A funny thing happened while I was playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (oy, what a mouthful of a title). While the D&D-derived play mechanics were largely unchanged from the first KOTOR, and the game as a whole continued to display an affection for the Star Wars universe that Lucasfilm seems to have abandoned, I noticed something weird about the story.
Part of the problem was the overarching plot itself. Where the first game focused on simple light/dark, good/evil choices and the impact they could have on the universe when made by an ultra-badass Jedi such as the player, the sequel gets carried away with what amounts to a hermeneutics of the Force, and the writers’ sad devotion to that ancient religion doesn’t help them conjure up a lucid ending (sorry, I just couldn’t resist). Still, a little overwroughtness never really hurt anyone, and a lot of the plotting along the way is expertly done, especially in the way many of the minor sidequests tie back into the main storyline.
Much of the storyline is driven by the game’s light/dark dynamic. Depending on the choices you make, you grow into either a Jedi Knight or a Sith Lord: actions like murder, thievery, and slave-driving push you towards the dark side of the Force, while rescuing innocents and doing good deeds for no reward shift you towards the light. While the central plot points don’t change all that much, the sidequests can turn out very differently depending on how light or dark you choose to be. Your appearance changes as well: light-siders stand tall and have clear complexions; dark-siders hunch over menacingly (I don’t know why poor posture is supposed to be menacing, but there you go) and have varicose veins all over their bodies.
The player-character isn’t the only one affected by your light/dark choices. The other members of the player’s party can gain or lose “influence” as the game progresses, either by being treated well/badly by the player or by witnessing good/bad acts that the player performs. Increasing your influence over characters not only affects their appearance (the more influence you have, the closer they adhere to your light/dark alignment, with the same visual results), but also affects their development. For some party members, influence just results in some stat boosts, but a number of characters can actually become Jedi students of yours if your influence is high enough. Having a whole pack of Jedi backing you up rather than just a couple of schlubs with laser pistols can make a huge difference in how easy or difficult the later stages of the game are, so it pays to max out your influence with these characters.
This is where things got muddled for me. I usually don’t care about maxing out a character’s stats in an RPG; it’s almost always more work than it’s worth. Suddenly, though, there was a stat worth juggling: influence. The problem was, I couldn’t just equip an item or level up a few times to boost this stat; it could only go up or down based on the way the plot and dialogue progressed. So now I had to be very deliberate in the choices I made in conversations with characters, and in the way I managed light/dark decisions. It got to the point where I reverted to using a walkthrough, not to figure out a tricky puzzle or boss-fighting strategy, but to examine the conversation trees to determine the optimal influence-boosting path.
Most games, particularly RPGs, go down one of two paths: either the narrative drives the gameplay, or the gameplay drives the narrative. Here, though, was an odd in-between place: the narrative had become the gameplay. By “gaming” the plot (to borrow a term from MMOGs), I had effectively abandoned narrative closure as a goal.
This got me to wondering if it’s really possible to have a multicursal fiction that doesn’t leave itself too open to being gamed. Most of the successful game/story combinations I’ve run across tend to have one “true” ending; that is, one ending that really satisfies the player-reader (becoming the dungeon master provides narrative closure; being eaten by a grue does not). Alternatively, you can go the route of The Sims: abandoning authored narrative altogether, in favor of letting the player-reader become a player-writer. But branching storylines? I’m not so sure anymore.
I think Sims-style player-as-writer is the way to go. Although the kind of activity (completing quests) that games like WoW pushes you toward is also an interesting way to handle narrative.
I'd say more, but am now fuzzy with cold + cold remedies. In other words, I can't remember where I was going with the above...