Free play?

Reason magazine website published an interesting article a few years ago. It basically talks about the interaction and dynamics of games and politics:

Political ideas are infiltrating not just the back-stories of games but their "play mechanics" -- the inner workings that shape game behavior. It may be the scripted parts of the games that explicitly state political notions, but what's ultimately more significant is the way games can communicate doctrine by demonstration, the same way sports communicate physics. As Salon's Wagner James Au once put it, "Socially minded films and television programs can only dramatize their politics, but we now have a medium where you can interact with them, as an engaged participant." If cinematic spectacle grabs eyeballs, then gameplay grabs minds.

That's a pretty acurate portrayal of what video games have become today, unlike watching a film or TV, a video game really puts you in the action, it's not a soldier ass you are watching on the TV the one that is under fire, it's your ass that's on the line! Quoting from the book Character Developing and Storytelling for Games from Thompson Publishing (very good book, I recommend it):

Games allow us to become characters we could not be anyway else. (Or something like that)

Free the Gamers!

In theory, the easiest way to graft an ideology onto a game is through the story, as with the post-apocalyptic backdrop to Gore. In practice, it's not so simple. Facile analogies to the movies have concealed a deep tension between game play and narrative.

Storytelling has so possessed game design that, with the exception of sports, racing, and a few other genres, it is rare for major titles to fore go extensive script and character development. But while stories can supply context and direction, they are told, not played. Full-motion video became reviled by many gamers in the mid-'90s for periodically butting in to tell unevenly produced story-snippets. Though visually striking, such vignettes tend to clash stylistically with game graphics. But the real downside is that they seize control from the player. One moment he is guiding the main character's actions; a moment later that power is frozen while a video clip plays. If the protagonist does something during the scene that the player would rather not have done, that is considered an acceptable cost of telling the story.

While it is true that we gamers demand a great deal of interactivity many of us still like a certain degree of guidance to play through a game, in GTA series while the gameplay offered you a lot of freedom to roam the city it still offered you a linear set of missions to advance through the story, unlock new areas, or acquire more abilities, sure you where free to do it or ignore it but in order to advance linearity or guidance is needed.

Games with extreme freedom got lampooned by the Penny-Arcade webcomic a few days ago.

Why? because sometimes it's not funny when when you don't know what to do next, it is said with certain reason that the player must have the objective clear in order to know what to do next, there is a great difference between guiding the player and designing stiff constrained environments. Ironically to achieve freedom the game must have a set of defined rules.

Another pitfall for "too open" environments is that sometimes it will be impossible for the player to know if he/she has made a mistake from which its impossible to recover, the player will continue playing for a while until he/she realizes the mistake, and what if he/she saved the game at some point before? The most viable solution would be to implement a system that makes "game over" as soon the player makes the mistake, but it will be harder to implement that on open environments.

Games are not simply another channel through which artists communicate but a means by which individuals take control. That control is brought to bear in a new and dynamic community where no topic, assumption, icon, or milieu is entirely safe from scrutiny.

I would disagree in a way with the above statement, while an artist wants to express his thoughts or feelings through his works, it is still up to the people who experience his works the feelings they get when watching a paint or listening to a music composition, if the artist managed to capture the thoughs and feelings in the way he expected it then it can be said that his work is a success, the same goes for video games, only that the way to experience the work of art goes beyond watching listening or touching, it is interactivity.

Because they want fun, not lectures, players have been known to skip scripted scenes -- or to wreck them just to see what will happen. Well-designed games get back on track despite such mischief, but they can't force an indifferent player to pay attention to the story. My father has played the war game Red Alert (Virgin) and its sequels for years but has never tackled the scripted missions. Instead, he plays in "skirmish" mode, which delivers strategic challenges without the movie clips or story. He never finds out who ends up ruling the world, nor does he seem too concerned about it.

It's true that you can't force an indifferent player to pay attention to the story, anymore than you can force a guy with no musical taste whatsoever to enjoy the classics, but then again it is up to the player those experiences, and it is in the developer's power to craft a story that will grab most people's attention.