Corvus Elrod has one of those “Oh yeah, makes sense, I agree,” kind of posts, under the notably unflashy title “Verb Restriction vs. Immersion.” But because the underlying ideas unlocked a lot of heavy pondering on my part, I’m compelled to turn this into one of those long-winded thinkposts.
Game developers, he explains, tend to turn off certain actions at key points in the plot. For example, in Half-Life your weapon automatically lowers when you look at an ally. Other games toss the player into a cutscene, ensuring a steady dialog stream and preventing the character from lunging prematurely at the supporting actors.
But the meat of Elrod’s essay is the suggestion that developers should give the player incentive to behave without restricting their actions. He concludes:
If the storyteller provides violent verbs and the audience chooses to kill key characters, then the plot cannot continue. That doesn’t mean the story cannot continue. The storyworld continues to exist, only the protagonist motivation is gone. It won’t be long before the audience realizes that playing within the unstated rules of the storytelling experience will reward them with a compelling story. And then it’s up to the storyteller to make good on that promise.
Two commenters pointed to Morrowind as a good example. I have not played the game, but apparently you can kill plot-essential characters and continue playing with the main quest unavailable (a text box first asks you if you still want to go on).
This reminds me of my last essay for The Escapist on player death, in which I argue that the die-and-respawn model of failure is an outdated convention. If you believe there’s any room for compelling narrative in games, these magic reset buttons, like the invincible supporting casts that Corvus laments, have got to go.
That’s not to say they’ll go quietly. Oddbob ripped me a new one for criticizing death-as-failure without adequately addressing the consequences. He writes:
Me, I prefer to learn from games when designing them. To delve into what worked for me, what didn’t work for me, what worked for other people no matter how dyed in the wool a mechanic it may be rather than frot myself senseless within a fantasy world that condemns entire genres to death because of my own personal inability to understand the medium of games.
It’s a fair counterargument; I didn’t bother to analyze all the scenarios where the removal of life and death obstacles would change the nature of games as we know them, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering in practice. The same could be said for Elrod’s argument. Being able to kill your supporting character, or run away from him during conversation, or cast magic to turn him into a woman would open new narrative avenues that are simply blocked off now because of the status quo. Unfortunately, Oddbob is working from within the existing framework, unable to see the forest from the trees.
A mere tinkering of the rules is never going to get video games to a point where player behavior has lasting consequences.
