The Illusion of Choice

[UleTheVee]

Recently, I've been playing some Deltarune (I'll even write a bit of an essay here) and I remembered that there are a lot of games that played with your choices or made them meaningless. What games have you found to have been playing you all along?

[Bravosi]

Probably all the Telltale games, lol.

[StaceyPowers]

I've heard people complain about the lack of choices in Bioshock Infinite in this regard, but to me that increased my empathy with the characters, who were trying to change the outcome of bad choices made in events preceding the game, but who were in many respects trapped by those choices during the game.

[skyfire]

I think most of the FPS games don't have much choice because often they lack the storyline. Survival games with storyline usually have the choice. And that can be pretty much limited. But pure FPS with shooting in multiplayers hardly have the choice. So for each type of the choice that we see in survival story can definitely matter as well. 

[UleTheVee]

On 3/9/2019 at 9:43 PM, skyfire said:

I think most of the FPS games don't have much choice because often they lack the storyline. Survival games with storyline usually have the choice. And that can be pretty much limited. But pure FPS with shooting in multiplayers hardly have the choice. So for each type of the choice that we see in survival story can definitely matter as well. 

While I do agree with your point the thread is mostly about the illusion of choice. As in, when a game taunts you with supposed choices you can make but after some time, the player finds out that none of their choices matter and that they are at the mercy of the game.

[StaceyPowers]

Now that I’m almost done with my first playthrough of Bioshock 1, I definitely have to mention this one as well.

SPOILERS BELOW***

 

You don’t appear to make many choices in this game. It’s a shooter, and you’re pretty much just following instructions from a guy over the radio. Why? Well … huh. When you think about it, you’re really not sure. It doesn’t seem particularly logical, even if he does seem sympathetic.

But you figure, “Well, it’s a shooter, and I’m used to stories in shooters being a bit bare-bones.” So you shrug it off, despite the narrative complexity of your environment.

Later, you find out that doing what this guy says all this time was illogical, and the only reason you were doing it was because your character was under the influence of mind control. This is revealed in a cutscene where you have zero control over anything—the genius of it being that in a way, your ability to operate the gamepad controls before was essentially the “illusion” that convinced you that you had free choice.

It’s interesting that both Bioshock 1 and Infinite deal with issues of powerlessness. But in Bioshock 1, Jack has too few choices, and in Infinite, Booker has (or had, in his backstory) too many. Both end up restricting their expression of will.