Editor's Note: Matthew Erazo gives some developers some food for thought. Great idea? Or will it usher in a new era of $!%^@* thrown controllers and $!%^@* swearing? -Shoe
The consequences of our actions is something we never want to deal with. We don't want to deal with the fallout of a relationship, the dissolution of a friendship, or the forehead-slapping stupidity of a mistake. As human beings, we don't want to make mistakes, or if we have made them, learn from them and move on as soon as possible. It's no surprise then, that we don't want to deal with them in our videogames either.
Why should we, though? Games are meant to entertain us, let us escape from reality, or be someone completely different than ourselves. The experiences of our digital avatars become manifestations of what we aspire to become or fantasize about doing since the real world certainly doesn't allow you to attach chain blades to your arms and destroy a god.
Yet, what do we do when we are forced to face the consequences of our actions in videogames? We reload a previous save and make sure we don't make that mistake again.
I propose that in certain games, this feature be banned. Outraged? Hear me out.
One of my favorite games is one that was lambasted for having a limited save system: Dead Rising. In Dead Rising, you were only allowed one save slot that was constantly overridden with each new autosave. This was implemented to force the gamer into multiple playthroughs of the game as it was meant to played. Pretty sadistic on the surface, but I saw it under a different light.
See, in the game you had to rescue survivors scattered around the zombie infested mall. Get them back to the safe room in one piece and you gained bonuses. If they died, that was it, they were done for, and you couldn't reload to save them. What made it even better: If one of the them died, you would see them as a zombie later on, further reinforcing the fact that you let them die and have to live with that. This created tension every time I ventured out to find more helpless souls. Would I be able to save this group? Am I up to the task?
I may be projecting feelings that probably weren't there, but that is the point. I felt something toward this game because I was forced to deal with my consequences. It elicited an emotional response out of me, something that many games strive for today and fail at miserably. How can you feel an emotional connection to anything you do in The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion if you can simply reload a previous save if you made the wrong moral choice?
Or how about in the original Fable? Toward the end, you are faced with a final choice: Throw in the evil sword won from Jack of Blades or keep it and succumb to the evil. You can simply save before this moment, make your choice and then reload to see the other ending. While this does make it easier on gamers, it robs you of any emotion you may feel toward this decision.
Are you ready to deal with the consequence?
There are games that do force you to face your decisions. But do it without being so overt as not letting you reload, and many of us will consider them the greatest games ever. BioShock made you the puppet of Atlus by using the common progression of a game against you with three simple words spoken before each objective. By the time you reached Andrew Ryan, you were forced to watch as you acted against your will, and then you were presumably left to die. This made you feel an "Oh my God" moment and made the game's story stick in your mind.
In Shadow of the Colossus, you bring a loved one to an altar in the hopes that you can find a way to resurrect her and are told to slay the 16 beasts roaming this land to achieve this. As the player, you are not given a concrete reason, but your goal is to save this girl. As you progress along this path, you feel more and more apprehensive about your actions, but this is part of the game. You must kill these colossi in order to achieve victory and get the girl. For those of you who know how the game ends, you know the consequences, and it almost certainly got a response out of you.
You'll do anything for a loved one. Why not in a game, too?
This way of thinking doesn't need to be the only way to make us feel anything about our games, but it's an important step on the way there. In order to gain the emotion and storytelling that we as gamers want out of the medium, we have to embrace the fact that we must face the consequences of our actions. Only then can the game grab us, make us apart of its world, and tell a story that we can react to emotionally. It's then that games can become the medium where the greatest stories can be told.
