aboyd said:
However, I wrote that off as hopeless, whereas I did not write off your comments as hopeless, and thus, I engaged you.
Flattery will get you nowhere!
Right. Because, as my interpretation is different from yours, mine must not be objective and must be clouded.
Well, what else do you want? I want to convince you that I'm right and you're wrong, not that we're both subjectively right. I may not convince you -- and my approach may be ineffective given your tastes -- but I'm not going to say, "Both are equally valid."
I'm not really sure how to explain my sentiments on this well. There is a degree of subjectivity to all this and whether one enjoys the ending is a matter of taste as much as anything else. But there is also a degree of objectivity, I think, particularly because this is not just art but also a game. Objectively, I think a game fails when it does not let players do what they want or provide a valid reason for them not doing so.
I also think you're mistaking my efforts to *objectively* judge PS:T as me restating my *subjective* feelings about the game as objective analysis. I loved PS:T. The ending blew me away. But when I read the post about how the ending discourages replaying, it struck a chord with me and I started thinking about it objectively. Or, as objectively as a I could. PS:T is a game I place on a pedestal and adore. So it's not a matter of making the ending "many times better for me." It was many times better than almost any other ending to any other game I've ever played. It's a matter of figuring out whether it could've been done better from an objective "theory of game design" standpoint. I am convinced it could've.
Because that's not how my brain works, and I understand that people are built differently. To me, the feeling that "it has to end like this" drove home the tragic conclusion. Taking that away would have taken away some of the punch.
I just disagree really, really strongly with this. Passionately, as is probably clear from my posts. I don't think players need to be swaddled. And the inevitability you're talking about could be accomplished just as well by having the endings preordained based on the player's prior actions, but nevertheless varied based on what those actions are.
I should confess, this is something of a mission for me. Back when I was a kid, I loved jRPGs. In fact, I set out to make one, writing some 200 pages of uninteractive dialogue, gathering a team of suckers, etc., etc. Project failed. I then worked for pay on a GBC jRPG, writing another linear, uninteractive story. I then used RPG making software to make such games, adding a little interaction, but basically still telling my story. I worked at a computer game company writing linear stories for RTS games. Etc., etc.
Backing up farther, I should say that when I DMed (or "narrated" as we usually called it) games, I would inevitably steer the story. The left and the right corridor always led to the same plot twist. Etc.
Some point along the way, I played the various western RPG greats (PS:T, FO, Darksun, etc.). Which I loved.
Eventually, I started reflecting and realized that many game writers are writing games as books. Not as games. I was doing the same thing. (Indeed, my fiction writing is what had gotten me my game jobs.) But the problem was, I realized, game writing isn't fiction writing.
Adam Cadre begins Photopia with a bit of dialogue where a child asks her babysitter, "Tell me a story." The baby-sitter responds, "Wouldn't it be more fun if we told it together?" Ironically, Photopia is just a book that you click to continue. It's all Adam Cadre's story. But he was right, all the same.
It *is* more fun if we tell it together. Sometimes the story doesn't get told as well, of course. But as a writer your job is to make it so that the *player* can tell *his* story the best way possible. You facilitate it so that his inartful impulses get channeled through your labor and wind up making his avatar witty, kind, cruel, etc. in literary ways.
PS:T let me tell my own story for most of the way through. Or at least did a pretty decent job of it. The highwater mark of that is when Ravel asks you what can change the nature of a man. I sat there staring at that list for some time, racking my brain for the right answer. For my answer.
I'm sure Chris Avellone could've picked the thematically best choice from the list and written a killer line for it and tied it into fifteen other moments in the game.
But it wouldn't have been as wonderful an experience as choosing for myself.
The problem is that at the end, PS:T tells *its* story, not my or your story or Dorrie's. Having loved the game, we've all accreted our ideas onto that story so that it *feels* like our story. But at bottom, Avellone made a choice for what he thought the right move for TNO was, and that's the move TNO made. No list. No choice.
I'm not unsympathetic to the view that having a choice-list at the end would trivialize the ending a bit by inviting the repeat replay tactic. I've become more and more wedded to the idea of the "fate as shaped by the player" ending. That would still be my story -- or at least how Avellone would write the ending to my story. But right now it's how Avellone would write the ending to his story, which sometimes is my story (like the first time I played through) but sometimes isn't my story at all (like when I play as evil).
It doesn't make sense from a design standpoint and it's a disappointing move. Above all else, disappointing. That's what I started this thread with: this disappointing realization that PS:T largely was someone telling a story *at* me, not *with* me.
Is this 20/20 hindsight? I doubt it's even close to 20/20, though it's hindsight. But this board isn't just about paying homage, it's about looking forward or, if not forward, looking to ideals. To say that PS:T is done and people enjoyed it so STFU seems unproductive on a host of levels, not the least of which that the main reason I've been provoking this discussion (and others) is because I want to learn how to be a better game writer, despite having all but hung up my boots.
No, there are those absolutist underpinnings, again. For me, if the game doesn't work for a CE aligned player, to the point that many people such as yourself found it flawed, I'd remove the option to play a CE character before I'd change the ending.
Now who's being "my way or the highway"?
---EDIT---
@ aboyd
Last point. This isn't a "new argument." My position wasn't that the ending was a bad ending in its own right. It was always that the ending discouraged replay because you had no control over how your character wound up. Maybe this is a refinement of that position, but I wouldn't say I've changed my point.
@ Mantiis:
In this game the ending is not why you play; you play to discover why and what you are.
But that seems to support the idea that once you've played through once, the incentive to play through again is somewhat diminished, since you already know why and what you are, etc.
@ all:
Anyway, barring someone really getting my frothed up again, I think I'm done, too.
