You’re writing a story. You know what happens next – what has to happen next in order to complete the narrative arc you’ve been planning out. You’ve got a Big Picture you’re trying to paint, here. The only problem is, your canvas is a video game, and players are so uncooperative: the surface you’re trying to paint on keeps moving under your brush. The question becomes, how do we make it stay still long enough to get the details right?
In a medium defined by the choices we proffer, one of the trickiest bits of designing a game comes when you need to force the player to do something. It sounds kind of ugly presented that way, but it usually needs to happen at some point in order for the game to progress – and normally these forces happen quietly, without being commented on. In Super Mario Brothers you have to run right, in Metroid you need to get the missiles – the player is channeled by means of the structure of the game itself to make the choice the designer wants them to make. The system works. Hooray.
It works less well the more ambitious the narrative gets. Say the story only works if you Kill The Guy – but maybe the player doesn’t want to Kill The Guy. Maybe they really like The Guy. Maybe they really hate The Guy, but he seems generally fairly harmless, and they don’t want his death on their conscience. Either way, the next scene takes place at The Guy’s funeral, so you better fucking figure it out.
You have a number of options.
One: Just make them kill the guy. Play a cutscene where the main character stabs him a hundred times and pushes him down an elevator shaft and then says some kind of snarky one-liner. This one doesn’t ever really fail but it never really succeeds either. It moves the plot to the next scene, and all the characters do the thing they’re supposed to do, but the player wasn’t really involved in any of it and no longer feels like they’re controlling the character – since they aren’t.
Two: Make the guy try to kill them, or otherwise make the desired action necessary in order for the player to survive. This is usually the go-to for most games, but it makes The Guy seem like a brave idiot with a death wish, which may be entirely contradictory to the character you’re trying to establish. Also, if you want to make them Feel Bad for Killing The Guy, having it be an admissible-in-court clear-cut case of self-defense probably ameliorates that instinct.
Three: Control the number of ways the player can act. This starts getting into a bit more interesting territory, but can easily go awry – this is the “when all you have is a hammer” of game design. If you’re in a room with The Guy and all you have is a gun and he has the keys, odds are that The Guy is going to get shot. Take care, though, that there is a logical obstacle to progression, like that key you need – without that, you’re forcing the player to do something they might not want to do, for reasons you’ve never bothered to explain.
Four: Control the number of things in the environment the player can productively act upon. This one is a lot like the last one, except you can still do all the stuff you’d expect to be able to do, it’s just that none of them get you anywhere. You’re in a room with The Guy and also there’s a pool table and some pinball machines. You can play pool with him, and you can try to rack up a high score at pinball, but eventually if you want to leave you’re going to have to get that key from him somehow, and all you have is a murder pistol and a pool cue – and it turns out The Guy has a fatal allergy to the exact wood that pool cue is made from. He normally plays with gloves. This one is, if anything, even worse if the logical connection to progressing the plot isn’t clear, because it’s impossible to guess which of five arbitrary actions you should be trying to do to move to the next room. Maybe if you get a high enough score he’ll be so impressed he just gives you the key? Who knows!
Five: Control the number of ways the environment can productively react. If the player presses the button to talk to The Guy, and instead of striking up a conversation the character immediately shoots him in the face, it definitely sends a message: Boy, this character was apparently Really Mad at The Guy! Next to doing everything in a cutscene this one takes the most agency away from the player, but it also conveys a lot more about the character and their internal state – this character is not just angry enough to kill, but is so angry they cannot stop themselves from killing. The main issue with this is just outright confusion, the player perhaps thinking they pressed the wrong button or that they missed a choice. That’s a pretty crude example, though. A more subtle version of this might just have talking to The Guy lead to a scene where the main character accidentally touches him after playing with the deadly pool cue, leading to anaphylactic shock, for which they are later guilt-stricken over his unnecessary death – either way he’s dead and they’re responsible, but the path taken to get there was very different. This is akin to the Magician’s Force, a staple of stage magic wherein you proffer a vague choice to the volunteer but the outcome of both choices is eventually the same.
In the end, whether any of these work is mostly a product of how logical the connections you’ve built up prior to the scene are. If your character is uncontrollably angry, you need to be able to convince the player of that. If The Guy absolutely must be killed in order for vital goals to be achieved, that needs to be communicated. If the guy fights like a cornered rat, that has to make sense for his character. Plan ahead: If you need to force the player to do something, try to make it make some goddamn sense.
The game mechanics compel Mario to run to the right, but Mario runs to the right because that’s where the castle is.