Hi! I'm finding this discussion interesting, so I hope you don't mind my clarifying a couple of things that it looks like I didn't say clearly enough in the original article.
Re. gender, I would actually have found it very interesting (if perhaps unmarketably grim) to have the game portray a woman's life in the Wasteland as a lot harder than a man's. For that matter, I've played and liked a lot of games where there was no option for a female avatar at all. What did bother me was the sense that the game designers hadn't really *thought* about what a woman's existence in this world would be like except as an after-effect with some very minor and unpersuasive modifications to the default: the world as seen by a heterosexual man. This caused a number of fictional moments that rang false to me and jarred me out of the game -- and unlike the cases where I was jarred out of the game by, oh, a bottle of beer that somehow was still good 200 years after bottling, I couldn't see a good game design justification for things to be that way.
I certainly did not feel that the game featured player controlled exposition either. The main quest was incredibly linear; told in very certain, concrete steps. The side quests were completely arbitrary and most had no relation at all to anything the main story was about. It would be like reading Moby Dick and putting it down every other chapter to read a few pages out of Pride and Prejudice.
Nnnnno, because the intersticial stuff still had a bearing on the broader story of what was going on in the world, and gave additional color to your choices.
What impressed me was the successful interleaving of Main Quest and sandbox/side-quest elements: when you get to Megaton and the game basically says, "okay, now you have to go do some side stuff; come back when you have some money to buy your next plot coupon", that structure -- though obvious -- did work for me. I felt like I knew what to do next in general, I wasn't lost and undirected, but the invitation to make it on my own in the world was an effective piece of the fictional arc. Fable 2 tried to do something similar, I think, but it didn't work for me nearly as well; the "important" and "unimportant" parts felt much more unlike in nature.
I would have to say this woman is a meta-gamer. She seems like the kind of person who continually restarts games just to choose the "right" response
Nah. I rarely restart anything unless it's a very short, broad game and I've already finished the game once, and I tend to resist the urge to check out wikis and other cheats for guidance unless I run into something that feels like a bug. (I did, at one point, have some serious trouble progressing the Little Lamplighters mission, and had to resort to a wiki to find the continuation of the main storyline. But for the most part I try to steer clear of that kind of spoiler.)
What I do find is that character creation -- even if I have a pretty good idea of the effects of my skill point distribution -- is not a very good way to generate a protagonist that I find interesting in story terms.
Furthermore, if she's so upset that every character she ends up playing is the same (which is even more odd since she starts out saying that she consciously picks a certain type of character, but whatever), then mix it up.
"So upset" overstates matters quite a lot, but: I choose stealthy rogues who use ranged weapons because that specifies the kind of *gameplay* I enjoy -- I'd rather sneak around and snipe enemies from a distance than run right up and hit them with a melee weapon. If I pick a melee set-up I usually spend the game dying a lot, and when I'm not dying, I'm still not having as much fun.
But there's very little narrative content to that choice at all, and it doesn't contribute to much sense of the protagonist as a character.
Similarly, usually the early choices about whether to act good or bad are sufficiently generic and uncontextualized that they're not really interesting from a storytelling perspective. By default, I'll choose to be nice, if I'm not given any kind of motivation to be otherwise.
By contrast, I felt like getting rolling in Mass Effect took too long, and I didn't really need to spend *that* long customizing the shape of my protagonist's lips -- but because I was invited to pick some backstory elements for my protagonist alongside the other choices, I was forced to start imagining some kind of specific and characterized person, and then I found myself making other choices for her around this idea that I had. It was like being given an improv prompt or two and then fleshing that person out. There were still a lot of issues I had with the intro there, but overall I felt I wound up with someone a good bit less generic.
As I mentioned above, and as Alex mentioned earlier, it seems our dear Emily wants to be co-author.
Not necessarily all the time, but sometimes, yes. (I've actually written a couple of other columns on that general idea,
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/08/col ... betray.php and
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2008/07/col ... playin.php .)
If you've got a fairly sandboxy game, but you want to let the player have a story experience with it if he wants one, then I think you have to hand over some structural and interpretive tools to the player. Like: letting him pick goals; encouraging him to think about character motivation and background; either signaling moments of crisis that he can choose whether to activate, or letting the player define his *own* moments of crisis on some way. (That's what I really wanted in Fable 2, discussed at
http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/10/col ... commun.php .)
Alice and Kev (
http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/) is an example of this in action. Sims 3's traits come a lot closer than conventional RPG stats to expressing characters; add to that the ability to pick life goals and an ability to change them at certain points if you gain enough XP, and you have a kind of rudimentary story-arc kit for the player to do things with -- if he wants to. It's not forced on anyone who isn't into that aspect.
On the other hand, the kinds of crises and experiences that are possible in Sims 3 are still centered on a very mundane consumerist model, so it's hard to have stories about challenges other than poverty.
So what I usually imagine when I'm blue-skying about playing co-author is something between Fallout 3 and Sims 3 on the sandbox continuum, but with events that can function as motivating prompts to the player.
That would be not so much "press this button if you'd like a romantic crisis to occur soon", but "here's a world with its own built-in rules, and you can make up goals and wishes for your character, then see how they play out in this universe; you get to push that character towards big crises and successes and changes of motivation".
Meanwhile, the game's rules do contain a procedural rhetoric that has its own message -- like "life in the Wasteland is unfair, and when you try to interfere in the unfairness, you very often just make things worse". The particular *way* in which the character experienced that theme, the goals he tried to pursue, the motivations he brought to it, whether he decided to give up at some point or to keep fighting the bad odds, or somehow managed in fact to overcome them despite everything -- those aspects of the story would be up to the individual player.
But I'd be pretty interested in the "push this button for a romantic crisis" game too, honestly.
) of Bethesda's game systems means that stats aren't really worth a damn at all. Most of the "choices" you make throughout the game are pretty much pointless anyways.
