Why I don't like choice in video games, usually

You’ve seen me talking about how much choice, adventure, and freedom you have in pen and paper role-playing games and how much I love it. You’ve seen me saying that in a pen and paper role-playing game, I love being able to figure out a way out myself without being constrained to what the game master has thought up. I like having the freedom to move away from the storyline and make my own way around the game world. These are the prime reasons that I love playing in pen and paper games and why I much prefer it over game mastering. An example of not being constrained, you ask? Well, I was playing in a Star Wars game back in October, and my party and I were trying to disable an anti-air battery so the Republic could land its ships on the planet and take it in the Clone Wars. We arrived at the anti-air emplacement and knocked out its shields by driving a speeder bike into it. This set off major alarms, but we managed to get into the base and start placing explosives. This is when trouble started. The alarms caused Separatist reinforcements to show up, including a AAT, and we were pinned down. We couldn’t get out, and we had bombs ticking.  My character wasn’t going to go out with a bang, at least not in that way. I was playing a Cerean Officer named Ke-ali, and he wasn’t the best at fighting, or flying, or slicing. What he was good at was talking. He had a silver tongue, and he was able to talk himself out of a lot. He was also a quick thinker–a very smart and quick-witted man. He was an officer in the army, and he got there by wit and guile, not physical ability. He’d thought his way out of bigger fixes than this, and by gum, he was going to think his way out of this one.

Where was I?
Oh.
Blaster bolts were fizzling past our heads, and our team’s clone commando went down. That was one of our 6 dead, and we only had two minutes to get out of the base before it blew, and there was no way we were going to fight our way out of this. Our Jedi was doing his best to hold them back, and our mechanic to get the bombs shut down. The slicer, Lillia, and I were trying our best to think of a way out of it.
“What about an EMP?” Ke-ali said to Lillia
“An EMP? Is that do-able?”
Our GM looked stumped. I explained to him how an EMP worked. If you funnel enough energy into a location, it can cause an electromagnetic pulse, which doesn’t hurt people, but does hurt machines. How is that helpful, you ask? How does hurting machines stop you from dying at this point? Well, dear reader, I’m fairly certain you’ve seen Episodes 1, 2 and 3 of Star Wars, and I’m willing to bet you remember the droids. That’s right, droids. And droids are machines. Droids are what the Separatists fought with. On the right train of thought now? Proud of you.
That’s right, we were going to use an EMP to bring down the droid armies. Our GM hadn’t thought of it, and it was an unorthodox approach, but he nodded. “Okay… let’s roll some dice and see what happens.”
We rolled some dice, and the slicer managed to direct all the power from the anti-air base into it’s satellite dish, causing an electromagnetic pulse to go off and defeat all the droids. It also defused the explosives, but we had more to set, meaning we accomplished our goal, and the session ended with a bang.
What you see here is players taking advantage of the flexibility and openness of a pen and paper role-playing game and using their own imaginations to create their own solutions. The true thrill of pen and paper role-playing games is not being rail-roaded (explicitly directed) into a decision, and being able to solve any problem your own way.
That can’t happen in video games.
Here’s why that’s the case: Because of the nature of the medium, every solution to a problem has to be thought of by the devs, at least in a role-playing game, which is what I’m talking about here (Kerbal Space Program fans, do whatever you want, it’ll work eventually), and then coded in. When you played Dragon Age, every single solution was hard-coded into the game, and scripts were written, and art assets made. Having that so fundamentally ingrained into a game limits what you can do with it. An old pen and paper adage is that you can’t account for player creativity, and the world of modded games speaks to that. There are mods of the Elder Scrolls games that Bethesda couldn’t have accounted for in a million years, and that is the same idea here. You can’t account for creativity when making a game. That’s why one of the biggest tips to game mastering is to be prepared for your best laid plans to go to waste, as shown in the example above.
In Oblivion for example, in the Dark Brotherhood quests, if the developers hadn’t decided to let me poison a mark, I couldn’t poison him, that’s the end of story. To me, that’s the major issue with video game role-playing games. I’m not saying that I don’t like role-playing games that are computer-based. In fact, The Witcher 2 is one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time.
And that might be why I prefer linear games in general. When playing a game like Skyrim, Oblivion, or Fallout, I get easily distracted, and it’s easy for me to lose direction. I’ve always thought that it’s because there’s too much choice, and I can’t decide on one thing to do. That’s definitely part of it, but now I think that it’s also got to do with the fact that whatever I choose to do is already been predefined, at least in terms of in-game content. I’m going to get tweets and emails saying “But in Skyrim, you can play as whatever character you choose, and set your own goals and everything.” I know that. What I’m saying is that it feels like I’m simply watching a story or playing a choose-your-own adventure book. It’s hard for me to immerse myself when no decision is truly my decision. Linear games don’t make you do that. They, generally, although recently it’s been on the rise, don’t force you to make a decision, and if they do, they don’t do it in the pretense that it’s a decision you’re making for yourself.
Now that I mention it, I think I can say why I like The Witcher 2 over games like Skyrim, too. It’s not a linear game, but it does follow a story. Decisions you make change that story, and it evolves around choices that Geralt, the main character of the Witcher series, makes. The same is true of Alpha Protocol. And for me, it works because they’re written characters. There’s no identity that I have to put into the characters, and because they have none of my identity, having the choices written out  for me makes sense. Because a character I play in Oblivion has my personality, he would make decisions that I want him to make, but he can’t. And that’s what throws me for immersion, and what, I believe, ultimately stops me from having as much fun in an open-world game as other people do.

Final Blog Portfolio

Coverage:

Film Adaptation of Oleanna

Masks In Hedda and A Streetcar Named Desire

The Allusion of Oleanna

Themes and Motifs Of Oleanna

Hedda Gabler Essay Analysis

Depth:

Hedda Gabler Essay Analysis

In this post, I analyse a critical essay written about Hedda Gabler, and critique how it analyses the play. 

Interaction:

Film Adaptation of Oleanna

In this post, I counteract what Gautam says about the film adaptation of Oleanna failing.

Xenoblogging:

Theme in Oleanna (Gautam's Blog)

In this post, I disagree with the way that Gautam thinks theme is conveyed in Oleanna, and I challenge it.

Discussion:

Masks In Hedda and A Streetcar Named Desire

In this post, I agree with a comment made by Ms. Morgan, and I expand upon it.

Wild Card:

Loss

I don't really know how to explain this post. Just that something terrible happened to me last night, and that I had to write this out. Just so that I could cope with it a little more. 

Loss

Loss

I loved you.

You loved me.

Wait...did you?

You say you did..

But now... now you tell me you aren't happy.

You're not happy....with me.

You say that you are happy with me. Just not....WITH me.

I understand. You say we can be friends.

I say we are friends. I say that you are my best friend.

You agree. You say that being in a relationship doesn't make you happy.

But...you told me I did.

You...lied to me.

I promised you I would never leave.

But you took that choice away from me.

You say that you don't want to lose me.

But I can tell that I've already lost you.

I still love you.

And I hope, you still love me.

Oleanna Adapted To A Film

This last week in class, we watched the Oleanna film adaptation, and I'll be the first to say that I loved it. To be quite frank, I really hated the play. I found that the weird pacing and the constant interruptions bugged me, and that I couldn't get the tone from the text. I did enjoy some of the themes, but the fact that it was all dialogue made it too hard to visualise in my mind.

This all changed when I watched the film. Firstly, I think that the two actors played the characters of John and Carol really well. William H. Macy, the man who played John, is a personal favourite of mine (he's played parts in some of my favourite films) and while it scared me the role that he played in this, I think he did a fantastic job in portraying John. I believe that the actress that played Carol did a phenomenal job of portraying Carol, even if she did make me hate her, even more.

The fact that this was a film helped to change the fact that I couldn't visualise anything. By having the room shown to me, I was able to build a spacial dynamic between the characters, something that the play gave me no opportunity to do. The same worked for me, in the change of the clothes, and the way that Carol stood, which helped me identify the power shift a lot more easily. The disheveled appearance of John as the play moves on also helped with this.

However, the biggest shift from the play was with pacing. Having the two people actually saying the lines, and making it seem like a real conversation, instead of just voices in my head, made the dialogue flow in a much more effective way, and I really enjoyed it, this time around.

One of my classmates, Gautam, says in his blog, that the end of the film is a failure, because it slightly changes the ending of the play. I could not disagree with him more. The play and the film are not supposed to be direct adaptations. The role of the film, and the play, is to appear to the audience as something interesting to watch, not to translate 100%. By changing the end slightly, they have insured that the audience will think about the ending a lot more, because it creates a more open ending.You can read Gautam's entry here. Gautam's Blog

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I enjoyed the film a lot more than I did the play, because it made sense to me in the film medium.

Mask In Streetcar and Hedda

In the plays "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams, and "Hedda Gabler" by Henrik Ibsen, we see masks used as tools to characterise the two protagonists, Blanche and Hedda, respectively. Both of these characters have come from lives that require them to be something that they are not. Blanche feels the need to portray herself as a much younger woman than she, so that she can feel accepted by the others. Hedda was pressured into being a son to her father, and she now uses that pressure as her mask, to make it appear as if she is a different person than she actually is. In both of these books, masks are used to help portray the pressures that society is putting on the characters, and how they deal with it. This is done through characterisation and through imagery.

Blanche uses the mask of her youthful dressing to hide her true self from Stanley and from Mitch.

Hedda uses the mask of her male upbringing to hide herself away from the pressures of being a woman in late 1800's Norway.

The Allusion of Oleanna

The tile of Oleanna alludes to the fact a 19th centurary utopian society named Oleana. This utopian society was in Pennsylvania, and was named after its Norwegian founder, Ole Bull, and his mother Anna.

In 1852, after a successful musical tour of the US, Ole Bull wanted to leave his mark in America . He bought 11,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania for Norwegian immigrants to settle. On this land, four main fiefdoms were developed, one of which was named Oleana. People flooded in, excited about the new, free land. The land was located in a valley between thick forests and they quickly realized the land was not suitable for farming. The community failed. By the middle of the 1850s the colonists all returned home or settled elsewhere in America .

I believe that this is an allusion to the fact that Carol is so obsessed with overthrowing the chains of oppression, even though they don't actually exist in this play.  A song was added at the end of the play, as an epigraph, which critiques the life in Norway, and was written to show the idealism felt by Carol in the play as well.

Again, I believe that it talks about how "grass is always greener" on the other side, and is used ironically here, to show how insane Carol is when she wants to try and find something more from the help that her teacher is giving her.

Themes and Motifs of Oleanna

In Oleanna, we see a couple of prevalent themes. These themes are all shown directly through the conversation, and carry a lot of weight, especially in today's society. These themes are as follows:

Communication:

The majority of this play is about the use of communication, and how it changes our perception of somebody, and our actions towards them. In Oleanna, communication plays a massive role in the pacing and setting of the scene. It doesn't work as well in the textual version of the play, as you don't have the same effect while reading it, but the use of interruption is one major role in this. Whenever John speaks to Carol, and as he is about to drive down a point, he is interrupted. Other examples of communication also include the teacher/student dynamic, the use of power in communication, which is shown through John abusing his power at the beginning, the use of ghost characters, and Carol's reliance on "the group" to put words in her mouth. Body language and intention also play a heavy role in the play, as they shape Carol's actions towards John in the second and third act.

Political Correctness:

Oleanna is very critical of the air of political correctness that was around in the 1990's. In this play, we see Carol feeling threatened by John, and she turns to her group, who I believe are a feminist activist group, for advice. They advise her that he is raping and assaulting her, even though he hasn't done anything that's anything like that. This makes the political correctness movement absurd, and points out the ability to misuse it for revenge or nefarious ends.