The world is yours

Steven Poole’s piece on “interactive cinema” ( E329) confirmed many of my thoughts around games which appear to offer you a choice while in essence boxing you in at every opportunity, but it made me think back to the exception to the rule, last year’s Detroit: Become Human – a woefully underappreciated game because of its numerous defects. Yes the morals were clunky, the analogies to the civil rights movement were laid on so thick it should have come with a free trowel and there weren’t very many shades of grey, but your choices genuinely affected the outcome of the game – from one of the bleakest endings I’ve ever come across in a videogame to others which were much more encouraging, and made you feel like you had been part of changing the (gaming) world into a better place than it was 12 hours ago.

Obviously it’d be cynical for a game so ostentatiously about free will to not allow the player the same freedom it espouses, but the ambitious narrative left you feeling like those choices you make throughout – whether to start a civil war or take a path of peaceful resistance, whether to be honest and open-eyed or distrustful and combative – really did matter. Not many studios, of course, have the resources to fund multiple branching paths which most people playing through the game once will never see, but Quantic Dream demonstrated the possibilities in this area, and in doing so they offered something beyond the “conservative and depressing” charge which Steven rightly levels against the bulk of the genre. In the future technological advances should allow smaller studios to carry this torch forward, although the most involving stories will still be the ones that stand the test of time, and some of them might even have happy endings. Mark Whitfield

We put this to Steven, but his reply went flying right over our heads as always. Have a year’s PS Plus in lieu of his response.

“The ambitious narrative left you feeling like those choices you make throughout really did matter”