I love single-player games. Don’t get me wrong, I like all sorts of multiplayer games as well, and I enjoy cooperation and competition as much as anyone, but what really excites me about the medium of games is the possibility to craft a whole freestanding experience, a place to be explored, full of mystery and art, character and sound. I love the idea of building worlds, places that can be lived in and moved around in, like a dream given form and shared with the world.
However, I end up thinking a lot about what the assumptions are that we commonly make in this solitary format. I think about the tiny slice these games are of what they might be, and what these preconceptions of what a game experience must be end up conveying. We assume games have to be challenging – while this is an assumption that has had some pushback over the last decade or so, it is still predominant, and games which buck this trend are still frequently considered ‘not real games’. Every game must have a challenge. Every challenge must solve a problem. Every problem must therefore be solvable within the mechanical constraints of the game. Because of these assumptions, game worlds are primarily engaged with as a list of problems for the player to solve. Most problems outside of games are not particularly solvable – and almost all of them are unsolvable through the actions of a single individual. However, to create a satisfying story, to make the player the main character, we strive to construct problems just so, that the right person in the right place can do the right thing and unravel the whole knot.
At its worst, and with distressing frequency, this creates worlds where every problem can be solved by a bullet to the brain, or many bullets to many brains. This fixation on violent solutions is one that I and many others have discussed a great deal, but even moving past this particular weird aspect of video games we find another assumption: The player must be able to solve every problem they are faced with. This makes a certain degree of Chekhov’s Gun-style sense. Players will get confused between unsolvable problems and intentional challenges if they’re presented within the same context, so to conserve effort and add clarity we make all problems encountered something for the player to deal with – quests, if you will. In this way, we shrink our conception of what problems are and how they are solved. There are many problems in this world, and few of them are entirely intractable, but almost every problem becomes unsolvable when seen from a viewpoint which can only conceive of individualist action.
If you come to internalize this system of atomizing logic, you begin to see a world where the only actions you can take are those which are small and quantifiable – by a weird coincidence, these usually line up fairly well with those tasks which businesses enjoy having people available to do, especially when those people are disinclined from asking larger structural questions. Eventually, these seemingly intractable problems cease to be seen as problems at all, and come to be seen as rules, as simply ‘how the world works’.
What am I actually arguing here? This could be seen as an argument against creating any experiences meant for individual players, but I actually feel that the real issue is in this conflation of mechanical challenges and game-world problems. Some problems cannot be solved by us, or cannot be solved completely by an individual, but are still issues which we need to figure out a way to engage with and push against. To pretend that a fictional world can ever wholly represent the reality of war or revolution is as foolish as to believe that it can wholly represent the reality of love or creation – and, of course, few developers would claim to be building a perfectly realistic model of real-world problems. However, the act of boiling such an issue down into something simple enough that one actor can control its outcome presents an idea of what a problem is and how it can be solved that is insidiously misleading. We know it isn’t reality, but it comes to shape the way we see reality, and see our own role in it – and when we become accustomed to this lens, and are faced with problems too great to fix under our own power, it creates a sense of learned helplessness.