Drama vs. Freedom

by Metacod

What if, in The Matrix, Neo chose the blue pill?

What if, in The Shawshank Redemption, Andy decided not to befriend Red?

The answer to both questions is obvious: you wouldn't have a very good story. Few people have the combination of compassion and cunning found in Shawshank's Andy. If an average viewer of the movie were given control of the protagonist, they would probably have less of a long-term vision. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you would end up with a dull story of a man's life in prison, one without the drama or uplifting conclusion intended for the movie. The Matrix example is not as radical in terms of unlikeliness, since there are only two choices involved, but many people would still decide to take the blue pill and go on with their lives, and there would be none of the allegorical plotting or dazzling, unearthly action that followed in the movie we know.

Let's digress for a moment to look at ourselves. Our lives—or at least those of most of us—are extremely boring. Days, even weeks pass by without a single emotionally powerful event. The few of us who do have roller-coaster lives probably wish they could experience that drama through entertainment instead, where nothing has real-world consequences. The reason why our day-to-day existence is so uninteresting is simple: freedom. Events occur as the result of countless separate wills, each struggling towards a different goal without a clear understanding of the territory they'll have to cross to get there. There's no omniscient writer designing each word spoken and action performed for maximum impact; there are only the creatures of the world, trying their best to make their lives as interesting and pleasant to them as possible despite their extremely limited viewpoints.

A novel is the exact opposite. Everything is crafted by a single person to enthrall, entertain, and intellectually stimulate the target audience. Every event happens for a reason. While good writers make their characters act using only their limited knowledge of the situation, that situation and even the characters themselves are designed so that the story will play out in the most interesting way possible. There's absolutely no freedom involved, but there's plenty of drama.

The more freedom, the less drama. Where is this rule most important? In the world of video games, of course.

A video game cannot and should not ever be a novel. The point of creating a video game, and the very quality that makes something a video game, is freedom. The difference between video games and film—the closest medium in terms of sensory presentation—is that a video game can take input from the viewer. If one wanted to tell a story without any interaction, one would probably not create a video game. So there always has to be freedom in games.

But what if you do want to tell a story in a video game, or just create a video game that has a story? Freedom in stories is obviously a fun concept. Instead of just watching a fictional, fantastic universe, you can actually be part of that universe. But the inverse relationship of freedom and drama still applies.

Many storytellers of the gaming world—especially in the console RPG genre—have solved this problem by using a sort of false freedom. In each gameplay segment, the player either reaches to the next story segment alive or dies and attempts the segment again. These gameplay segments aren't freedom to change the interesting parts of the story; they're only freedom to either successfully complete a minor task in the story the way it was intended to be completed or to die and try again. There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, as long as both the gameplay and the story segments are entertaining. But sometimes games that use it make me ask, "If the developers' goal is to tell a story, and the gameplay is there just because of the expectations of the medium rather than for anything it adds to the story, why have it at all? Why not just make a movie?"

Some games take a different route and have a story, but allow a lot of freedom to change that story. After hearing me repeat the same ideas so many times, it should be pretty obvious what I think of these. Even if the plot variation is as small as multiple endings, the story still loses something. If The Shawshank Redemption was a game with multiple endings based on choices the player made early on (like the example I presented earlier), would most of the endings be anywhere near as powerful as the one the writers chose for the movie? And allowing the player to change more about the story's course means that there's less chance that the story will go somewhere interesting, somewhere a writer would have sent it. More freedom, less drama.

I remember the first few days I played the classic Mac game Escape Velocity. I loved it, but not because of any great story being told or any visceral thrill I got from the gameplay. I enjoyed the experience because of how complete and how real the game's world felt. I wasn't pressing keys on a keyboard to ultimately increase a game variable that would allow me to alter another game variable; I was being a shuttlecraft pilot in the far future, doing trade missions to get enough credits to buy a more powerful ship. Freedom in plots can be a very fun thing. But it should be limited to entertainment completely based on it, like Escape Velocity. When mixed with an attempt to tell a good story, rather than just a free one, the only thing that can occur is a conflict between the unwitting will of the limited-perspective player and the linear plotting of the omniscient writer. The more the player is allowed to choose what path the plot takes, the less chance that the plot will take a path like the one the writer wants, or even a path worth taking. The more freedom, the less drama.