At End of Road

"Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity." - Lester Bangs

Videogames get a bad rap.

Take, for instance, this recent study, which claims that videogames are responsible for declining attendance at national parks. Putting aside the fact that national parks tend to be in places like South Dakota (and I don't have a car, even if I wanted to drive to South Dakota)—how exactly does one go about proving this correlation?¹

And this grievance is mild compared to the accusations hurled at videogames in recent years: angry mothers and aged politicians go on high-visibility media tirades against games every week, it seems. I'm not going to use this forum to argue against those accusations, because I (like many of the people who make the accusations) have no idea as to their validity.

What I'd like to talk about instead is agency.

* * *

In philosophy, an agent is a person who can take action. The term is usually used in the context of ethics, i.e., a moral agent, someone who is free and rational to make choices, and is responsible for the effects of those choices. A person who can choose to go to a national park, or to commit a murder, is a moral agent. This person has agency.

Studies that claim videogames affect our behavior suggest that games interfere with our ability to make free, rational choices—that, because of the game, we're less able to visit the park, that we no longer have any choice but to commit the murder.

* * *

Lately, I'm playing a game called Hitman, and the sole object of the game is to commit murder. You, the agent ("Agent 47"), are hired to kill a succession of strangers (who neither attack you nor even know you) for money. How you kill these people is left up to you—you are a free agent—but you are rewarded for executing them in ways that are particularly clever, crafty, or violent.

You may find yourself getting swept up in the power that comes from creating so much mayhem, and, for no better reason than You can, you might consider killing innocent passersby.

The thing is, You can't. The game doesn't allow it. You are a free agent. But not that free.

* * *

Colossal Cave Adventure. The game that started it all. "You are standing," it told you, "at the end of a road before an all brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully."

And then,

That blinking cursor was an invitation to adventure, an opportunity to do ... anything. "What should I do?", you asked yourself. "I am a free agent. I can do anything. I can express my new, virtual, existential self through the actions of my choosing." So you typed instructions to your avatar, and your wish was his command.²

At End of Road
You are standing at the end of a road before all brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

> go skinny-dipping in the stream.
You can't see any such thing.

> jump in the stream naked.
I only understood you as far as wanting to jump.

> get naked
You can't see any such thing.

> jump stream
I only understood you as far as wanting to jump.

> go stream
That's not something you can enter.

> bite me
That's not a verb I recognize.

Welcome to agency, videogame style. Free will ... but not really.

* * *

Lately, I'm playing a game called Dreamfall, where the sole object of the game is to rescue your friend. This is what psychologists—especially the kind who write about the evil effects of videogames—call a "prosocial act." In the game, your friend has gotten into trouble with your futuristic fascist government and with the multinational corporation it serves. This corporation, you discover, is about to launch a product that will allow them to control people's thoughts and desires—will strip them of their agency.

People who study videogames³ sometimes split into two camps. Ludologists, on the one hand, study them as games, and focus on how people respond to play, how they tend to learn rules and solve puzzles and interact with one other socially. Though videogame reviewers don't often aim to write social criticism, when they do it tends to be from a ludological point of view. They are curious, most of all, about "game play."

On the other hand, there are narratologists, whose study of games focuses on storytelling, and borrows from the vocabulary of film studies and comp lit. If there are fewer narratologists than ludologists, then it's easy to guess it's because so few games have stories that hold up to scrutinous critical reading. Yet when Dreamfall is described as "critically acclaimed", this acclaim has focused almost exclusively on the story, partly because the story in Dreamfall is unusually rich, and partly because in Dreamfall there is almost no gameplay whatsoever.

It's a dilemma inherent in any videogame that aims to tell a narrative story: gameplay is the freedom to choose one's path through the game, to control one's own fate—to have agency. But narrative is linear, and the storyteller dictates the line. If a player can exert actual control, then the game won't have enough structure to tell its story. Instead of freedom, most games offer an illusion of freedom—an ability to make small, not very significant choices between each major plot point—but no actual ability to affect the overall story.

The illusion of agency.

Dreamfall—whose story is specifically about a character fighting for freedom—barely bothers with the illusion of agency in its own gameplay. Players are given a single choice to execute in any given moment of the game: they don't play the game, so much as run errands to keep the plot moving forward. Even more surprising, then, that at the end of the narrative, the main character has not found her lost friend, has not managed to save the world, and has fallen into a deep dream-coma from which she can never wake up: the player has failed to achieve any of the game's objectives, has lost in every sense—lost, even though there were never any real choices.

And this is what makes Dreamfall worthy of its (narratological) praise—because isn't this exactly what those who villainize videogames would have us believe? There are no choices. I may think I have free will, but if I play games then I will become more violent, I will cease to visit national parks. I have only the illusion of agency. I am a free agent—but not that free...

1. I'm curious in part because I've been asked to work on what is essentially a videogame to entice people to go to a national park...

2. There's another puzzle of agency inherent in Colossal Cave Adventure: the computer addresses all of its narrative directly to you—"YOU are standing at the end of a road"—but you respond by giving commands to ...? When you say, "Go north," who are you talking to? Yourself? Maybe studies should be done to determine if, in addition to driving people away from national parks and causing murders, videogames lead to multiple personality disorder...

3. Yes, there are people who study videogames, despite what Chuck Klosterman says...