Blog
RG5: The Tyranny of Choice
Article Discussed:
The Tyranny of Choice
Aevee Bee
https://gameranx.com/features/id/14224/article/the-tyranny-of-choice/
Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find out more about Zan’s music at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com or http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/.
Other Links:
Aevee Bee’s publication, Zeal: https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal
Worst Girls, Aevee Bee and Mia Schwartz’ videogame studio: https://worstgirlsgames.tumblr.com/
Raph Koster’s “A Letter to Leigh” https://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/09/a-letter-to-leigh/ and “Two cultures and games” https://www.raphkoster.com/2012/07/06/two-cultures-and-games/
Rough Script:
This article, which was pretty formative in my understanding of systems and what interactivity can and can’t accomplish, is going to require a little bit of background. This is critic Aevee Bee’s entry into an ongoing dialogue at the time. In some ways it began with Raph Koster, another critic and designer, who made waves by claiming, in an article entitled “Two cultures and games,” that,
“I like Anna Anthropy’s work, but I also try to be clear-eyed about the fact that a lot of Dys4ia could be built in PowerPoint and isn’t a game. That’s not a value judgement (edit: nor does it mean that as a whole, it’s not a game). My value judgement of the piece as a work of expressive art is pretty high.”
The ensuing debate took a close look at the claim of what gets called a game, and how a classification that might appear value-neutral on its face comes wrapped up in intense political baggage.
“The Tyranny of Choice” brings one thread of that argument to the fore. I’m not going to rehash the whole thing for a few reasons. The first is that I don’t think it’s necessary to appreciate what’s going on here. The second is a bit more complicated. So far in this podcast, we’ve talked multiple times about authorship, labor practices, and genre, among other things. It won’t be a big component this episode, but know that in the future we’ll be adding preservation to this list of recurring topics. It will come up in terms of both games themselves, but also of criticism; it’s relevant right this moment because significant chunks of this dialogue have been lost to blog and website closures and the sands of Twitter+.
Hopefully that’s enough background. Which brings us to the article itself. The opening line is as good an introduction as any: “I’m very interested in systems.” This is what we will be talking about: systems. Initially, and mainly, in games. But not exclusively. Aevee then brings up some of the arguments made in Raph’s blog post “A Letter to Leigh,” written to critic and author Leigh Alexander after she wrote a Twitter thread on the debate. Aevee starts by honing in on a point early in the letter, where Raph asks if, as Aevee paraphrases, “messing around with player agency really had a future as a design technique.”
Aevee’s response to this question is in some ways the thesis statement of this article. She says,
“I think the trick that these games use—That Dragon, Cancer, Dys4ia, Brenda Romero’s board game Train—games that appear to give choice but really don’t … is actually the only trick we have. There are not some games that subvert player agency, and others that grant it. Rather, all games, by nature of being games, by nature of being systems, inherently restrict player agency in the exact same ways.”
The bulk of the rest of the article will be expanding on what is meant by this statement, so I won’t belabor any points here. I will say, somewhat confidently, that even when I first read it I found the argument incredibly compelling. I take it in a similar way to my claim, in the first episode, that games can be boiled down to engines of dissociation, among other things. The primary way that they structure boredom is through systems. Mechanics – the things that happen when the player interacts with the game, primarily through the interface of the controller – might be what makes games unique. And I say “might” intentionally, because I’m not sure that they are unique, or that identifying them as such is worthwhile. Systems are how the game interacts with itself – often, but not always, in relation to the mechanics. These are both provisional definitions, of course; I’m no scholar. But I think they make sense. And, more importantly, I think they build toward broader claims.
For now, though, let’s set my thoughts on systems to the side and let Aevee take the floor. In continuing to respond to the letter, she says, “Koster implies that games are capable of creat[ing] dialogue with their systems; I believe games can only make statements.”
The operative phrase here is “with their systems.” She then goes on to fully quote one of the questions asked, about whether “choosing non-interactivity as the central defining characteristic effictively put[s] you in a broadcasting position, and therefore turn[s] the games into monologue rather than dialogue?” Her response:
“What Koster chooses to define as interactivity here is choice. He believes that interactivity, as well as dialogue, are things that arise from giving players choice. Here’s an abstract example of why I don’t believe it: I, the designer, give the player a choice between two premises. It seems I am offering the player the choice to participate in a dialogue, to vote yes or no. But I, the designer, got to choose what those choices were. I control the player’s options because I control what their choices are.”
She goes on to boil it down even further:
“[T]hough a video game may appear to contain a dialogue between two different viewpoints for ‘the player to decide between’ the entire terms of that dialogue are set by the designer, not the player.”
This is what she means by “games can only make statements.” Not that games are defined by things that make statements, or that better games make stronger statements. From a different angle, you might rephrase it as: games are designed. They have designers. Those designers make the game in a certain way, including all the choices available within the games. All choices available to the player through the mechanics, then, are choices stemming from the designer. They aren’t choices, in other words. They’re statements about the world – either the world of the game or the world outside the game, no matter the intention.
In her words:
“It may seem like a dialogue to offer the player two opposing questions, but it is in fact the opposite: by offering two opposing choices, you have made the claim, through your system, that only opposing binary choices exist in moral situations. Though a game with a good/evil morality system appears to be a dialogue between two points of view, it is actually a statement: that the world is a morally definite one.”
I’m trying to hammer home this point for a few reasons. The first is that it’s how this essay goes, and I like this essay. The second is that I think each of these quotes provides strong support for the argument itself. I’m not sure how many times you’ve heard that games are about player choice or agency or interactivity. I know I’ve heard it, implicitly and explicitly, ad nauseum. Taking a clear look at systems – the ways that games interact with themselves, according to my provisional and personal definition – cuts through that nausea. To this point, I see Aevee arguing that games may well be about player choice insofar as games are things designed by designers for players. But taking a step back, what they are about isn’t synonymous with how they actually function in the world. Designers can be as infatuated with providing options as they want to be, but that doesn’t change how what they make functions. Putting it bluntly, Aevee writes:
“A game with one choice is no different than a game with two choices, or a game with ten thousand million choices, because these choices function as part of a larger system, and a system cannot help but make claims.”
Relating this to the previous example is helpful. We’ll imagine three games, each at the same point. The first has one choice. A nonplayer character is speaking to the player character. You, the player, has one option: press the action button to advance the dialogue. Doing so triggers the mechanic that causes the systems to spin up, and the nonplayer character will then deliver the next line of dialogue to the player character. If the game has a system tallying good vs evil, then, it will also take that interaction to tally up one side or the other (or neither) based on the game’s own systems.
In the next game, we have the same nonplayer character telling the same player character the same thing. This time, though, the player has two mechanics at their behest. First they choose a response, and then they hit the action button to advance the dialogue. Let’s say, to stick to the example of a morality system, that the nonplayer character is a daughter looking for her mother. The options might then be, for instance, to point the girl in her mother’s direction, or to lie and tell the girl that her mother is dead. This duality is what Aevee means when she says that this system isn’t a dialogue, but a statement about the moral definition of the world. You don’t get to decide what the good choice is or the evil one. The game’s systems only talk to themselves about that.
The third game, then, presents this same scenario. Except it has ten thousand million choices. I’ll avoid trying to provide that many examples. Let’s say, for now, that this exact moment is illustrating this game’s morality system. It’s safe to say that among these options, slightly more nuance is going to arise. You might end up pointing the girl to her mother for bad reasons, or lying for good ones. With ten billion choices to fill, the designer may even have to find ways for the player to be able to lie for bad reasons that produce a positive moral outcome, or to point the girl to her mother for good reasons that produce a negative moral outcome. No matter how Gordian the choices become, though, this exponential growth at the level of mechanics doesn’t change the systems. If the system in question boils all mechanical input to good vs evil, the amount of mechanical possibilities does nothing to change that input into a dialogue, rather than a statement.
I think this is the clearest way to illustrate this point, but I’m also suspicious of how cleanly it comes out. But it’s actually more complicated than some other possibilities. For instance, a game might have a combat system. Mechanically, you have your one-choice game – press the Square button to attack. Your two-choice game might have you push the Square button or the Triangle button to do two types of attack. Your ten thousand million-choice game might dedicate every button on the controller and a keyboard, and every combination of those buttons, and maybe some other things, to do ten billion different types of attacks. None of those produce a dialogue with the game though. Each mechanical input is sent to the systems to do with what they were programmed to do. The output is the same: physical conflict can resolve problems.
If you aren’t quite convinced, let’s argue one more quick hypothetical. There exist games in which dialogue is quite literally a mechanic. Online multiplayer games on computers often have systems which allow one player to type human words to another human player. The input goes through the game’s servers and comes out on the other player’s computer. We can even assume the lightest touch possible; MMORPGs, for instance, often have nothing more than a text box in the user interface to mediate this conversation. Once one person says something and the person it was said to responds, dialogue is a literal game mechanic.
The system facilitates the dialogue and mediates it, but it doesn’t participate. In fact, in terms of the game, it boils it down. The game itself doesn’t partake. It makes a statement: this world requires interaction between human beings. Even in those light touch examples, for instance, that mediation might also say: and these human beings cannot curse at each other, represented by a language filter. Or they can’t harass each other, represented by the powers granted by other discrete systems to moderators. Or they can’t be made sure that they will feel safe, because of an absence of these or other safegaurds. Systems aren’t a dialogue.
Returning to the essay at hand, though. Aevee returns to Raph’s “Letter to Leigh” to bring to bear her point:
“So to the other question Koster asks, almost rhetorically, ‘isn’t dialogue the best way to create empathy?’ I would have difficulty answering in the affirmative. Not because I don’t think dialogue is a way to create empathy, but because dialogue requires a statement and a response, and systems are statements. Games can be fantastic statements to respond to, like any kind of art. But they do not contain the mechanisms to respond to themselves.”
Here, I think, is where my provisional definitions of mechanics and systems become important. I said before that mechanics are “the things that happen when the player interacts with the game,” and that systems are “how the game interacts with itself.” This might look, on its face, to contradict Aevee’s statement that games “do not contain the mechanisms to respond to themselves.” But I don’t think it does. Because mechanics, whether they are dialogue options, combat choices, or typing into a dialogue box, aren’t responses. They’re the thing that happens when you press a button. They’re always already an aspect of the system, even as systems extend far beyond them. A statement that contains a response is still a monologue. Or, in Aevee’s words:
“I think systems prevent dialogue by their very nature. After all, the designer has written the very rules of dialogue. How can I possibly have a dialogue if I don’t agree with those rules in the first place?”
And then, a bit later:
“No matter what I do as a player, I will never be able to change the hard coded rules in this game. But dialogue of a different sort is possible. Do films and books contain dialogues? The best ones I think certainly do, without a system, without choices, without mechanics. … But it is always a dialogue between the creator and herself, not between a reader and the creator.”
Without diving too deep into it, I think this is a strong argument for why the way we talk about interactivity is bunk. If mechanics are pressing buttons to allow the game to react in ways defined by its systems, which are how the game talks to itself, then any real interaction with a game is fundamentally the same as the process of reading a book, listening to a song, or watching a movie. It’s a matter of degrees rather than kind; videogames’ required interactivity is just paying attention, amplified.
With all this groundwork done, Aevee then goes on to expand the scope of the argument. Before we quite get there, though, she gives one more example from another contemporaneous debate about a newly-released videogame.
“BioShock Infinite allows the player the choice of being a violent bigot or taking up arms against racism. Is this a dialogue? Certainly not. Both choices enforce the same thesis: racism is evil. I believe that it should be possible to provide many choices that provide depth and nuance. But even if such a feat is accomplished, it will still be a limited and specific vision: a single voice that speaks in many, perhaps quite contradictory ways, but never a dialogue.”
I want to admit, here, that I’ve been performing an elision. I’ve been doing it partially because I think the piece performs it as well. But it’s too tied up in our previous discussions, especially on authorship and labor, to continue without commenting upon. To this point, I’ve been following Aevee’s lead in referring to a “designer.” We know, in fact, that almost all videogames are made by a team of people. These teams can be made up of anywhere from one person and some contractors – or one person and some tools created by others – to a dozen horizontally organized individuals, to thousands of contributors from across the globe working in the interests of shareholders. BioShock Infinite is a reminder of this because it performs the auteurist reduction of that last group to a designer – Ken Levine. But the reality is almost certainly that Infinite had many designers; that its systems were not produced as statements from on high, but in dialogues between people in different positions and in choices made at each level of labor and management. This also does not fundamentally undermine her argument, however. The auteur has always been a useful fiction, one that pins a name to a piece of art in order to better understand that art. Referring to “a designer” does something similar; it regrounds the product in the labor of its creators. Whether that’s one person or ten thousand, it doesn’t change the fact that what results is a text. It is readable as a unit, and – with games becoming more service than product – as a palimpsest. The statements that are made by systems aren’t necessarily from the mouths of Ken Levine or Tetsuya Mizuguchi or Chris Avellone. They’re from the game, because it is ultimately the product of human endeavor.
Now, to the broadening of the argument. This is a bit of a long one.
“Like Koster, I see games as systems. … Here is where I lean differently: rather than seeing those systems as avenues for choice and exploration and emergent behavior, I see those systems as inherently restrictive.
“To provide a choice is to exclude all other choices. To provide a way to win is to provide infinite other ways to lose. A system that values some choices and behaviors will necessarily devalue others. A system might offer all sorts of pleasant choices to some, but for other participants, there will be no choices that do not oppress or do violence to them. Certainly struggle for meaning and value is possible in such a system, but that doesn’t change the fact that a system can be an instrument of hate and violence. A system is not a dialogue. In fact, it can by an instrument that specifically removes the possibility for dialogue (though thankfully, the opposite is also true).
“Ah, I’ve stopped talking about video games.
“This is starting to sound almost exactly like a discussion of how cultural and societal systems constrain human beings into binaries of sexuality and gender and race. Well, of course it is. And this is part of the reason why I find systems of all kinds so fascinating, beautiful, terrible, and worth talking about. The systems that govern game worlds are not unlike the systems that rule our everyday lives.”
Aevee then says that this is why frameworks like social justice, feminism, and queer theory can offer useful insights into game design; they have been studying these systems at a societal level for longer than videogames have existed. Specifically:
“The rules of society are not inherently different from the rules of a game; understand how human social, cultural, and political systems function, and you will understand how they function in games much better.”
This puts her earlier arguments about systems as statements into a different light. I’ve tried to supplement them by talking about specific aspects of what is sometimes called gameplay; things like mechanics and interactivity. But, similar to the elision of “a designer” for teams and individuals and a product, another elision is now taking place. Systems that don’t have mechanics, because they aren’t part of videogames, are being said to be statements as well. For me, this is a fairly intuitive leap. So much so, in fact, that I have a hard time articulating exactly how it plays out. And given that this episode is already fairly long, and we’ll be getting back to this subject matter in further episodes, I think it’s fair to say I’ll leave it here for now and get around to wrapping this thing up. Before we do, though, we need to look at two more quick quotes. First, in closing the argument that this article begins with, Aevee says:
“If Raph feels like games like Train, Dys4ia, and Howling Dogs are playing him, I must answer: every single game I have ever played feels like it’s been playing me. I believe a game can have a dialogue with itself … I believe that as a reader or player, my personal response to struggling within a system or reading a book can certainly be the other side of the dialogue. But it is necessary that I express my response outside of a game, because within that game, I am ruled by your system.”
This is crucial to remember. There is a possibility of dialogue. But it is with games, not in them. The systems won’t allow for that, but these kinds of systems are siloed off into their respective games. They can be touched and then walked away from. They can then be discussed in articles or podcasts, or just talked about at home among friends. That is where the dialogue lies, and what differentiates them from societal systems, which rise and change and fall but are omnipresent when they exist. Which is where, I think, the study of games might feed back into those other disciplines. Feminism and queer theory have thought experiments and history to look at, but nothing is quite so clean as a small, designed system to see what statements it might make.
And as per usual, I want to end this with a quote from the essay. It’s a conclusion; a reiteration of the thesis, with the new information presented wrapped in. I hope you’ll find it useful as I did, and continue to.
“I believe systems are statements. Not always restrictive or exploitative of hateful, but always statements. Statements about what choices are allowed. Statements about the limits of freedom. Statements about what categories exist, and what it means to belong to them.”
Next Time:
A Detailed Analysis of the Resident Evil Videogame Series by Capcom
Dan Birlew & Thomas Wilde
http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps/198459-resident-evil-3-nemesis/faqs/2204
