Well yeah chris you're right, obviously I generalized a bit. But I can't think of any literary work often spoken in conjunction with the words "great" or "classic" with a happy ending -although I admittedly don't read a lot of books-.

Of course, just because it hasn't been done yet(or maybe it has?) doesn't mean it can't be done. Just saying, that from my point of view there is a very discernible pattern.

Don't forget that in stories the characters have a near-infinite range of possible responses to situations, be they good, bad or worse. In games you HAVE to limit the player's options because to do otherwise is impossible. So your in-game character is never going to be able to do what you'd do, merely what you'd do when presented with the available options. Which is quite a big difference.

Still, as noted it sometimes still works. And as noted, it works better when there IS no option three.

Regarding choices that have stuck with me, (spoilers as always, but like: dude! It's 2010 already) mass effects Ashley/Kaidan sacrifice was a pretty good one.

I basically never used either of them (tali and wrex 4 lief!), but they were both well-developed enough to be memorable characters, and I really had to pause and think: emo psychic who looks like a burns victim, or annoying bible-thumping racist who looks like a burns victim, but both likeable enough for me to not want either to die.. I went for kaidan because he was busy setting up us the bomb, and I figured that was more important...but I realised as I was doing so that what I was really doing was using the bomb as an excuse.

And it was that realisation, the fact that when forced to choose, I had to hide behind an excuse rather than admit that I basically preferred to let a bible-thumping racist die...and that, really: it was because she was a bible-thumping racist (even though we'd ascertained by this point that it was mostly just her upbringing, and she was learning to get along with aliens).

Essentially, I was prejudiced, and clearly embarassed enough by my own prejudice to seek an unrelated excuse for it.

And then she goes and says "It's OK, commander: I don't regret a thing.", which MADE ME FEEL EVEN WORSE.

So yeah, that stuck with me.

[Ignores post above on account being 3/4th through Mass Effect 1]

Yeah, not everyone always plays the latest of the latest. Some people wait till the price drops and stuff...

To be fair, I did exactly the same, but ME1 has been about 3 quid for over two years...

I think the first respondee may have had magic mushrooms for lunch. I see me joining that forum about the same time hell reaches 50 below.

Yeah, RPGcodex is pretty much entirely for "assholes so opinionated they no longer even recognise their opinions as anything other than fact".

Got Jonas's permission to sorta hijack the thread . Reading Jonas's post got me thinking about choice and immersion, in particular whether or not choice/consequence gameplay really has all that much effect on immersion at all...

In Bioware games (and what I played of Witcher) you have no real interaction with the world except via pre-scripted choice/consequence sequences. Not knocking Bioware, they make great games and I always have fun playing them. But I've never had a suspension of disbelief moment playing them, except possibly in long dialogue sessions.

When I look back at the games that really sucked me in, the ones I come up with are Half-Life, Deus Ex, Thief, and STALKER. Those games were less about choice/consequence and more about creating rough approximations of worlds. Admittedly part of that is believable interactions with NPCs, but even DX's choices were pretty tame (you had the Lebedev one, but the other ones such as letting people live/die, and the Rentons were pretty incidental compared to other RPGs).

With Deus Ex, the moment that blew me out of the water was when I was listening to the subsequents of the club owner in Paris. Just a guy talking about his club, but it really sold me on the believability of the world.

So...do you think there's a correlation between choice/consequence gameplay and immersion? Does one have a more lasting impact on you as a gamer than the other?

For me, C&C (assuming we can all agree that it covers choices on a major scale) isn't about immersion, but about the longevity and individuality of the experience. Discussing BioWare games tends to be more interesting than discussing structurally linear games, because it's exciting to hear what the other players experienced and compare notes. Further, major plot branches or tailored responses to my actions tend to make a greater impression on me than microscopic interactivity. That is to say, I generally hold the overall quality of a game in higher regard if it has that solid immersion, but when I try to remember individual moments, it's usually the plot branches that stick with me.

But to repeat the answer to your question: plot branches do nothing for my suspension of disbelief - it might help on subsequent playthroughs, but I very rarely play games more than once. There are just too many games to spend time playing any of them twice

I agree that the plot choices in games is not a big factor in immersion. Moonbo's mentioning of the Thief series revitalises the chills, and the feeling of despair and offness for want of a better word, that I get visiting The Cradle in T 3. Half Life 2 is another where general play has me totally hooked. We Don't Go To Ravenholm's beginning is awesome in a scary anticipative way.

Edit: Christ! Why did I have another look at the RPG Codex forum? The only one there who doesn't seem to have his head up his arse is a member of this forum. They're so busy waffling on about Dragon Age they have completely missed the point of the OP.

When I first learned that you could save Paul, it blew me away. I couldn't believe that the world was actually alive enough to let you change something that, at the time, seemed like such a pivotal moment in the game.

Unfortunately, as I grow older and play more games, that kind of thing is becoming less and less interesting to me. These choices are never actually meaningful. The nature of story in games is such that for every branching path that is added, somebody has to make it, and the story is always crippled by it. It's impossible to account for all the different choices a player can make, so the designers have to limit them arbitrarily, and split their resources among the ones they leave in. So I never get to make the choice I really would have made, and it never changes as much as it really should. From the instant it becomes possible for Paul to die, I know that from that point on, he won't have any real impact on the story.

Luckily for Deus Ex, it also offers a lot of choice in an area that I actually do find interesting: gameplay. The interactions between the player and the game world form stories of their own, which, being governed by (very dynamic in this case) systems rather than made by hand, are infinitely deeper and more numerous than any amount of canned choices the designers can throw at me. And this is ultimately where the game shines; when it's helping me create my own narrative, not asking me to choose my own adventure.

I think C&C can help immersion. You see, I believe that there's more than one kind of immersion. There's the one that the games industry seems to be gunning for, aka suspension of disbelief which I would call emotional immersion. Then there's intellectual immersion. To me, that is when I'm totally immersed in the choices, and naturally this only happens in heavy RPG/Strategy games. But Strong C&C can really help there, which is kinda what I'm hoping Alpha Protocol will be.

For the record, the third kind of immersion I believe in is the "physical" ie, it looks, and sounds real.

That's interesting Jaedar. I can't really get into strategy games but I can see why people love them. There may even be a fourth form of immersion: *The joy of an eight year old at play*, I have recently re-discovered this in Just Cause 2.

I think it's somewhat like color timing (assuming I correctly remember what color timing is). When done badly it breaks immersion, but when done well you shouldn't notice it with respect to immersion.

So, for example, when a game won't let me do something that the player character should be fully capable of doing when that thing is a blatantly obvious choice that would make perfect sense ... well that comes off like cracking your skull on the side of the holodeck, no matter how good everything else is you've just been slapped in the face with, "No, silly. This is a game where you can only do what I want you to do." That doesn't really help with any kind of immersion.

Obviously there are two ways to avoid such a situation. The first is to have narrative choices. The other is to never have a spot where an alternate choice would make any kind of sense. Actually that's really two different versions of the same thing: wherever there is a sensible alternative choice, let the player make that choice. (Sensible might not be exactly the right choice of word here, if an option is obvious and in character but not particularly rational, the player should still be able to use that option.) If you try to implement that you'll see that one way to do that is to make that wherever be equal to nowhere, another is to simply locate all wherevers in the narrative and give appropriate options at all of them, thus returning you to the original two ways.

This, to a certain extent, is why I think there's a tendency to lack Jaedar's "proper story" endings. If we look at tragedy in particular I think the obvious conclusion is that it wouldn't work well in general. I'm not saying that it wouldn't work well ever, but for the most part I don't think it would work out.

Now I've previously written 544 words on this topic which I decided not to share because, among other things, no one is talking about making games that are tragedies. I'll try to be shorter here.

First off, there are two different definitions of tragedy. One is Tragedy as opposed to Comedy. In that definition every work of fiction is either Tragedy or Comedy, Tragedy if in the ending everything is fucked over, Comedy in all other cases. This is why Dante's most famous work is known as The Divine Comedy even though it is not particularly funny. That is not the definition of tragedy I'm using here. I'm using tragedy as a genre, what we mean when we say "Tragic hero," "Tagic flaw", and stuff like that.

In that sense a tragedy is a story about someone who ziged when they should have zaged and was screwed over as a result. Often times it is about someone who made an entire series of zigs when even one zag would have saved them. A defining characteristic is that they could have zaged, they should have zaged, and they didn't. Zaging was a clearly visible option. Usually the reason that they didn't zag is the tragic flaw, which we tend to consider to be a character flaw but really, traditionally, it can simply be something like being misinformed. In tragedy the hero is screwed, but he doesn't necessarily deserve it.

The problem I see with translating something like this into a game is that the whole point is that the eventual outcome was avoidable. Easily avoidable*. As such the player might very well decide to avoid it. A player might decide to zag. At which point, to have the game stay a tragedy, the game has to stop the player. In that case the player would be perfectly justified in saying, "What the fuck game?! I want to zag. Zaging is a valid option. It should be the easiest thing in the world to zag. I don't want to zig. No good can come from zigging. Why in the God forsaken bloody plains of Hell are you forcing me to zig?!" That's not a good response to provoke from a player. At least I don't think it is.

Now there is another option. Have the zag be an illusion, something looks like a zag and turns out to be a zig. A story like the story of Oedipus, where Fate is making sure everything goes shitty in the end, is one in which any thing the hero did would eventually result in the same outcome**, the only question being, "How?" Seeing the way in which every attempt, no matter how reasonable, resulted in failure might be somewhat interesting, but it also screws with the idea of choice and consequence to the point that the players actions are clearly meaningless. If the outcome is the same whether the player puts in every bit of thought and effort available or the player decides to have the character stand in one place that, to me, seems to be taking away something very basic about what a game is. In a game, as opposed to something like a movie, you have a measure of control.

Anyway, that's my take on tragedy in games. Someone else want to look at another set of narratives with poor endings and see if how well those would fit into games?

-

* For example, Hamlet could have been king, got the girl, and lived happily ever after if he'd just killed his uncle the moment he learned the man was definitely guilty. Instead he decided that he knew better than God who deserved to go to Heaven, and as a result waited until his uncle had sin on his hands. As a result he died, his girlfriend died, his mother died, his old friends died, his girlfriend's brother died, his girlfriend's dad died. Someone playing Hamlet: The Video Game might not be particularly interested in raging against the Heavens and trying to overthrow divine authority. He or she might reasonably decide that it would be a good idea to simply accomplish the mission at the first available opportunity. In which case, either the game wouldn't end in tragedy or the game would say, "Fuck you player! You're going to lose whether you like it or not."

** This brings up a question I've never really heard addressed, is it still a tragedy if the hero still would have been screwed even if he didn't have the tragic flaw? If Oedipus knew he was adopted and learned who his real parents were Fate still would have found a way to force him into his appointed path. If he didn't try to fight fate he definitely would have been just as screwed. He would have been just as screwed no matter what. As such no tragic flaw can really be said to account for his troubles unless "Being Fated to be screwed," is a tragic flaw. Which, I suppose, it could be.

Those are all excellent points Chris, but I think there's possibility to explore less absolute tragedy in games, that is, games where in the end only some things are fucked over. Invisible War is a good example of this: no matter what you do, something will be considerably fucked over. You implement world peace at the cost of any last ounce of freedom. Or you maintain relative stability by strengthening the sinister conspiracy. Hell, in the last two endings, almost everything is fucked over.

Mask of the Betrayer's two proper endings are similar: you sacrifice yourself to save a ton of other people, or you sacrifice a ton of other people to save yourself. Dragon Age's endings are very similar: sacrifice your own life to kill the arch demon, sacrifice someone else's life to kill the arch demon, or make an unholy pact with a witch to conceive a child and trap the demon in your unborn offspring. All of these endings accomplish the overall goal of the game (slay the demon), but there's always a major cost, and how to pay it is up to you.

There's also Torment's approach, where the whole object of the game is to die, which somehow manages to present an on paper completely fucked over ending - the immortal player character becoming mortal again and being cast into the eternal demonic wars of the hells - as something which is actually a satisfying, if bitter-sweet, resolution to the story. The choices in Torment aren't about what ending you choose (there is only one), but how you accomplish it.

What I find a bit frustrating about Torment's ending though(and you should spoiler tag that ) is that there are plenty of non-standard game overs before that point, but in many regards they are actually BETTER than the proper ending :S

And I thought there was an evil ending in Torment where you basically go: Screw that shit, I'm immortal forever and have slain all my enemies. Guess I'm wrong on that count.