The Illusion of Freedom

Despite achieving a feeling of agency (control, self-direction, choice) when you play a game, you are in fact playing out the prescribed vision of a game designer. Carefully considered illusions of freedom are created in good games to give the player a sense of control and a unique, personalised experience. There are no truly open-ended worlds in games.

‘Branching’ (Spector, 1999) is a games development technique used to create this illusion of freedom– the freedom to roam at will in a world, by creating a number of options a player can take, with a number of different outcomes depending on the choices they make, the paths they follow and the weaponry/skills they employ.

Taking different routes offer players meaningful choices that affect their progress in some way, even when they end up coming to the same event or challenge. Forks in paths are laid out in game worlds, sometimes knowingly taken, sometimes unknowingly – by turning left you battle with X, or by turning right, you meet character Y. Either way, the game’s designer has created these branches and interconnected outcomes with the game’s overall goal or narrative in mind.

It’s a bit like walking around a seemingly open-ended space, when in fact you’re walking through a series of interconnecting transparent tubes; you can see around you and you get a sense of space and openness (you feel like you can go where you like), but to progress in the game you have to follow the direction the transparent tube takes you. BTW, the more games you play the easier it is to spot where there is a fork in the road, a doorway to enter, a character to confront – you know it’s an illusion of freedom, but somehow it doesn’t affect the sense of agency you get from playing the game. It may not be open-ended but it certainly isn’t linear either.

In game development terms, the branching that creates the illusion of freedom means the creation of content and experiences that many, if not most players will never see- rarely do players retrace their steps and replay, unless they have to.

Branching also creates the need for signs or clues that redirect the player back onto the primary game path. The game’s narrative or player’s purpose needs to progress and make sense, regardless of the order in which players may experience branches of the game.

This is, as you might expect, an expensive and time consuming development process. Hence the budgets and the development time that are synonymous with digital game development. But the ‘personalised’ experience that it creates for the player is what makes digital games so unique, and is something worth reflecting on in learning design.

Giving learners a degree of freedom to choose the path and process in which they complete a task, or when they are given a set of tools or principles that will help or even hinder their progress, makes for a more meaningful and deeper learning experience. Learners are then not simply following a prescribed route or shopping list of actions, passively and without thought; they are thinking through a problem or task for themselves, considering ways to approach it, making decisions on skills or knowledge that are needed to resolve a problem or answer a question.

Spector, Warren (1999) Remodeling RPGs for the New Millennium

Labels: agency, RPG

posted by DS at Monday, January 11, 2010