Thanks to the recent blog post on deaf gaming experience, I spent some time this weekend perusing oneoddgamergirl.net, which offers not only accessibility reviews for deaf and hard-of-hearing gamers, but also articles discussing gaming in other contexts, like mental health. I was particularly interested by this article, which describes a refugee’s experience playing Skyrim. This article made me rethink choice-making in video games, and the way it had been discussed in class and our readings.
Throughout “A Refugee in Skyrim”, the author draws parallels between her refugee friend, Melek’s traumatic life experiences and the decisions Melek makes through her Skyrim character. Those of you familiar with Skyrim will recall that it is not a particularly deep game. Generally Skyrim presents the player with choices very much like those devalued by Miguel Sicart in “Wicked Games”, choices which are meaningful mostly in their mechanical ramifications, free of consequences or ethical torment, especially since Skyrim is a game meant to be played multiple times as different characters, exploring all possibilities that interest the player. Much of the decision-making in Skyrim is also profoundly divorced from real world quandaries, mostly concerning the machinations of magical beings and imaginary nations struggling over ideas and objects that are utterly fantastical.
The central conflict in Skyrim, as far as Skyrim can be said to have a central conflict, is between the Imperial Legion, agents of the setting’s declining continent-spanning, Roman-esque empire, and the Stormcloaks, revolutionary nationalist guerilla fighters. I have, in my multiple playthroughs of Skyrim, never sided with the Stormcloaks, who use explicitly racist rhetoric and policies against members of the setting’s several non-human races. My sister, who has played roughly thirteen hundred hours (54 days) of Skyrim, has only ever made one character who sided with the Stormcloaks. But neither of us had evaluated this decision in any depth. Until reading about the reasoning used by Melek, I had rarely even thought about the Stormcloaks as anything other than a different texture for quests largely identical to the Imperial Legion quests. But Melek’s decision reminded me that choices and decisions are not only tools by which game designers make more immersive worlds for play, nor are they only methods for demanding a kind of profound (profoundly anti-pleasurable?) ethical engagement with players.
When Melek chooses to side with the Stormcloaks, she acts out an important part of her identity, and moves to strike a(n imaginary) blow for (imaginary) religious freedom, a right which has been denied her in real life. This is not meaningful in the sense that she is forced to wrestle with a deep ethical quandary, or make a decision which will forever govern her Skyrim experience, let alone her life experience. This is not a meaningful decision in that it forces her to take ethical action in a realistic, or even particularly coherent, context. This decision is meaningful, however, in that it allows Melek to be a self who can make such choices, to act out her values in a space that is safe and endlessly alterable. This article affirmed my belief that games like Skyrim, games without weighty ethical struggles or terrifyingly ambiguous possibilities, have an experiential value. Games which impose a final, important decision-making scenario also deny players the chance to wear other selves, to act out new and familiar possibilities, and experiment with and investigate their own values.
When I choose the Paragon dialogue option in Mass Effect, I know on some level what will happen, what the ramifications will be, and how a character will respond. Even when I don’t, the results are rarely bad, and I can always reload to try again. But this doesn’t, for me, undermine the meaning and pleasure of the decision experience. When I choose a certain dialogue option or action, I am acting out my values, exploring what kind of person I believe or wish myself to be. A game can be a device with which I ask and answer questions about myself, or expand my self, or alter my self for the purpose of exploration and enjoyment, all without consequences, and that too is meaningful.
In the article, Melek uses Skyrim to explore her past and her values in a space completely safe from real world consequences, where she can act out both what she has done and would like to do. The choices she is offered are not “wicked”, not difficult, and can always be rectified or altered. But this creates spaces of possibility and liberation unlike those at available either in the real world, or in more ethically important games. It appears to me that consequence and permanence are not always the only or most direct route to meaningful experience or emotional intensity. Wicked games as proposed by Sicart might propose knottier questions, but they seem as though they would also refuse a player’s personal agency to enjoy and wonder about their character and their attendant selves.
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