Game designer Peter Molyneux famously stated that Americans were unlikely to play games as evil characters. He claimed that only 10% of them were willing to make the unseemly moral choices entertained by their more “free and liberated” counterparts in Europe and Japan. Other detailed studies have also examined how often players make “evil” choices.
I can’t tell whether these studies have accounted for impatience.
The Outer Worlds comes to mind: it's a game where players regularly make decisions that have serious consequences for the inhabitants of Halcyon System. I’ve seen what happens when an altruist unites different factions to ensure their collective survival, and I often wonder what would happen if a greedy sociopath set out to claim the system’s resources for himself.
…and then I remember that I’d have to endure all those loading screens again.
It’s not moral revulsion that prevents me from exploring these choices, it’s an aversion to tedium. I know that fully implemented storylines offer entirely new narratives, but I was tired of fighting the same four enemies during my first trip through the story. The possibility of a new story is interesting, but it's not interesting enough to make me grind through the same challenges a second time.
People have used Molyneux’s claim to gripe about the work involved in offering a meaningful choice — why waste effort creating an “evil” story arc if nobody will choose to experience it? Those complaints ignore the fact that sometimes the gameplay is a bigger problem than the narrative.
Being “liberated” might not have anything to do with it; the success of the Hitman franchise shows that people are willing to play as evil characters. Audiences are interested in exploring evil story paths, but not interested enough to put up with the boring parts more than once.
Image credit: Lenina Libera / CC BY-SA-4.0
No comments:
Post a Comment