Imaginary Worlds - Choose Your Own Adventure

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

One of the unique aspects of video games is that you can control the characters. But game developers are often torn between wanting to give the players as much freedom as possible, and wanting to guide the players through a strong story. Adam Hines tries to crack the code with his indie game Oxen Free. Ryan Kaufman and Alyssa Finley discuss why the Telltale games were more like Choose Your Own Emotions. And psychologist Jamie Madigan explains how role-playing video games can help strength our sense of morality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Have I mentioned that I'm a Batman fan? Maybe a few dozen times throughout my podcast? Well, for years I've been playing the Arkham video games, where you get to be Batman in this very cinematic universe. But as a player, your options are limited beyond whether you skip the side missions or just stick to the main plot. But in 2016, I started hearing about

this new Batman game by a company called Telltale. Unlike the Arkham games, it wasn't very CGI looking. It was more like a graphic novel come to life. And the Telltale game was broken up like a TV show with episodes that you download periodically as part of a limited series. But what really stood out about the Telltale games is that you have a lot of choices. Some of the choices are big, like whether as Batman you decide to save Selina Kyle or Harvey Dent, which could delay his transformation into Two-Face. Mr. Dent. Thanks. or Harvey Dent, which could delay his transformation into Two-Face. But what I was really excited about were the smaller choices, especially when you're playing Bruce Wayne and all you have to work with are your four dialogue options. And in certain situations you can really diffuse the tension or make a stand. And I could never predict how

the other characters would react. You were the fiercest DA the city ever had. Someone who fought for people's dreams. So much for a safer Gotham. You're right. This isn't me. Go. Go. Get away!

Now, the company Telltale also got critical acclaim for their games based on The Walking Dead, where your moral principles were often in conflict with your need to survive. Please, you can't save her, Clay. We have to go. And they did games based on Game of Thrones, where your sense of dignity and honor are on the chopping block as often as your head. Let's see you bend the knee to my father. Now, I love these games.

There was something about them that felt very real and even kind of intimate to me. And whenever a new episode was released, I couldn't wait to play it. So for a long time, I really wanted to talk with the game developers. But Telltale was going through turmoil. Basically, they expanded too fast. That led to a lot of managerial issues behind the scenes. And in the fall of 2018, the company fell apart. And it was a real shame, not just for the game developers that lost their jobs, but also for the players. They've been working on all these

really cool games that will never come out. Although ironically, the company's implosion actually allowed me to finally have access to their game developers, who are now former employees. But I'm not going to go into why the company folded. That's actually been covered a lot in the gaming media. I just wanted to hear about their creative process. Like, why were these games so effective? Why did I get so much pleasure making impossible, gut-wrenching decisions?

And why did I care so much pleasure making impossible, gut-wrenching decisions? And why did I care so much about these digital characters? Alyssa Finley worked as a creative director at Telltale, and she said when they were developing the games, their approach, in a way, just came down to trial and error. So a lot of times we would do that kind of iteration where we would put something up and try it and try it and try it until we found one that was sufficiently gut-wrenching. Now, Telltale, of course, did not invent role-playing video games. The early PC games that were mostly text with very few images actually allowed the

players to have a lot of leeway. But when it comes to big-budget CGI games, the real groundbreaker was Bioshock in 2007. And the big choice you had to make in Bioshock had to do with these little girls that were made of a substance called atoms that your character needed to survive. So there was a way to rescue these girls without taking the atoms for yourself. Thank you, mister. Or you could kill the girls and harvest the atoms for your own survival. Or you could kill the girls and harvest the atoms for your own survival. That atom should do the trick. You did the right thing.

How can you do this thing to a child? Alyssa began her career working on that game. You know, in a world that's very dangerous, there's a lot of motivation to do the awful thing. But on the other hand, these are little girls. They're adorable. They're good people. So you go, well, maybe I don't want to do the awful thing, but what does that mean for me as a person? So the game is really asking you this question the entire time. Who are you and how do you deal with danger to yourself versus danger to others? Now, Bioshock and other role

playing video games like Mass Effect or Dragon Age were actually a long time coming. For years, players have been complaining that in video games, the stories felt like they were on rails, you know, like a railroad track that you couldn't deviate from. So companies like Telltale started thinking about stories using a different metaphor. They imagined them more like trees. The roots of the tree would be the theme that the game developers want to explore. The trunk of the tree would be the main storyline. And the branches are the choices that the players can make. Now, as much as I enjoy these games, a lot of people complained those branches, those story branches, would often converge in the end, no matter what you chose.

Alyssa says it's a fair criticism. I mean, she certainly wishes that was not the case. We always wanted to give the player as much agency as we could. But one of the challenges of making episodic games and making branched games is that branches can be expensive. Every time you do offer a choice, you end up having to support two content paths for, you know, whether that is for the course of a scene or an episode or the season. And the bigger the branches are, the more expensive those choices are. So it was always a push pull of decision making of how much can we afford to offer without making the baseline story unacceptably short.

Ryan Kaufman struggled with that problem as well. He used to be a narrative designer at Telltale. And he's very proud of the Batman game that he worked on, which was called The Enemy Within. It was about the evolution of the Joker. When we first meet the Joker, he's actually kind of relatively harmless. He's an inmate at Arkham Asylum called John Doe. And he is infatuated with Bruce Wayne. I knew the moment we met, friends for life. Ryan wanted there to be a

real possibility that your actions could create a different Joker than the one you're expecting. The producers were scared of what that might mean in terms of branching because the team was like, will we really want to be able to branch the last episode and make it a major, huge difference? Producers were like, I don't know if we can afford that. Maybe it can be more of a subtle version. That got into a pretty contentious thing where we were, the team, the creative team was like, had to be pretty adamant that, look, if you're going to set up this entire thing with the Joker, who's a beloved character, it should be really meaningful. And if we have to spend the money, that's where we should be spending it.

Now, another option for game developers is to scale down the production design a lot. So you have the bandwidth to just focus on the choices the players can make. That is what Adam Hines did when he left Telltale years ago to co-create a critically acclaimed indie video game called Oxenfree. Didn't you hear me calling for you? Jesus, you scared me. Oh, I scared you? You scared me?

In Oxenfree, you play a teenage girl named Alex. She and her friends are stuck on an island that is haunted by ghosts who can manipulate time, among other creepy things. What do you want? For the first time. In making this game, Adam and his team wanted to eliminate cut scenes, which is a common thing you see in video games, where basically you stop controlling the character

and you have to watch a scene that is full of exposition. That just isn't a thing that we'd ever really seen a game do before. And it's not the sexiest goal, but it was just that idea that we felt would be really, would just feel really kind of fulfilling in a weird way. And to try to get away from what I consider, at times, these kind of story-based games can feel like you're not the actual character.

You're more like Jiminy Cricket on the character's shoulder, kind of giving them suggestions on what to do and not actually being the character the whole time. So we really wanted to kind of back away from that and really make you feel like, no, you're controlling her and you can interrupt yourself and interrupt people. And she used to talk about other things and kind of really divert the conversation if that's what you want to do. Now, Oxenfree is a lot less cinematic than the Telltale games. It looks more like a flat illustration that's come to life. But going that simple allows the player is really paying attention to and understanding.

Because in a movie, you know, you can kind of half fall asleep for a couple of minutes or zone out and come back in. And the main character in the movie isn't now not going to know what he needs to do. He's going to know what he needs to do. But if you do that in a game, you'll be like, oh wait, I missed it. Should I be going to the door now? Should I be getting the key?

But they managed to pull it off. And the other cool thing about Oxenfree is that if you try to play it again, you don't get a fresh start. The game remembers what you did. Now, other games have done that before, but it does work really thematically with Oxenfree because the game is all about time loops. If you load up your save and jump back into the game um immediately you'll see that you get kind of brand new choices to the same conversations that you had and because now you are playing as a version of alex that remembers already being through this this whole night so she'll be able so she'll say things like man i remember having this conversation or actually i really feel like last time if this

makes any sense we kind of did this before. Maybe we should try something else. And your friends will definitely react to you like you're insane. But the ghosts will more than kind of anything because they are aware of all the kind of timelines and what could possibly happen. And they've seen kind of like the world be born and die again an infinite amount of time. So they've seen all the different avenues and tactics and ways that this night can play out. They will respond to you and be able to remember like last time you did this and maybe you should try this now. Now there is a genre called open world games where you have unlimited movement. And of course, the most popular open world game right now is Red Dead Redemption 2,

which takes place in the Old West. Ryan Kaufman likes those kinds of open world games, but he really prefers the narrative games that he worked on at Telltale, even if the players complained that their choices were too limited. You know, player feedback is, oh, I wish my choices really mattered. And I look at games where that's true. And open world games are a great example you know you can run around endlessly in grand theft auto making all sorts of really impactful choices but at the same time there's kind of no story it doesn't mean anything there's there's no narrative thread pulling you through so i think that ultimate freedom is something people fans and players talk about wanting but i think sometimes it's more satisfying

to get that. Like there's an authored story and you sense a theme and the theme makes you feel a very specific emotion and brings you through an emotional journey that is so much more meaningful than just freedom. It's so funny. It's not, I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it's interesting. You don't hear people say something like, which is more important than freedom. It's so funny. It's not, I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it's interesting. You don't hear people say something like, which is more important than freedom. I feel like in our culture, freedom is like supposed to be the best thing in the world.

Yeah, I mean, freedom can be, especially when you watch people try to play games, freedom is really confusing to people. They kind of don't know what to do with it. You really have, even in an open world game, you have to teach them and tutorialize and bring them along so that they're comfortable with what they're doing. And I think it's the same for a story.

Like a completely free story is confusing, even to the person who's trying to work their way through it or tell it. Then they become the storyteller. And I don't know that everyone has the power or ability within themselves to just sit right down and say, I'm going to tell myself a great story. And well, it's funny. I mean, this is obviously life is the, you know, the real open world that we all live in. That freedom is confusing. And so we come up with stories anyway

about our own lives. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like we map random events with some sort of narrative explanation just to like, yeah, get our heads around it. Telltale really advertised their games along the lines of the Choose Your Own Adventure books from the 80s. But Ryan thinks they really should have advertised the games as Choose Your Own Emotions because the real interesting part of the game isn't what you do. It's who you choose to be. I mean, that's what I found so compelling about the Batman games. Because, you know, there's so many different versions of Batman from the comics and the movies. And their games allowed you to choose which Batman you wanted to be, not in terms of his costume, which a lot of other games do, but in terms of

his personality. The main axis was kind of that, are you going to be the forceful, vengeful, dark knight who will just break people's arms to get what you want, but who cares? They're bad guys. All the way to a more, a compassionate, a compassionate crime fighting. And is there also a third version of that?

I found when playing Batman and Bruce Wayne, whenever I was the more compassionate, the kinder, gentler, more compassionate crime fighter, I got taken advantage of, or there were moments I felt I was taken advantage of. But then whenever I tried to, I chose sort of brutality to keep people in line, Alfred was always there to say like, you're losing it. I don't know if I want to stick with you. Like I felt like there were consequences for either way. There didn't seem to be a right way, which I really liked. Yeah. And that was something that we always, always tried to promote was this idea that there's no right way to play the game. There's no winning or losing. It's all about what you

wanted to try and whether you accomplished it or could tolerate it. Now, as you're playing a Telltale game, the game actually keeps track of your choices. And when you're done, you can see what percentage of players made the same choices that you did. Now, all that information went back to the company. And since the games were released episodically, that allowed the game developers to adjust the storylines as they were developing. But I asked Alyssa, what if, let's say, 90% of the players chose to do something? Did she worry that they had made that choice too easy? She said, no. Sometimes we'd get these hard splits, these 90%, 10% splits where everybody made one choice with a character. And, and, uh, you know,

again, in the walking dead season that I worked on, we were surprised, uh, by one of those, one of those hard splits to the extent that we said, wow, let's lean into this and give that 10% of people who made the, who made a, what was obviously a very difficult choice here. Let's pay them off and give them something special for their investment. And so we had a particular character who there was this live or die moment where most people chose for him to die. For the 10% of people who lived, they got a much more detailed story with that character and actually several more live or die moments over the course of the season. And so that's interesting, though.

So that 10% of the players choose something, you would think that the most cost-effective thing to do would be like, well, if 90% of the players are going in this direction, we need to give that 90% more to work with. But it's interesting that you wanted to reward that 10%. I think we tried to do both. At some point, Telltale would... We would often lean into the 90% more than the 10%. And then I think the people who are in the 10% side were like, my choices don't matter. So sometimes we'd flip the script and try to try to do the unexpected rather than the expected. I asked Ryan if he was ever surprised by the data that he got from the players.

I asked Ryan if he was ever surprised by the data that he got from the players. I was always surprised by how kind people were in contrast to how they would sometimes conduct themselves on the Internet or on the forums. People can be harsh, but actually people would generally take the more compassionate option when they could. And that was surprising to me, because when you're playing a video game, you are, you're free to like, you're somewhat anonymous, right? You can do what you want. You can, you can be a shit to people and they're just video game characters. So what's the, you know, what's the problem. And, but even so, um, people would be generally more kind than I expected them to be. Well, it's interesting because I know that you always try to make sure that the choices are as gut-wrenching as possible.

Discovering that people were more compassionate than you thought, was there a way that you decided like, hmm, I wonder if there's a way we could actually use this against them? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes. At every opportunity, we would use people's compassion against them. Yeah, I think that was part of how we hooked players in that it never felt resolved. Like even when you were compassionate, you didn't get a nice resolution. You always got a little bit of a stinger. Because I think if we ever gave you a really nice resolution, there might be a danger that you setting down the controller and saying, okay, I'm good. You know, good you know story's done yeah god it almost reminds me of the speech that agent smith

gives in the matrix where he talks about how they they try to create this perfect world and the and the uh the people rejected it so they had to create a deeply flawed world uh and then the everybody inside the pause was willing to accept that. Yeah, that's such a great analogy. Yes, yeah. For many years, the big media story about video games was that they were desensitizing the youth to violence or even morality in general. And there are some video games

where all you do is kill everybody on screen, but to me, those games are so cartoonish or impersonal that it's more like a high-tech version of dodgeball. I mean, for players who like role-playing video games, they want the conflicts to be really gut-wrenching. And psychologists are starting to use these games to study morality. Here's a psychologist, Jamie Madigan. these games to study morality. Here's a psychologist, Jamie Madigan. Like nobody thinks about the morality of Pac-Man, but, you know, Joel from The Last of Us is very much somebody that you think about, you know, the morality of what you're having him do

and what he's doing on the screen. Jamie writes about the psychology of video games, and he says there are players who can totally disassociate themselves and don't care about killing characters, or at least hurting their feelings. But studies have shown it's actually rare. People do sometimes go through and do like an evil playthrough, you know, of a role-playing game or whatever kind of game. But they generally do that second after they've kind of played through according to their own moral compass. I mean, we tend to think of morality as being black and white, but psychologists actually break down our moral framework into five components. Care versus harm, fairness versus cheating, loyalty versus betrayal, authority versus subversion, and purity versus degradation. You know, people vary, like individuals like you and I could vary on how sensitive we are to each one of those five.

So I may be really sensitive to morality around like fairness and purity. And you may be low on those, but you may care a whole lot about caring, you know, and authority. Like in life, we often think that people are acting irrationally when they're really just weighted very heavily towards one end of that spectrum. We often judge characters in video games for the same reason, which can affect the choices that we make. Like there was one study where psychologists tested people to see where they fell along that moral spectrum. And then they observed these people while they were playing a video game. You must protect the Watadavian creatures.

They actually had like a modified version of Neverwinter Nights, which was a single player role playing game from a few years ago. And they had sort of created these little quest lines within that game. And each one of those was designed to sort of present a moral quandary around, you know, each one of those five, care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. And they found that people's attitude towards those types of moral infringements outside of the games somewhat predicted what they would choose within the games. But that doesn't mean that games can only reinforce what we already believe. In fact, in some studies, psychologists have been able to heighten a player's moral sensitivity to certain issues that had not been high priorities for them.

So that if you highlight something about fairness in the game or make the player somehow think about that concept of fairness. And you can sort of temporarily make them more sensitive to transgressions against fairness. And then you can give them a moral quandary related to that, and they'll take it more seriously or find it more stressful, you know, to make a decision about. I mean, that's what the Telltale games did. I mean, they would often focus on one particular moral dimension for thematic purposes. Like, Game of Thrones games were all about authority versus subversion. The Walking Dead games were about loyalty versus betrayal. The Batman games challenged you on care versus harm.

Even Bioshock, the groundbreaking game that I mentioned earlier, tapped into purity versus degradation in terms of whether you saw those little girls as being beyond saving or not. And Oxenfree dealt with fairness because the ghosts on that island are angry about their fate. But if your character of Alex can take control of the time loops, you can actually cheat death for some of the characters. cheat death for some of the characters. Jamie Madigan wishes they could develop a system where the video game would tailor-make the choices to your specific moral framework. You know, I kind of joke like, this is how you can tell I'm a psychologist. I want to put multiple choice surveys, you know, into video games and have players fill

out these measures so that we can have this data on them. But, you know, if you could do it some way, that'd be super cool. And everybody's experience would be a little bit different and everybody would feel important in their own way for making those decisions and shaping that game. Now, I actually discovered things about myself playing the Telltale games. First, I did not realize what a romantic I am because I ended up pursuing every romantic interest in all of the games. But the choices that really haunted me were the violent choices that I made. There's another Telltale game which I loved called The Wolf Among Us, and it's based on a comic book series called Fables. In the game, you play the Big Bad Wolf, or Bigby for short,

and he's now walking around in mostly human form, keeping the peace among these other fairytale characters that are all living in this gritty urban film noir. All the decisions you make as Bigby involve whether you're going to take the sort of carrot or stick approach, which is about authority versus subversion, and a little bit of care versus harm. But that gets complicated when your job as peacekeeper involves dealing with your previous victims, like one of the three little pigs, who in this case is not that little,

and he doesn't want to take any orders from you because he hasn't exactly gotten over the whole blow your house down thing. It wasn't murder. I was hungry. Yeah, well, I'm hungry now. You don't see me tearing the flesh off of your bones. But you would if you could. Probably. But, uh, no. Hate's the wrong word.

They fear you more than anything. You ate a lot of people back in your day. I thought we were all supposed to have a fresh start here. I can't change the past. Well, you can't change people's memories either. I found the game really tense. Alyssa says that was by design. The whole world of The Wolf Among Us, everybody who lives in that space has an opinion about Bigby that you're pushing against from basically moment one of interacting with them. I think in the introduction,

it says something like, you know, people still haven't gotten over what the big bad wolf did. And then you're dealing with people and they clearly they're still reacting in this hostile way. And then you as the player have a chance to either try to change that story or lean into it and say, yeah, that is who I am. Thank you very much. There's another scene early on in the game where there's this creature called Grendel who is challenging your authority. You get into a huge fight and at the end you have the option of ripping his arm off or just letting him be. I'm the lapdog, huh? And I did it. I ripped his arm off. You fucking monster!

But I told Ryan Kaufman that I felt so disgusted afterwards, I actually quit the game without saving so I could redo the entire level and not pull his arm off. Well, that was the intended effect. That was one of those moments where we thought, all right, like it's right at the end of the fight and we put it there on purpose so that you would be, your adrenaline would be going. You're really thinking like I'm in a video game

and in video games, we rip people's arms off. That's just what you do. And then to have that next beat be such the pull the rug out from your moment, you don't feel good about it. You don't get any points for doing it. It's very real. And people are like, holy shit, you are terrifying. So yeah, I'm glad you felt that. Although Alyssa says that I shouldn't worry that deep down there's a big bad wolf inside me. I think of it philosophically as it's practice.

Video games are practice for what if I do do the outrageous thing? How will the world affect? How will the world react to me? And how will I feel about that? And I do think that, you know, a simulation gives you a chance to push outside of the person you might be in everyday life and understand what that means to you and how it makes you feel like i was playing game of thrones and my daughter was watching me and she was like why are you being so mean and i was like well because i'm generally not you know i would like to i would like to role play that for a while and i think that's what's the gift that video games give us, and especially these kind of branching

stories give us, is they let you sit outside of your own shoes, experience the world from a different way and go, either I like that, or I don't like that, or I now know something that I didn't know before about myself. Do you think that also by working behind the scenes and knowing how the sausage is made, you felt more freedom to go outside of what you would normally do because you really understood the artifice of it. You suspended your disbelief a little bit less. Absolutely. I think I worried less about the long-term consequences of my decisions, partially because I knew the space of the sausage factory.

The space of the sausage factory. I mean, overall, I think these questions are touching on a bigger issue that we all wrestle with. How much do our choices matter? Because the nice thing about video games is that no matter how difficult the choice is, once the choice is made, it has an impact. Or it should have an impact if the game developers have the time and money to do what they want. Otherwise, the story is too predictable, unlike real life. Or, if you make choices and it's not clear whether your choices had an impact or not, then it's too much like real life. And the game of life is not always that satisfying. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. My assistant

producer is Stephanie Billman. Special thanks to Alyssa Finley, Ryan Kaufman, Jimmy Madigan, and Adam Hines. I'm very psyched about the next game that Adam's working on, which is called After Party. In this game, you have to outsmart the devil with drinking games. It hopefully feels like an actual night out where you go out and you think to yourself, man, if I drink whiskey, I'll become like a kind of sleepy, belligerent drunk. But if I stick to vodka, I'll get a little flirty and stay up. So of course that just means that instead, like, with an oxen for you, you had at most three choices per things you could have.

In this game, every single choice and every single moment where you can speak, it has that minimum six to seven. It can sometimes be like 10 or 11 or 12, depending on how many drinks are just available in the bar. My favorite drink is a white Russian, so I hope they have a lot of them in the game. So long as they don't make me spacey or sleepy like real alcohol does.

Now, there were a lot of other great RPG games that I didn't get around to mentioning, let alone the Black Mirror episode Bandersnatch, which actually was a choose-your-own-adventure game where you could click certain options that would affect the direction of the story. What are some of your favorites? You can let me know on the show's Facebook page.

I tweeted emalinski at ImagineWorldsPod, and my website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.