Meaningful Choices: Why You Should Only Play Games Once

I contend that the meaningfulness of a choice depends on its exclusivity. We make choices by choosing to do some things and choosing not to do other things, just as a definition can’t delineate its ambit without gesturing to what is not included (red includes the set of things that are red and excludes the set of things that are not red). Obviously, by virtue of human lives’ unilinearity, if I play Loved first disobeying each order and then second obeying each order, I have a made a choice. Because of the direction of the arrow of time, I have forever played Loved in this order and my perception of the second time through is irrevocably altered from what it would have been in the imaginary world in which I obeyed first and disobeyed second. What determines whether this modification from playing order constitutes meaningful choice is not clear cut. Certain decision ordinalities are clearly meaningful. For example, if you play Bioshock first and then rewatch the cutscenes in which the import of “would you kindly” is revealed, your experience will differ greatly from doing so in reverse. Alternatively, if I read the back of a Campbell’s soup can and then play Tacoma, it’s highly unlikely that my experience of playing Tacoma is meaningfully impacted, and vice versa.

Whether a choice is meaningful or not also clearly depends on your state of mind when making the original choice. If your approach is what I would term the “exploratory approach”, you go in to the game knowing that you want to make every possible combination of choices such that you experience the totality of the game’s content. Such an approach can transform decisions of apparent morality into ones of mere curiosity, what happens if I kill him and what happens when I don’t. This, as Miguel Sicart identifies, significantly undermines the ability to make meaningful choices and instead reduces them to merely “a series of interesting choices” (Sicart 106). Sicart’s solution to this problem is for game designers to follow his modified decalogue of “Rittel and Webber’s ten characteristics of wicked problems” (Sicart 108). As a player, this solution is unsatisfying, and I think it is possible to facilitate ethical gameplay as a player even in games that Sicart would suggest are not structured to do so.

In the sense that what game designers do is create a series of restrictions on a possibility space, a series of prohibitions, which as Foucault instructs us are generative not repressive, game players are always game designers, whether they are aware of themselves as inhabiting such a role or not. To play a game, one must create a metagame (my understanding of a metagame comes from Episode 14 of Scholars At Play, an excellent critical game analysis podcast that I would recommend, which discusses and expands on Boluk and LeMieux’s Metagaming, which I understand we are reading in week 6). Just as texts don’t exist without a reader and a reader must create in order for something to be read, videogames don’t exist unless they are played, and in the act of playing, various decisions are made that constitute restrictions. For example, in games like League of Legends or Smash Ultimate, something called “the meta” is often referred to that constitutes a subset of the possibilities of the game which constitute the dominant strategy and usually proliferate. In a less restrictive sense, if I choose to play a Pokémon game and I assemble a specific party of any type, I am playing a metagame in which the game world is navigated by this subset of Pokémon which I have elected to use. This concept of metagame is useful because it allows for the preservation of the notion of meaningful choice in games with finite but never completely explorable game worlds, such as GTA V (it’s impossible to exhaust every way in which the game could be played). Such games that do not have a finite set of choices are made meaningful through voluntary restrictions, such as in Fortnite that I am only going to land in Tilted Towers because I find this metagame most compelling. In this sense, at least a double choice is always being made. Every time one plays a game, one must first restrict initially the possibilities through a metagame and then secondarily restrict the possibilities by making choices within a given metagame.

Metagames also are a useful tool for thinking about why some people might describe themselves as finishing The Stanley Parable, or that outside the choice points there is nothing more to do. Some games are able to be finished because certain people have explored the possibility space of the particular metagame of their choice. Some people might describe themselves as finishing The Stanley Parable if they accessed every ending. Others may define themselves as finishing the game by earning every achievement. Still others might want to read every piece of paper in The Stanley Parable or hear every piece of dialogue. It’s not that certain games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim can never be fully explored, but games like The Stanley Parable can; it’s that people playing the former have more readily accessible raw material to construct interesting and satisfying metagames (through the creation of different characters and adoption of different playstyles), whereas those playing the latter, at least experientially, don’t have such raw material because the components of the game that aren’t that compelling.

I think with this understanding of a metagame, we can see that it is possible to transform the game that one plays by constructing certain metagames that expand the possibilities of ethical gameplay and meaningful choices. A player can choose not to take advantage of the save/reload features of many games. A player can choose not to weight choices based on in-game benefits but instead focus solely on the upholding of a certain form of morality. Players can make choices deliberately not taking into account their knowledge of certain in-game mechanics that would predict the outcome. What I am proposing is that if we care about ethical gameplay, we should strive to create metagames that deliberately reduce the amount of the game world accessible to us and perhaps play every game only once.