Nicholas Binford's Case
Second Year MA Student (Literary Studies)
Department of English, Washington State University
Email: nicholas.binford@wsu.edu
Interactivity and Player Freedom in Digital and Analog Gaming
This project examines the common claim that video games allow players to make meaningful choices and that players are fully autonomous in their decision making. If pressed, few would maintain that these claims are literally true, but players, developers, and journalists are captivated by the possibility and extremely invested in making it a reality. The fact is, choices in video games are not genuine acts of freedom or personal expression. Selecting an option from a finite list does not accurately reflect the complex mental process of real-world decision making that occurs in an environment which does not prohibit individuals from taking certain actions.
This project draws heavily on Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media (2001), specifically his comments on the ‘myth’ of interactivity. He reminds us that all media is interactive, that interactivity should not be redefined to the physical act of pressing a button lest we forget that it is the interactions of our mind with the media--in the form of interpretation, analysis, and reflection--that result in the most meaningful experiences. He speculates that the oversimplification of ‘interactivity’ stems from a modern desire to “externalize” and “standardize” the mind: “Unobservable and interior processes and representations were taken out of individual heads and placed outside--as drawings, photographs, and other visual forms” (Manovich 60-1). Manovich’s text is paired with Katherine Malibou’s What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2004) which presents the argument that, since the discovery of the plastic nature of our brains, we have failed to update our way of thinking about them, continuing to treat them like complex computers. This plasticity enables us to change and evolve our own minds, yet we can never do so until we become aware of that fact because ““The brain is a work, and we do not know it. We are its subjects--authors and products at once--and we do not know it” (Malibou 1). The combination of these two texts produces an interesting question: if our so-called interactive media is the attempted externalization of our minds, as Manovich argues, and if we are capable of shaping our brains through conscious thought and action, as Malibou says, then what is the consequence of immersing ourselves in so many deficient facsmilies of our minds in the form of video games? Put another way, what are the consequences of convincing ourselves that the choices we make in video games are true, meaningful choices, when they are clearly not?
Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (2013) is a game which addresses this question head on. The game’s website describes it as “an exploration of story, games, and choice. Except the story doesn't matter, it might not even be a game, and if you ever actually do have a choice, well let me know how you did it.” In The Stanley Parable, the player controls Stanley, an office worker who has discovered that everyone has vanished from his building, and the player must decide what to do. An affable an expressive narrator tells Stanley what to do, and the player can obey or disobey until they reach one of nineteen different endings. Wreden is directly concerned with exploding the idea that players make their own choices while they play by crafting endings which undermine the player’s sense of agency. The Museum Ending is particularly direct in this matter:
When every path you can walk has been created for you long in advance, death becomes meaningless, making life the same. Do you see now? Do you see that Stanley was dead from the moment he hit Start?... Press ‘escape,’ and press ‘quit.’ There’s no other way to beat this game. As long as you move forward you will be walking someone else’s path. Stop now, and it will be your only true choice.
The only ending which does not in some capacity echo this argument is the ironically titled Freedom Ending, which can only be achieved by following every one of the narrators instructions. When completed, the narrator jubilantly declares: ““Yes! He had won. He had defeated the machine, unshackled himself from someone else’s command. Freedom was mere moments away,” just before the player loses control of Stanley entirely. The only time the narrator will not challenge the player’s belief in their own autonomy is when they do not exercise it.
Despite the industry rhetoric arguing for the realism of choices made in video games, many players are aware of the medium’s extreme limitations. They feel very keenly the boundaries placed upon their freedom in games and resent those that overstep in their claims of player agency, as perhaps most famously demonstrated by the scandal over Mass Effect 3’s ending. These players refuse to accept insufficient representations of their minds and are seeking a freedom which does not yet exist in video games, and they have begun to look to other mediums to find it. One of the most prominent landing places for these players is also one of the oldest: the classic tabletop RPG Dungeons and Dragons, currently experiencing a renaissance. Dungeons and Dragons provides an author-player dynamic entirely different from that found in the video games it helped to give birth to, and casts a new light on the limitations of the video game genre.