[Light spoilers for Bioshock Infinite, heavy spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line] Continue reading
Tag Archives: free will
Notes on Remember Me
This post contains spoilers on Remember Me. I’m going to assume you’ve played the game before reading on, so my explanations of in-world organizations and events will be truncated. Even if you’re not familiar with the world, it shouldn’t stop you from following along.
Below I talk about the combat and navigation design, the believability of Sensen (Remember Me‘s memory-based technology), the quality of morality missing from the story, Nilin as an acting agent, and the male gaze.
How Yorda’s Uselessness Ruined Agency in Ico
In philosophical terms, “agency” is the capacity for a person to make decisions and act according to those decisions. The ability to decide one’s own actions entails a substantial degree of self-expression and so is quite a significant power to hold, both pragmatically and existentially.
In videogames, however, agency becomes a tricky thing. Virtual actions are the products of the agencies of multiple participants: the player who acts, the developer who enables actions, and in cases of story-based narrative, the player-character whose actions drive forward the plot. For instance, players often distinguish between things they did and things their character did. When these agencies line up in agreement, a game is poetry in motion.
Not so much when they collide, as occurs in the puzzle platformer Ico, a game haunted by the agency quandary. The illusion of choice granted the player only survives so long as the player wishes to act according to the developer’s guidance, and when the player’s desire on how to act strays from this guidance, the illusion shatters beneath an unveiled deterministic game design. With the player’s actions largely being governed by the whims of the developer, player agency becomes something of a problem. Continue reading
Goodbye, cruel will: Determinism in videogames
[Originally published over yonder.]
Inside everybody’s head lives a tiny mad scientist who governs their actions and whims. Most of the time it’s barely noticeable, even to the point of feeling perfectly natural. Every now and again something might come along that makes a person question their actions and doubt their sense of self-efficacy, such as when a past decision that, at the time, felt entirely appropriate, but in reflection seems bizarre. Generally speaking, however, this little tyrant works away and the individual under its influence none the wiser.
The same is true of videogames. Typically when we play, we abstain from the realization that the virtual world around us is an entirely authoritarian environment. Everything therein is controlled by principles that dictate their nature, designed to suit a particular purpose, to a particular end. Virtual worlds are oppressive in the extent to which they attempt to control us. Jump here, shoot there, don’t go that way, clean your bedroom. In a world where everything that is not impossible is mandatory, to what extent do videogames simulate reality? Continue reading
