kills whichever of the two people you saved much earlier on and ends up dying for it. However, the story you've navigated through ends up being radically different. On my first playthrough, I butted heads with Lily and Larry until, by mistake, I smashed Larry's head in when he was alive. Lily saw this as me taking revenge, and held a grudge against me, making my life difficult at every turn. Eventually, she shot someone dear to me, and I left her to die on the roadside.
On my second playthrough, whilst I disagreed with Lily's leadership, I saw her doing her best and tried to stay as friendly as possible with Larry, even trying to forgive his leaving me to die. I eventually unsuccessfully tried to prevent Kenny from smashing his head in before attempts at recuperation, which led to Lily and me being friendly. Through a complete accident, she shot a close friend of mine. I did my best to keep her alive, but she betrayed my trust by stealing our only means of transport, simultaneously accidentally dooming herself to the very fate I'd convinced the group not to leave her to a few hours prior.
I was still leader of the colony. Larry still died at our hands because he was unconscious. A friend still ended up dead. Lily still wound up MIA, with practically zero chances of survival. But don't tell me those aren't two completely different stories. The first is fraught with anger, resentment, and mistrust, whereas the second is a tale of what appears to be an unlikely friendship blossoming ending with a foolish and painful betrayal. It's not what happens in the story, but the choices you made and how that affected how you and the people around you understood the events that made this sub-plot of Walking Dead enthralling.
However, this isn't the only thing that choice does. It's not just a choice to write out branching paths and storylines, but also a tool to put the weight of them on your shoulders, be it the case that it's your fault or not. At several points in The Wolf Among Us, you encounter a ring of prostitutes who physically cannot disclose certain information. Eventually, you discover that this is due to a ribbon tied around their neck that contains a charm, tied to one of them. For all the girls, removing the ribbon results in the head being severed. You end up talking with the "key", the girl whose ribbon the enchantments on all the other girls is tied to. There's practically no history between you two, you've met once or twice before, fairly briefly. However, you get the option to force her to untie the ribbon: This will sever her head, but release the enchantment from the rest of the girls. This is the option I chose. However, at a later point it becomes important that the enchantment has been released. Unless this game changes more than I give it credit for, I can only assume that the other option is she elects to untie it herself, committing suicide for the good of her coworkers.
This alone is a huge emotional change. I felt really conflicted about forcing her ribbon undone, but I justified it in my head by arguing that this enchantment had already cost several lives, and was likely to cost more if it wasn't undone. Furthermore, she'd willingly and knowingly tricked her friends into having the charm placed on them, which made her liable to suffer the fate she'd put others to in order to spare them from it. At several later points in the game, whenever the consequences of the charm being broken became important, I felt pangs of guilt about it, and changed my behaviour accordingly. If she'd chosen to take her own life in my version of the game, I'm not sure it would've made my heart any lighter, but it certainly would've alleviated most of the guilt, as well as made me less resentful of her in the long run. Even though the outcome would have been the same, my emotional reaction to it would have been completely different because the guilt wouldn't have lay on me.
That's an emotion that I think games can bring out to its fullest extent, better than any other story-telling medium, and that's why I think story-based gaming works well with stories as dark Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us. Context, in both the long and short run, can make a story feel radically different, even if the overall structure of it is the same. Whilst TellTale has repeatedly fallen flat on its promises of hugely diverging stories depending on player choice, I believe the company has mastered the art of contextualizing the same story event through choices that don't change anything.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario