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I have been reading through many of the post on here tonight, for about the last 8 hours actually, and one of the key things that keep popping up is about how to make players do this or that or how to fit storyline X into the scheme, etc. The one question that keeps popping into my mind over and over and over is, "Why do we have to dictate game play to the gamer?"

Now I know some poor programmer or scripter out there would read that question and immediately roll their eyes making some nebulous comment about the idiocy of noobs and how such things are nearly impossible or too much work etc.

And fair enough. I am a Noob to programming and such. If I had the tshirt, I would wear it proudly. However, I am not a noob to game design, nor to writing good a storyline. When I was a kid I was an avid reader, my favorite books being the 'Choose your own adventure' type. When I got older, I enjoyed the gaming freedom of table top RPG's like white wolf and D&D, and later still, the text based glory of MUD's.

I am in the early beginning stage of development on my on RPG. I am anticipating lots of coding challenges, and a whole lot of headache and heartache as I realize that some of my ideas simply will not be possible. Be that as it may, I do not intend to cop out of the games ultimate goal of freedom.

More importantly, as a writer, and beginning designer, I want to make sure that my players are faced with tough choices, and hard consequences. At the same time, I will make every attempt humanly possible to give them the freedom to make those choices, and perhaps even ways to redeem themselves if they make poor choices.

Some of this will be accomplished via conversation responses, some by making them choose between skills or spells (medieval fantasy RPG), and yet others will simply be a matter of making them choose whether or not they wish to dedicate the time needed to master a skill, or follow an in-depth quest line all the way to its finish.

I think some wonderfully successful illustrations of my point are the original Everquest, the Fallout series, Fable, etc.

So to all the longstanding programmers and game designers out there: Why do you feel the need to force a player into a predetermined role, class, or story line?

Ultimately, all games "force" something onto the player. It's just a fact of the trade. Even a title with multiple choices is dictated by the choices that are ultimately available. Nothing will ever be dynamic in the true sense until someone designs a completely procedural game. And even then, the code that generates the content will set the boundaries.

So all it really comes down to is how many options you can bother to make before shipping the game and how well you can create the illusion -- for the player -- that whatever she does actually has consequences.

In other words, it's all about presentation and has almost nothing to do with storytelling or game design. If you can make the player BELIEVE he is free, he will be.

I think there are two reasons - one technical and one artistic.

The technical one is that it is simply easy to program a constrained storyline, in which the player can perform only a limited number of actions determined by the programmer, than it is to program a freely explorable and interactive world in which the player can perform as wide a range of actions as he or she likes. That is surely fairly obvious.

The artistic one is more interesting and has to do more with what a game experience is supposed to be. Is it about telling a story? In that case you have to limit what the player can do, because otherwise he or she won't follow the story you want to tell. Alternately, is it about simulating a world and letting the player do what he or she wants? In that case you won't be telling a story, or at least not in the same way.

Some games go for the first of these options. I think most Japanese RPGs fall into that category. Other games go for the second of these options. "Sandbox" games in the mould of Elite are the obvious example. It's a matter of what you think a game should be. I think the technical considerations mentioned above make many companies today go for the story-telling option, because that way they can focus more on the glitzy stuff that modern players like (such as impressive graphics and sound) and less on the world-simulating stuff. To put it most straightforwardly, if you're going to make the best graphics you can for the scenes in your game, then the fewer such scenes there are, the quicker and cheaper the development will be. Allow a player to wander around an entire world and you have a vast amount of graphics to create. Railroad a player through a pre-ordained plot and you cut down on that drastically. Conversely, create a world in which the player can roam at will, and you're either going to have to craft an awful lot of content or find clever ways of generating varied content procedurally, which will be time-consuming either way.

This is one of the things which has recently come to my attention regarding games, and it really fascinates me. Take a book, or a film: the plot starts at the beginning, progresses throughout the duration of the work, and then finishes. Obviously, it will always happen in that way: no matter how many times you read Hamlet, it will always end the same way.

The thing which really strikes me is that games, for the most part, do this as well. Most FPSs are very linear: the story begins at point A and moves to point B and so on. You can control how you go about shooting people, and sometimes there will be different branches to go down (ie. go in guns blazing, or choose the stealthy option?) but for the most part, the story is pre-written, like a book. RPGs are better - Fallout 3 particularly - but they mostly boil down to one big quest which works on the same principle of a predetermined plot, maybe with a choice at the end (which is mostly quite crude in the "save the babies or eat them?" black-and-white good-and-evil sense).

But there's no reason why games should conform to these models (apart from the fact that they're easier to make this way, and they will probably sell better). Games are the most interactive art form which humans have yet created, and I think it's a shame we haven't exploited that more. Take, for example, Facade:

[Edit: the link doesn't seem to want to get hypertextised, so you'll have to copy it into your address bar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%C3%A7ade_%28interactive_story%29

In this game, you are a guest in a couple's flat; they are on the brink of breaking up. The AI is, broadly speaking, very flexible, which means there are many, many different paths which you can take, and many actions you can perform. In a sense, you have freedom.

But I'm not completely happy with it as a prototype for the "perfect game", because although you have freedom, I still felt strongly compelled to help these people work through their relationship problems and get back together. Once I'd done that, my "freedom" was basically squandered on going round kissing both characters until I got kicked out of their flat, just for fun.

The problem, I think, is that only one storyline has "worth" in that game (from my point of view anyway): the storyline where they get back together. In a book or film, there is only one storyline but it is imbued with worth due to the fact that it's been crafted by someone. Conversely, while certain RPGs like Fallout 3 or WoW allow you a lot of freedom, any stories which are unique to your experience will only be a part of *your* experience: if you narrowly survive an overwhelming attack by super mutants through some miraculous happenstance, it will only be relevant to you and will, ultimately, be meaningless in the wider context of the game because there is no higher power (ie. the storyteller) to give it worth. If such an event were to occur in a book, it might be symbolic of the fact the character is protected by the gods, or a sympton of their superhuman qualities, or a comment on the randomness and unpredictability of life; but in Fallout 3, it will always remain nothing but an anecdote.

What I think might work is to pursue a choose-your-own-adventure style of a game with options, but give so many options and give each option such meaning and such symbolism that the game, whichever paths you take, is ultimately meaningful. Rather than the game behaving like a straight line (as does a book) it would behave more like a spider diagram, or the splinter-marks that appear when a hammer cracks ice, the game beginning at the epicentre of the hammer-stroke.

This game would be a sort of "idea space", I think: since nothing would be set down for certain, one might get a sense (with multiple playthroughs) of an atmosphere of an idea, rather than a concrete plot. If, for example, there was a character who held a certain philosophy like hedonism or solipsism, they would reappear in different lights in different playthroughs, which would allow the player to see them from different angles and get a feel for (but not a definite narrative of) that character.

Of course, this game would sell phenomenally badly and would, by its very nature, be difficult to produce. But I for one would like to see it.

Apologies for the long post!

That was my favorite part of the game!

I think the posts above mine handled a lot of the issues with it fantastically, so I'll just add a small bit.

You called MUDs glorious in your post, and while I never played one for any significant amount of time, I can certainly appreciate the kinds of experience that would arise from such an environment. What's the difference between MUDs and the epic storylines of JRPGs? People.

Warren Spector gave a talk at my university about his philosophy of design, and when asked if he was interested in multiplayer he said "Yes, but I think it's cheating." He wanted to create interactive narrative experiences in his games, but the mere presence of other players will start to encourage emergent gameplay and purely on the presence of dialogue between players, literally or via gameplay, more dramatically fulfilling experiences tend to emerge.

So, this brings up the question, what is the future of single vs. multi-player in games whose goal is emergent gameplay or interactive narrative? I don't know about you, but I found a whole lot more dramatic experiences and emergent gameplay in most Halo:Combat Evolved matches than I did in many RPGs, Japanese or Western.

let me give you an example why games can't force the player

Modern Warfare 2 spoilers below