To clarify what I say in the article: I don’t mean you shouldn’t offer the player choice when it comes to a situation like that, even if the player is cast as the victim. I think you need to think about how the choices that you offer, the way they’re presented, and the mechanics that underlie them speak to your view of the subject and the story you’re trying to tell. So the problem is not that Kara’s story contains choices at all, but that they’re presented here as a multiple-choice test which the player can pass or fail based on making the “right choices.” This is a very common structure to use, it’s a structure that we use a lot in games, it works fine in a lot of situations, but I don’t think it’s appropriate here, which isn’t to say the only way you can do this is by offering the player no choice at all. You just have to do the research of figuring out how you match the agency you’re giving the player to the real agency of a person who lived that experience and then you have to think long and hard about how you build that, how you present that. Between the trailer and the interview there is zero indication that any understanding of this problem went into Detroit at all, but I’m absolutely not saying that you shouldn’t try, as a game designer, to give the player choices in a situation like this. I’m saying it’s a hard problem that we have no reason to think Cage has solved or even tried to solve. And yeah, you can’t necessarily come up with a solution that will please everyone or is criticism-proof, but what we saw from that trailer was blatantly not working.
What does a good representation of choice in a game from the perspective of a DV victim look like? I have no idea. To find out you’d have to pay me and several people like me to work for months. That’s the point, it’s a tough question that takes real work, research, iteration, and care to answer. I’m sure there are ways to navigate that but I wouldn’t even hazard a guess without a ton of preliminary work, and Sony just put out a trailer where they offer the answer, “use the same structure and choice mechanics we use in the rest of our sci-fi thriller game,” which is definitely not it.
One possible way of putting playing choice to such a situation is having the choices happen after the event. The event itself is done and over, but the character still needs to deal with the consequences. I think something like that could lead to an interesting game, although it’s not quite without its own potential problems.
At the very least, I don’t feel my reaction to that sort of scenario would be as bad as this one.
I’m not completely sure that’s true; it’s common in games with choices to have that pass/fail paragon/renegade red/blue split, but Cage seems to try to avoid that - Heavy Rain has enough flexibility to allow the story to both proceed, and to end, in quite different ways.
Some of the endings are clearly better for the characters than others but, partly because there are so many of them rather than just two, in story terms it always seemed to me that they’re equally valid, just different stories; they’re not a pass or a fail.
I would hope and expect that this scene in Detroit will be similar - you’ll make choices based on limited information and limited ability, and try to do whatever seems like the right thing at the time. Then explore what happens as a result. That worked in Heavy Rain because you could make a choice and still not know what the knock-on effect was for quite some time, if it ever became clear at all.
What I don’t expect is to get the narrative breaking “You failed, go back and try again” sort of thing that lots of games have.
Clearly, it’s possible to screw this up - if we get a CoD style “Press X to avoid abuse” then we’ve got a real problem. But it should be possible to do this well, and I’m glad someone’s trying, even if I’m not sure they’ll entirely succeed.
I think we might be saying similar things, actually. I still think the way Life Is Strange handled its particular case is good; it’s one of the early moments in the game that tell you it’s really something special.
I guess what I was trying to get across is that the author (who I see has subsequently commented in this thread!) seemed to be saying that the multiple-choice test as a way to determine whether Kara prevents the domestic abuse or not is problematic, and I remember feeling the same way about that specific situation in Life Is Strange.
But that doesn’t mean that I think that kind of multiple-choice test can’t work in a game, even with the subject matter is heavy; I was just trying to figure out for myself how to reconcile my appreciation of that scene in Life Is Strange with the idea that as a bystander, even a close one, you have limited ability to change someone else’s fate and that often there is no right answer, no magical set of choices you can make in the moment, that prevents that suicide. That said, I absolutely agree that harm reduction is important, and that the opposite extreme of disallowing player choice completely to reinforce that there was never anything you can do can also be a problematic stance, assuming the rest of the game is focused on player agency when it comes to shaping the story.
That’s not to say that I think the only two options are “choice” or “no choice,” though I think I’m in the same boat as Dias when I say that I don’t really know what a thoughtful alternative is in Detroit’s case. I do agree that Life Is Strange is a much more thoughtful example by underlining the significance of that one encounter, since it’s one of the very few times in the game your time powers are taken away from you, and the only time it happens spontaneously. If nothing else, it’s a marker that says to the player, “hey, this is meaningful, you should take this seriously,” in a way that Detroit trailer doesn’t. (It’s entirely possible the game WILL do the work necessary to respect the gravity of the situation; I think Cage’s work and thoughts in interviews points both to reasons why it might and reasons why it might not.)
Also, apologies if this particular discussion about Life Is Strange is dominating the thread, it is kind of tangential to the article’s main thesis. I’m happy to stop if needed!
I think Life is Strange gives us a good point to ground wider conversations about the topic (as there we have an actual known quantity, the text is available so it’s more than speculative discussion of a theoretical handling of a situation - one that also centres around a choice-driven/branching game with heavy topics).
I don’t necessarily agree that by making things interactive you send a message about being an active participant or creating the notion that “you could have stopped this” that bleeds in to real life. I think, by and large, most people are able to realize that the game has control far more than they do and they simply can’t impact the story however they see fit. Even in games where you can change the overall resolution, I rarely feel like I had any particular agency in that change as much as I just happened to ace my multiple choice test. Lots of games have absolutely awful “romance” interactions which essentially boil down to press reward button until sex, I don’t think that most people walk away from these experiences thinking that’s how actual relationships work.
A big part of the problem is that video games cost so much more to produce than film or TV, you can’t just rent a set and pay some actors. If you want to have a scene in a living room, you’ve got to model the entire living room from scratch. With that much effort needed for everything, it’s no surprise that AAA games take narrative short cuts, laying the groundwork is prohibitively expensive. Making these characters deep and nuanced costs a lot more than making them an obvious monster and threat.
Indeed. And as well as the text itself, we know quite a lot about how people responded to it.
Some people did treat that scene as a pass/fail mechanic, and either looked up guides to get the ‘right’ answers or savescummed it to get the equivalent of not losing Max’s powers. Other people played it straight, and just dealt with it, which was IMO the better approach. I played it through once, did my best, but my Kate died and she stayed dead. I felt bad about it, but that was the(/my) story.
It would have lost all its emotional impact and, I imagine, would have felt like a fairly distasteful subject for a ‘game’ if you approached it as a pas/fail test of skill like scoring or missing a goal. I’m not sure that’s fixable other than by people getting used to not treating narratives that way.
This still effectively the same in practice because it decides how good or bad an ending is. Visual novels do the exact same stuff. It’s an idea that can be done well, and has been done well (even inverted into meta-narrative in 999), but those sorts of stories tend to stick to more universally understood concepts and drama. Live or die, kill or be killed, not abuse. The reality and fallout of that is far more emotionally complex during and after, a simple choice isn’t really enough to tackle that subject matter well (I suppose framing the choice a certain way could work, like not making it clear to the player what the choice entails fully to reveal something about the player character and make them a separate entity from the player, which Lisa and Undertale both pull to great success, but David Cage clearly isn’t as thoughtful as the writer for those games).
This is almost a tangential point to the rest of this comment, but this line stuck out to me. Because you’re right, really- Detroit & Heavy Rain seem predicated on this ‘exploration of the choice you made’ thing, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. As others noted, it’s a super common structure in visual novels, for example.
The reason Detroit rubs me the wrong way (& why I agree with the OP) is that this isn’t a scenario where there is a ‘good enough answer’, I don’t think. And I don’t think even David Cage himself thinks that- the scene was presented as a pretty clear pass/fail sequence. Pass means you stop the dad from abusing the girl, fail means the girl falls to further harm.
Because that’s the crux of the whole problem. Cage wants to have his cake & eat it too, in that he wants a game with multiple choice-branches but ALSO a game that talks about a rather simple moralistic quandary. You have the ‘choice’ to act in savior to a girl who’s being abused by her father, or… not. From what we’ve seen of the scene, there is a clear ‘right way’ to play it.
…which is sort of my entire issue with Cage on many levels. He’s obsessed with ‘not saying things’ but structures Detroit clearly in a way that is saying something: ‘child abuse is bad’, ‘violent revolutions cause unnecessary collateral damage’, ‘policing works’. These are all messages communicated in the trailers alone.
yeah like, that’s the big thing for me here. between choice-driven narrative or linear narrative there ultimately isn’t a “better” choice for tackling sensitive matter in a videogame, but Cage will take both and fuck up with both of them because he doesn’t want to take a stance on anything and doesn’t realize that he’s stumbling into taking a lot of stances by doing so.
This is why I find the first season of Telltale’s Walking Dead series to be leaps and bounds better than anything they’ve ever done since. Aside from a small handful of moments, choices don’t affect the actual course of the story but change the framing in key scenes.
You can’t save Larry in episode 2 but the way you handle their death changes how certain characters regard your sense of judgment. Ben will always die no matter what, but keeping them alive longer changes the redemptive arc of another character in a small way. You’ll always have to deal with The Stranger at the end, but your choices throughout the season can make the scene either about Lee facing up to their selfishness, or the vehicle for a broken person to try to project their guilt onto.
Story-altering choices like those in season 2, or in games like Heavy Rain, have little-to-no narrative weight and exist solely so that the player gets to feel more like an active participant. It’s the difference between a game with one slightly variable cohesive story, and a game with a dozen permutations of middling stories.
Absolutely killer discussion here. I’m new to this discourse dot zone, but there’s way more thought going into these posts than I’ve come to expect from gaming forums/communities. I’m blown away by how the takes aren’t hot so much as meaty!
Regardless of where I sit and how I feel about this trailer or Cage’s stories, as a designer I can’t help but try to focus on what I’d do differently to try and deliver the best player experience possible.
What kind of IMPLIED choice structure, (given we’re getting a taste and not the actual experience) do people think would help their preview of this scene make us say “I want to play this” instead of “I don’t trust this”?
Silly to ask without an example, an attempt, so what if the trailer implied that the victims of this abuse would be harmed regardless of player input, and the choice was focused instead on how to deal with the abuser in the aftermath? All these “break through your programming to try and help” interactions imply a certain almost video gamey kind of agency, but this makes me wonder what Cage is more concerned about the player feeling; A sense of disappointment that they didn’t get to save the day, or a sense of what it actually feels like to be “programmed” by society to be exposed to abuse.
Great article and I agree with the overall sentiment. Based on his previous work and the on the nose marketing for Detroit, I don’t think Cage has it in him as a creator to handle this with the subtlety it requires. I want to be proven wrong and I hope that Detroit deals with these topics sensitively but I worry that he’s going to fall into his old tropes and pitfalls as a creator.
There should really be a What Did French Ken Levine Do This Time dot Com single-serving site. Anyway, any remaining confidence in Detroit seems to be evaporating as we approach release and Cage keeps failing to really engage with anything (currently: criticism of studio culture).
If nothing else, I guess it’s pretty consistent with the picture that has been painted of David Cage over the last few years. He is so utterly caught up in his own hype that he has become impossible to talk to about not just his games and the critcisms there of, but also the world in general. That this somehow also spilled over into his professional life and turned into horrible working conditions probably shouldn’t surprise me but it is sad and disgusting none the less.
