
Maintaining the Illusion of Choice.
How Telltale and DONTNOD started fixing the problems of a genre.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead undoubtedly stands as a milestone in the brief history of videogames. Here was a choose-your-own-adventure for a modern audience, a story that ran the gamut from touching to terrifying, driven by your decisions and the promise that “they will remember that…”. You had to chose who lived, who died and had to deal with consequences that were often more heartbreaking than anything seen in games beforehand. A critical and cultural success, it led to Telltale adopting this same successful formula for (at last count) nine more games.
In The Walking Dead, player choices felt like they carried real weight. Thanks to clever design sleight-of-hand and satisfying payoffs, it felt like you were in control game’s direction. But just like watching a magic trick over and over again, the Telltale formula began losing its spark with each successive game. It became apparent two games later — by the conclusion of The Walking Dead Season 2 — that player choices didn’t really alter the paths of these games in any meaningful manner beyond which NPC’s make it to the next episode. Stories will always hit the same beats and arrive at the exact same destination regardless of what you do, because the writers have a particular story to tell. They — rightfully so — are in the driving seat whilst you’re in the back with a toy steering wheel, changing the minor details.
That is not to say that individual acts of choice weren’t still affecting or the stories worth any less, but they did suffer from attempting to pull off the same tricks over and over, and it became ever more difficult to shake off the knowledge that you were an observer of a pre-planned narrative rather than a participant in crafting one.
Telltale had a problem: How do you continue to inject consequence and serious meaning into what are clearly arbitrary choices? With the release of Tales from the Borderlands, it appeared they had one answer: Don’t. Drop the sombre pretence of all their previous games, and play it for laughs. By adopting an IP already known for its tongue-in-cheek humour, Telltale sidestepped the issue of significance by boiling almost every choice down to which of several punchlines the player would prefer. No more difficult dilemmas around which character to save or who to trust, choices in …Borderlands were content with asking you which type of gun you’d like your mail order personal defence robot to have or whether ’tis nobler to simply knock someone out or hit them in the nuts with an electrified baton.
Not only in aid of laughs, this change in tone also had an important implication for how the game was played. By stepping away from morally difficult scenarios, players were afford a lot more freedom. In The Walking Dead you were often asked to choose between benefiting a group of adult survivors or an innocent child for whom you are the sole protector. Each end-of-episode breakdown of how all players responded to each significant choice showed a massive tendency towards helping Clementine, your infant charge, because of course they would! Many choices weren’t much of a choice. By contrast, most of …Borderlands statistical breakdowns were much more 50/50, since — thanks to whip-smart writing and Hollywood-calibre voice acting — players knew that each choice would lead to something hilarious, so the decision came down purely to comical preference.
Whenever you died in previous Telltale games, you’d be met with a game over screen and made to start over again. “Sorry, you performed the wrong action here, go back and try again.”
In any other game, this is an accepted part of design literacy. In games that pride themselves on reacting and adapting to player behaviour though, there should be no wrong action. All actions available to the player should be relevant, all choices equally valid. When you inhabit a single character in the present tense, where you experience events at the same time as your avatar, this can be a difficult thing to reconcile. Thankfully, Tales from the Borderlands neatly divests itself of this mortal dilemma by presenting the story in the past tense. Actions have already happened to the two unreliable narrators who are recounting the tale. Similar to the original Prince of Persia, at any point where the player acts in a way that would otherwise result in a ‘game over’ screen, the narrators pause the action to remind each other “no, that’s not how it happened, you’re remembering it wrong.” (Which, as an aside, is a device that leads to some of the funniest moments in the series).
In previous games, the designers at Telltale insisted that each player decision required an exploration of your own morals and pretended they would impact the larger picture, even when the outcomes would turn out to be inconsequential. By contrast, …Borderlands’ designers were happy to divide the labour; they would handle all the important stuff like the story, and let the player kick their feet up in the back seat, listen to cool music and enjoy the ride. Where previous Telltale games tried to obscure the fact that player choice was largely irrelevant, …Borderlands embraced it and was all the more entertaining for it. How disappointing then, that their next work was a return to the dour seriousness of old with a Game of Thrones series.
Luckily, the bug had caught at other studios and at the same time as …Borderlands, French developers DONTNOD released Life is Strange, a familiarly episodic choice-driven-adventure game that took the tropes of Telltale games and turned them upside down.
Max, the teenage player character in Life is Strange is able to rewind time by a few minutes. At critical moments within the game, just as in Telltale games, she will be given a seemingly significant choice to made. Whereas making the ‘right’ choice in Telltale games was often a case of following your gut instinct and hoping for the best without context, Max is able to make a choice, see its immediate impact on her and those around her, rewind to see the alternative, and then make a more informed decision. Although it’s tempting to suggest that this makes choices moot or easier to decide between, its actual impact is absolutely the opposite. Seeing each potential consequence means you know exactly who your final decision will help and who it will hurt.
Making a choice in Life is Strange is often as tense, difficult and heart-wrenching as anything Telltale ever proposed. Do you side with the meek, unpopular student and get yourself on the wrong side of tyrannical college security, or uphold an unfair rule, earn the trust of the guard and be yet another person adding to this student’s obvious misery? How do you tell someone who you just hurt that it really was the best course of action? Rather than trivialising choices, this mechanic instantly lends weight them. As Max, only you know both sides of any given story, and in trying to reconcile your decisions with the often hostile reactions of other characters who only see one side, you spend the whole game second-guessing whether you really made the right call, agonising over a moral quandary of your own making.
Life is Strange also uses it’s unique time-travelling premise to deals the elephant in the room for choice-driven games, the fact that nothing really matters in the end. Along with every Telltale game, LiS has a critical path that can’t be deviated from. Rather than brushing it under the rug, Life is Strange directly embraces it. Max spends the entire final episode trying to prevent a particular event from happening, repeatedly rewinding time to fix one detail only to find that tiny ripple has mutated into another catastrophe and the same terrible conclusion is met each time.
In the final moments, the whole game is suddenly cast in a new light, becoming purely about the notion of immutable fate. Whatever is supposed to happen will happen regardless of what you or Max does about it. Max’s unique predicament is used as narrative justification for a technical limitation; your choices don’t matter in the end because they weren’t supposed to, by design. It’s said that success comes from turning weaknesses into strength, and by turning this major flaw into the entire crux of the story they wanted to tell, DONTNOD were absolutely successful in improving the genre template.
Handling choice in games will always be a balancing act; too much choice and player decisions become arbitrary and less meaning, too little choice and the player becomes a passive observer. However, by tweaking how choices are made and for what potential outcomes, or re-framing the context surrounding them, both Telltale and DONTNOD proved that there is still plenty of worthwhile room to explore in a genre that was previously at risk of going stale.
