Does anyone else remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books? I recall getting a few minutes off from class to go to those Book Fairs, and I'd always want to get one, along with book versions of movies or episodes of The X-Files. I still have my copy of “Independence Day: The Novelization.” I was so young and stupid.
The Choose Your Own Adventure Series was always a source of great frustration. The idea was simple. The reader would start on page 1 and the book would give the reader a series of choices, and based on what one chose, the book would direct the reader to various pages until the end of the novel.
What frustrated me to no end was knowing that I’d gotten a 150+ page book, and would only get maybe ten-thirty pages at a time, continually having to make little annotations to avoid making certain choices or avoid getting the characters murdered.
Even worse was that was when I was cautious. “Should Kirby go check out the weird noise in the basement? Go to page 123! Should Kirby go back to bed and read comic books? Go to page 13” Then at page 13 (yes, I’d choose page 13) it’d say something lame like, “Kirby went to bed and read comics. The end.”
I didn’t like being forced to go back and reread the same sections, or pick and choose what would be the most interesting page to turn to. Why couldn’t the author just give me what was the best experience in an easy-to-read series of pages? Why make me go on a treasure hunt for the coolest information, creating a map of incidents, not far off from this? I get that I probably wouldn’t have purchased what were essential genre stories for kids without the gimmick, and yet it bothered me all the same.
Now, here I am, thirteen years later and I have the same issue with the modern form of interactive storytelling- video games. My favorite gaming experiences of this past year have been pretty linear. I finally played The Orange Box, which, especially with Half-Life 2 and Portal, is like The Criterion Collection of gaming. I played Shadow Complex, a six-hour retro pastiche both in terms of gameplay (Reminiscent of Super Metroid and Castelvania: Sympthony of the Night) and story (Although based on Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game, it’s closer to an uber-cheesy seventies conspiracy thriller combined with a twist on the “Save the Princess” gaming trope). Bioshock was a game I replayed, a focused single-player experience that deserves more ink than I’m giving it here.
All of these games have tight single-player experiences, and none of them become sprawling epics, outside maybe Half-Life 2, which acts as an extended version of Children of Men.
This would have easily been a draw when I was ten and entertainment was a bit more scarce, but now, anyone with the internet and an interest in keeping up every good show on TV (and there are so many) has no shortage of free entertainment to keep themselves occupied. Also, unlike my ten-year-old self, I have a much busier schedule, and a greater awareness of my own mortality. Do I really want to spend sixty hours playing in post-apocalyptic wasteland covered in the color grey?
The idea of choosing good and evil has become a trend, and while it has been done well (once again, I point to Bioshock), other games have used it as a way to artificially extend the replayability. The makers of Infamous would say they're giving the gamer the freedom of choice, but Devo may have been right in saying “Freedom from choice is what you want.” I love going to the movies because I’m watching the best ninety minutes a studio could come up with. Maybe that’s why the gimmick for the film Clue, that there would be three different endings, forcing die-hard fans to pay three times to see them all, never took off.
I’m not dogmatically against choice in games. In fact, this is a way that the medium has distinguished itself from other narratives. The Grand Theft Auto series, while it still has a long way to go in its depiction of women, has made excellent use of an open world, full of possibilities and choices yet never losing that core story. Sure, I could spend all day messing around in Liberty City, but there’s a great crime epic that I’m missing out on. Little Big Planet, a title whose replayability comes from the user created levels and the level of customization, startled critics when the best levels out there were the ones already in the core game, but why should it have? These game designers knew the world the best, and created the most well paced, interesting experience they could come up with. Why would a kid in Wichita be a better level designer than the guys who invented the world?
It’s not just the length that gets in the way in these digital Choose Your Own Adventures. I always get this palpable sense of being cheated out of something if I miss a tiny bit of content while playing a game. It’s part of that obsessive nature that’s made me so attracted to games over the years, yet when I play Dead Rising, and I know that I can’t go back and fix everything I did wrong, I feel cheated out of an experience. Maybe my frustration is misplaced, but I wish more game designers would consider why Portal worked so well. Sure, it was fun, innovative, smart, fluid and had a unique perspective. But mostly, it never wasted my time.