Choices at Play
An interactive story editor examines how in-game tensions between story and play teach us about real world agency.
By Sara Holston
What do Latin riddles, turn-based tactics simulators with role-playing narrative elements, sprawling fantasy adventures, and choose-your-own-adventure novels all have in common? Probably a few things, but most significantly, they all feature elements of both story and play. Riddles, as Nick Montforth argues, mark one of the earliest forms of literary games, “presenting a metaphorical system that the listener or reader must inhabit and figure out to fully experience.” Fire Emblem is a series of tactical role-playing games, in which players move units across a grid-based map to complete an objective. These units are also fully fleshed-out characters that interact with each other and with the player in the course of a largely linear narrative. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an open world experience, in which players can largely go anywhere they want and much of the appeal consists of exploring the in-game world. As they explore, players come upon numerous quests and storylines they can bounce between at will. Choose-your-own adventure novels are, of course, stories (of all genres, types, and formats) where the player chooses which pathways to follow, leading to multiple possible endings.
The extensive history of play and story appearing side-by-side shouldn’t surprise us. After all, we’ve long understood narrative to be an essential part of what makes us human. From cave drawings to Jesus’s parables to written literature to film, we’ve been telling each other stories—and experiencing their immense power—for as long as we have existed as humans. And now, the comparatively recent advent of game studies is revealing that play is also deeply ingrained in us. It is an instinct we have as children to engage with the world, and characterizes most of our earliest learning. More and more research is showing that, even as adults, our brains are designed to respond powerfully to reward systems and to the “flow states,” or periods of intense focus, that many games help us achieve. The resulting power of “gamification” is increasingly being applied to even the most mundane activities to improve motivation and engagement, or to help lessons and information stick.
By nature, both story and play offer us a space—removed from our day to day reality—to engage with ideas and explore possibilities before encountering them in real life. The frameworks they provide are directly relevant to how we think about navigating our own world. George MacIntyre wrote, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” Engaging fictional narratives in a variety of media helps us recognize those real-world stories around us, and prompts us to imagine our role within them. The interactivity of play introduces a unique opportunity to practice answering the “What am I to do?” part. The act of play in a game with narrative elements simulates real-life experiences and puts us in positions to make choices that affect the world of the game, allowing us to see how our actions change the story around us.
Today, newer evolutions in interactive fiction incorporate significantly more advanced technology, but they still operate on the same format of narrative-with-interactive-elements.
It’s no surprise, then, that “interactive fiction” was not only one of the earliest forms of digital gaming, but is still one of the most prevalent today. Interactive fiction began as computer games in which players engaged with a narrative world through short verbal commands, receiving feedback in the form of narration about the effects of their decisions as they worked to solve puzzles and/or progress the story. Take, for example, “An Act of Murder,” published to a digital interactive fiction archive by Christopher Huang in 2007. Described as “a classic country-house mystery,” the central puzzle—and central story—requires the player to figure out whodunnit. The game opens with the description:
You are standing on the front drive of Gull Point, residence of noted theatrical patron Frederic Sheppard. The house, a rambling old place, stands to the south.
Beside the front doors, the large doorbell button gleams amber in the moonlight.
You can also see a red Triumph Roadster, a blue Austin and a green Morris Saloon here.
And there the description stops, until the player decides his or her next course of action. If, say, the player enters the command “ring doorbell,” the story progresses inside the house:
You ring the doorbell. Somewhere deep in the recesses of the house, pleasant chimes announce your arrival. A moment later, the front door swings open…
From there, players have a limited number of turns to investigate clues and question witnesses. There are no visuals, merely the narration and dialogue progressing the scenes in response to the player’s actions.
Today, newer evolutions in interactive fiction incorporate significantly more advanced technology, but they still operate on the same format of narrative-with-interactive-elements. I work in one of these contemporary forms—an interactive story game called Episode. Stories on Episode look like a cross between a film and an animated comic book, but structurally, they read more like choose-your-own-adventure novels; the story progresses in a generally linear fashion between moments of player choice, sprinkled throughout.
Despite the reality that both play and story are essential parts of these experiences, many critics and players tend to view them as inherently opposed, and the relationship between player and game-maker—or, in my case, editor—as a constant tug-of-war. The more players are given the power to make choices that meaningfully affect the narrative, the less control I have over the story. If I want to maintain a linear progression that hits all the beats I need to hit, I must severely limit the impact of the player’s choices on the plot.
Proponents of this idea are not entirely wrong; most linear stories in the interactive gaming space follow a clear and immutable narrative arc. A player’s choices might alter the events of a single scene—so long as certain important plot points still occur—but on the whole, the story is going to follow a predetermined path. Interactive story game-makers have had to get creative about how we define a meaningful choice, and we’ve invented a few different kinds to provide varying types and degrees of agency. Writing multiple endings is considered the best way to make a player’s choices powerful. Allowing a player to branch off the main story thread for some sufficient, but ultimately finite, amount of time is another way to give choices some weight. But what about giving the player decision points that define the tone of an otherwise aggressively linear narrative structure? In this framework, the story beats remain the same, but the player decides whether her character is bold, nervous, happy, or angry—and these choices color her experience of the story.
Picture this: your character is walking across the cafeteria when she is tripped by her rival, the school’s Queen Bee. Her lunch goes flying, and suddenly everyone is watching as the mean girls pretend, mockingly, that it was an accident. A choice appears: will you stammer an excuse and run, roll your eyes and move on, or call her out and storm off? Whatever you decide, your character will leave the room while the Queen Bee continues to insult her. After all, we need to establish your character as the underdog to the Queen Bee’s reign of terror. But your decision transforms the scene all the same; one branch sets up a tale of a reserved girl finding her voice and standing up to her bullies, another introduces a confident misfit going toe to toe with her rival.
When players realize that the gameplay and narrative elements don’t line up with their philosophy, it interferes with the feeling of losing oneself in a game.
This tension between story and gameplay is not unique to Episode. The phenomenon has been documented and discussed across the world of digital gaming, where the conflict extends beyond simple player agency and narrative control. Some games fall prey to what has been dubbed “ludonarrative dissonance,” a specific instantiation of this tension where the mechanics of the game tell the player one thing, while the story tells them another. It’s usually considered a weakness in the game–a moment when the flow state comes to a screeching halt over the confusion of the disconnect.
The best example I’ve seen of the issue is in the Grand Theft Auto games. The series, though incredibly popular, has received criticism for its perceived glorification of illegal and violent behaviors—if you’ve ever heard the debate about whether violence in video games is damaging to children, Grand Theft Auto comes up almost every time. In my digital gaming course in college, we ended up spending an entire week’s worth of classes arguing over whether the series constitutes a social critique; is the point of the game to call attention to those very complaints, and demonstrate the reprehensible nature of such behavior? Maybe, but it seems to me that viewing the franchise through such a lens raises the ludonarrative dissonance issue.
Take a scene in which the player needs to hire a new member to their crew for a heist. A few candidates are offered, with a brief explanation about their strengths and how much it will cost to hire them. The magnitude of your mission reward depends on striking the right balance of both; a cheap, incompetent character may mean the job is less successful, while a skilled but expensive character may take a huge chunk of the payout. Of the only female candidate, the player is told she’ll work for less than she’s worth. And therein lies our conflict: if the story of Grand Theft Auto is meant as a social critique, presumably it’s attempting to call out the practice of taking advantage of people by not paying them what they deserve, simply because you can get away with it. But the way the gameplay works, all the incentives are for the player to ensure a higher reward at the end of the mission by taking advantage of the female driver. The mechanics of the game say that the behavior is beneficial and strategic, even if we’re trying to read the opposite message from the story.
Usually, ludonarrative dissonance jars players out of the immersive experience. When players realize that the gameplay and narrative elements don’t line up with their philosophy—or even with each other—it interferes with the feeling of losing oneself in a game. But perhaps the tension can serve a more productive purpose.
Just as developers can use ludonarrative dissonance to enhance player engagement, there are times when fearing it can actually lead to even bigger problems of empty story choices.
One of my go-to game franchises is Fire Emblem, and my favorite chapter of any entry is Chapter 10 of Fire Emblem: Awakening. When it was released, Awakening was supposed to be the last game in the series. The franchise had largely died out, and the plan was to release one final swan song before letting the title go. The developers threw all the blue-sky ideas they’d never gotten to try into Awakening, and while most of the bigger new mechanics get more attention—from players and critics alike—I’ve always felt that the conceit behind Chapter 10 must have been one of these risky dreams the developers weren’t really sure would work.
Major spoiler alert: in the preceding Chapter 9, the player’s army raced to rescue Emmeryn—queen of their kingdom and older sister of protagonist Chrom—from being killed by the evil King Gangrel. The player’s army arrives just too late, and Gangrel issues Chrom an ultimatum: surrender, or watch his sister die. To save Chrom from this impossible choice, Emmeryn, a champion of peace and redemption, sacrifices herself in an attempt to demonstrate that war will only lead to more violence, but even one selfless act can affect profound change.
At the beginning of Chapter 10, we see that Emmeryn’s gambit has worked. The enemies are discouraged (or, perhaps, inspired) and wish to throw down their weapons and go home. But their commander doesn’t have that luxury. To protect him from the retaliation of their notoriously wrathful king, his soldiers choose to stay and fight on his behalf, saying they have found their motivation in “a cause worth fighting for, one [they] believe in: loyalty to [their] general.” These are the enemies the player must defeat in order to escape to safety. By showing the player these scenes, the game’s story engenders empathy on behalf of the enemies—right before throwing the player into a level where the only way out is to fight through these soldiers and defeat (read: kill) their commander.
But the dissonance doesn’t stop there. Under the hood, the gameplay mechanics twist the knife; with each successive turn the enemies’ stats drop, while the critical hit rates for the units in the player’s army spike. The result is that the longer the level goes on, the quicker and easier the player’s characters are mowing down enemy units with stunningly powerful attacks.
On one hand, this is a beautiful example of mechanics and story aligning. It makes sense that the enemy soldiers, who don’t want to be here in the first place, are increasingly demoralized as the fight goes on. Their stats plummet accordingly. Meanwhile, the characters in the player’s army have just seen their beloved queen die, and they believe they face an enemy force who would happily capture and kill them, too. They are desperate and distraught, and their attacks grow more wild and powerful as they fight their way free. The overall impact on the player, however—at least for me—is a hollow feeling. I know the enemies aren’t fighting out of anger or hatred, but my character in the story does not. The narrative gives me plenty of reasons to wish I didn’t have to kill all these people, but the gameplay requires me to do so in order to progress. The mechanics and battle animations that are usually fun and exciting become instead tinged with sadness and regret.
I think that dissonance is exactly the point, and what makes the chapter so compelling. The games in the Fire Emblem series are built on simulating a war—even if it is always a war for noble causes—and levels typically involve defeating and killing hoards of enemy soldiers. Chapter 10 of Awakening challenges this concept from both a story and gameplay angle, intentionally drawing players out of the strictly immersive experience—while maintaining a strong emotional hook—and asking them to reflect on the themes and experiences of the franchise as a whole. In this case, the ludonarrative dissonance is not a flaw, but a tool, and one that ultimately made me feel like my choices were much more important. There was no strict time limit on the chapter, but should I try to complete it more quickly to avoid killing as many enemies as possible? If so, which moves will get me to the end fastest, rather than wasting turns and forcing me to fight more reinforcements? By raising such questions and giving them emotional weight, the game engaged me more fully by adding additional stakes to every move.
And just as developers can use ludonarrative dissonance to enhance player engagement, there are times when fearing it can actually lead to even bigger problems of empty story choices. Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim attempts to avoid moments of ludonarrative dissonance by getting rid of thematic railroads. With only the basic background of a story, but no moral underpinning or intention to drive towards any particular resolution, the game frees players to do anything they want without fear of derailing the narrative. Any judgment call the player makes is right, which means, in the end, none of the choices feel particularly meaningful.
Strategically limiting our in-game choices—and making us feel and reflect on the tension of that restriction—can ultimately prepare us to better navigate our real-world agency.
For example, in the sidequest “In My Time of Need,” players are presented two sides of a story: a woman named Saadia claims that she is a noblewoman fleeing persecution for speaking out against a fascist order, while her pursuers accuse her of betraying her city to its destruction. Saadia wants you to get rid of the people hunting her; they want you to help bring her to justice. At the end of the day, players can choose either side for a 500 coin reward, or play both sides, killing everyone and looting their bodies for the full 1000 coins. Nowhere in Skyrim does there seem to be a particular moral theme or message that would suggest the latter option is wrong (or right), and the game never makes it clear which version of the story is true. It simply allows players to make their decision, and then never again references their choice or any consequences and effects.
Players have absolute agency in the case of Saadia and her pursuers. From choosing a side, to playing both, to walking away and never resolving the issue at all, players can take just about any course of action they could dream of. But whatever choice they make is ultimately meaningless; there’s no real story, so there were never any real stakes. The player will never feel satisfaction that she rescued an innocent woman, or guilt that she helped a traitor escape justice.
Perhaps Skyrim’s ambiguity on the true story reflects reality—most of us don’t have all the information every time we make an important decision—but in the context of the game, it’s the lack of payoff that makes the choices feel less engaging. Like other narrative media, games are a space for us to explore possibilities without concern about the ramifications, and the interactivity inherent to the medium amplifies the way we pour bits of ourselves into the game world, and take pieces of it with us in turn. We aren’t just experiencing vicariously through the characters, we are in the driver’s seat to try out ideas and actions we might not in real life, and any consequences disappear when we turn the game off. This is important, because in the real world we can’t escape the consequences of our choices—and we wouldn’t want to. We want our choices to be and feel meaningful, and we want to prepare ourselves to make the best ones we can. Getting to experience the full weight of our in-game decisions is a key part of this process.
We rarely make decisions in the moment the choice is presented to us; what we decide to do is the result of many decisions we’ve made up until that point. What values have we committed ourselves to? What are we willing to sacrifice to uphold them? What do we want most, and how far are we willing to go to get it? The experience of playing a narrative game inherently puts us in a position to consider questions like these, and, if we find we don’t like where our resulting choices take us, to reconsider our answers. And while the immersion of playing a game is a powerful tool for creating these opportunities, ludonarrative dissonance and other moments of tension between story and play can—when used correctly—help us take a step back and reflect more consciously on the weight of our in-game choices.
This self-awareness offers us another perspective on our agency as real-world actors. I am unlikely to ever really be in a position of having to fight my way through reluctant soldiers to escape from an enemy kingdom, but I often find myself wrestling with overwhelming emotions brought on by the actions of others, and it is so easy to forget—or ignore—that they, too, may be trying to muddle their way through hard choices complicated by difficult emotions. Awakening’s Chapter 10 didn’t just allow me to experience the feelings brought on by taking one course of action through this issue, it challenged me to question why I felt that way, and whether a different path could have led to a better outcome. In the world of the game, there may not have been any other direction to go, but in the real world we are usually less constrained in our decision making. Strategically limiting our in-game choices—and making us feel and reflect on the tension of that restriction—can ultimately prepare us to better navigate our real-world agency.
Sara Holston is an editor on an interactive story game in San Francisco, CA.