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the international journal of volume 19 issue 1

computer game research May 2019
ISSN:1604-7982

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“This Action Will Have Consequences”:

Sarah Stang
Interactivity and Player Agency
Sarah Stang is a PhD by Sarah Stang
candidate in the
Communication and Abstract
Culture joint program at
York University in This article examines and challenges the assumption that videogames
Toronto, Ontario. She are interactive experiences which allow users to exercise control and
completed her Master’s agency over their narratives. Interactivity is a debatable concept which
degree in Cinema and has been so over-applied as to be rendered meaningless, and the sense
Media Studies at York of agency that videogame players experience is illusory. While this
University and holds a illusion of agency is problematic, it allows developers and players alike
BA in History and to engage with questions of ethics and morality. This article uses two
Religious Studies from case studies to explore different ways in which game developers have
the University of
connected player agency with issues of morality. The developers of
Victoria. She approaches
BioShock attempted to subvert notions of player agency by denying the
the study of digital
player any meaningful control within a narrative that centralizes free
games and other media
will. In The Walking Dead, players are forced to make morally-heavy
from an interdisciplinary,
intersectional feminist choices in a narrative shaped by branching and converging decision
perspective. trees. While these games are enjoyable and critically acclaimed, they
present the player with false choices and offer only an illusion of
Her published work has agency. In the end, this article argues that true player agency lies not
focused on game within pre-scripted videogame narratives, but in the players’
adaptations, gender interpretations of the game text, in their engagement with fan
representation, communities, and in the exchanges that occur between fans and
fatherhood and familial developers.
bonds, representations
of madness, and the Keywords: videogames, choice, agency, interactivity, ethics, BioShock,
monstrous-feminine in The Walking Dead
digital games. Her
current research
explores the symbolic
“If films offer voyeuristic pleasures, video games provide
connection between
vicarious thrills.”
monstrosity and
marginalized bodies in - Bernstein, 2002
digital games, tabletop
roleplaying games, and Game designer and theorist Chris Crawford (2001) famously defined
science fiction and interaction as “a conversation: a cyclic process in which two actors
fantasy media. alternately listen, think, and speak” (p. 5). Although this definition is
often cited by game scholars, Crawford also famously admitted that
Contact information: this cycle of input, process and output can describe a human’s
smstang at yorku.ca
interaction with a refrigerator as well as with a computer. He
disdainfully dismissed the kind of simplistic interaction a human would
have with a refrigerator as “silly and beneath the intellectual dignity of
almost everybody,” emphasizing that his “concern is with interactivity
that has some blood in its veins” (2002, p. 6). As David Myers (2003)
observes of Crawford’s statement, “[d]efining interactivity according to
the amount of ‘blood in its veins’ is a functional approach appealing
more to common sense -- or humanist intuition -- than to the
observation of any formal property of game design or quantitative
measurement of play behavior” (p. 74). This suggests that videogame
interactivity is something we feel rather than something we can
observe.

Dominic Arsenault and Bernard Perron (2008) have questioned whether

:
 videogames are interactive at all, arguing that “a video game is rather
a chain of reactions” in which “[t]he player does not act so much as he
reacts to what the game presents to him, and similarly, the game then
reacts to his input” (p. 119-120). Tommy Rousse (2012) also suggests
that since interactivity seems to encompass “any experience requiring
interpretation and construction between audience and creator,” we
should instead use the term “reactivity” to describe videogames more
specifically (para. 9). Similarly, Charles Bernstein (2002) points out
that “[t]he much-admired interactiveness of video games amounts to
less than it might appear given the very circumscribed control players
have” (p. 164-165). His observation that “[j]oysticks and buttons (like
keyboards or mice) allow for a series of binary operations” underscores
his point that “computers don’t respond or give forth, they process or
calculate” (p. 162-164). While it is certainly up for debate whether
videogames are interactive or reactive, some scholars have begun to
recognize the value of both concepts by using the term “interreactivity”
to describe the interpretive process of videogame play. Toby Smethurst
and Stef Craps (2014) adopt the term interreactivity, as they say, “[i]n
order to acknowledge the fact that during gameplay, it is not only the
game that reacts to the player but also the player who reacts to the
game” (p. 5). This is an interesting and useful term, as it allows
scholars to recognize that although technically computers are more
reactive than interactive, videogame play nevertheless affords a strong
illusion of interactivity.

Videogame interactivity, and the sense of control that it elicits in

players, is illusory. Player input causes the game system to react in a
specific, pre-coded way and, given our current lack of true artificial
intelligence able to adapt and generate content in reaction to
unpredictable human behaviour, player choice is necessarily limited. As
James Newman (2013) states, “videogames do not present endlessly
variable scenarios in response to player performance … No matter how
creative, exploratory, resistant or deviant the player’s performance
might be, it is bounded by rules” (p. 102). This is not necessarily a
negative thing, as rules are required for play itself. In videogames, as a
computer-based medium, rules -- understood as code -- are necessary
for the game to exist at all. Ian Bogost (2008) points out that “play
refers to the ‘possibility space’ created by constraints of all kinds” and
that we “encounter the meaning of games by exploring their possibility
spaces” (p. 120-121). Certainly, regardless of the constraints inherent
within videogame worlds and narratives, players create meaning within
these possibility spaces.

There is, however, a dissonance between the fact of videogames as

pre-scripted objects which offer only the illusion of interactivity and the
discourses around the nature of videogames among many developers,
marketers, players and scholars. There is a widespread assumption
among videogame proponents that interactivity means that the player
is afforded agency within the game. This laudation is particularly strong
among those who emphasize the difference between videogames and
other media. As Susanne Eichner (2014) observes in her book Agency
and Media Reception:

Video games are widely considered as paradigmatic

interactive media, distinguished from ‘traditional’ media
by interactivity, thus providing the positive pleasure of
agency for their players. More often than not, however,
the nature of interactivity and agency is not further
explicated. (p. 53)

Agency, understood as the general and fundamental capability of

humans to act in the world, is a tricky and multifaceted concept
restricted by countless factors, such as physicality, access to resources,
societal expectations and political structures. Although agency is
certainly not restricted to the personal or individual level, Eichner’s
concern is with the agency individuals have in the process of media
reception, and, similarly, it is individual agency that is the focus in most
articulations of videogame play. The discussion surrounding agency and
videogame play can be traced back to Janet Murray (1997), when she
:
 defined videogame agency as “the satisfying power to take meaningful
action and see the results of our decisions and choices,” and pointed
out that players desire this subjective experience of power and control
(p. 126). The sense of power and control that videogames afford must
partially come from the fact that the game system, like any computer,
responds instantly to our input, obeys our commands, and consistently
responds the same way to the same input. In this way, agency is
considered by many to be the natural result of interactivity and
therefore inherent to the medium.

Many scholars and players extend this assumption regarding player

agency to argue that videogames are co-created by both developers
and players, even suggesting that this medium is an example of Roland
Barthes’ (1975) scriptible or writerly text, in which the reader is
transformed from a passive consumer into an active producer of
meaning (p. 4). This kind of ideal text requires collaboration or co-
authorship, thereby breaking down the barrier “which the literary
institution maintains between the producer of the text and its user” (p.
4). Barthes compared the scriptible text to the more traditional lisible
or readerly text, which does not offer the reader “the pleasure of
writing” (p. 4). Although it is true that videogames are generally only
experienced through the process of play, as Murray points out, “[t]here
is a distinction between playing a creative role within an authored
environment and having authorship of the environment itself” (p. 152).
Indeed, no matter how loudly a videogame proclaims its own
interactivity, it does not allow for co-authorship.

Alec Charles (2009) suggests instead that a videogame should be

considered a faux-scriptible text, “which gives its user the illusion of
meaning, power and active participation, and which, in appearing to
satisfy its audience’s desire for agency, in fact sublimates and dilutes
that desire” (p. 289). This illusion of scriptibilité and its subsequent
sublimation of the desire for agency are reminiscent of the famous
criticisms of the popular culture industry put forth by Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer in 1947. Although it is unlikely that videogame
developers are self-consciously trying to spread ideological assimilation
and acceptance of the status quo, Charles observes that “the game’s
demands for functional reactivity promote an illusion of agency which
lulls the player into an interpretative passivity, and which thereby
serves to posit its subject within a virtually invisible (and therefore
virtually irresistible) ideological mould” (p. 289). The illusory nature of
videogame agency betrays a fundamental lie within the discourses that
surround the medium, particularly within the insistence that
videogames are interactive. Developers of narrative-heavy videogames
are often guilty of propagating this lie, since in those kinds of games,
as Tanya Krzywinska has observed, “you are promised some kind of
agency, but your agency is taken away from you” (as cited in Charles,
2009, p. 285). Although many games offer players at least limited
control over the abilities, equipment, statistics and appearance of the
player-character, much of the promised agency with which scholars,
players and developers concern themselves takes the form of choices
offered to the player within the game’s narrative. Games which are
marketed with the promise of player choice and which frame those
choices in terms of their morality have been particularly popular objects
of study. The consequences of promised agency which is revealed to be
illusory are especially concerning when the choices are ethically heavy.
Although this lie inherent in the medium is primarily a philosophical
concern, it has been directly addressed by videogame developers both
in interviews and in the game content they produce. Game designer
Ken Levine and his critically acclaimed first person shooter BioShock
(2K Games, 2007) provide a particularly relevant case study.

“A man chooses, a slave obeys”

The first installment in the BioShock series was applauded for offering
players a form of so-called moral choice: to either save or “harvest”
genetically-altered little girls, called Little Sisters, throughout the game.
:
 These Little Sisters exist to gather a substance called ADAM from
corpses, and ADAM is in turn used to upgrade the player-character’s
abilities. As Miguel Sicart (2009) elaborates in his study of the ethics of
BioShock, this is hardly an ethical choice as “there is barely any
difference between letting the Little Sisters live or die, since the player
will receive Adam [sic] as a gift if they are left alive, in a quantity
similar to what she would get after killing the girls” (p. 159-160). The
apparently heavy choice of saving or harvesting the Little Sisters only
influences some in-game dialogue and the ending scenes; as such,
“[t]he game turns their [sic] alleged key ethical decision-making
mechanic into a resource-management process that does not require
any type of moral reasoning for the player to succeed” (Sicart, 2009, p.
160). The Little Sisters, then, function as goals for the player to reach,
or as tools that enable the player’s progress.

Throughout much of the game, the player-character Jack must follow

the guidance of Atlas, the heroic and mythical leader of an underground
working-class rebellion, to hunt down and confront the game’s
antagonist and Rapture’s founder, Andrew Ryan. The climax occurs
when Jack realizes that he has been the victim of psychological
conditioning forcing him to unquestioningly obey any orders issued with
the phrase “would you kindly?” This revelation comes with the
discovery that Jack is actually Andrew Ryan’s illegitimate son,
purchased as an embryo from his mother by Ryan’s political rival, Frank
Fontaine. Atlas is revealed to be Fontaine in disguise, and Jack
discovers that he was simply a tool for Fontaine’s takeover of Rapture.
In an unforgettable cut-scene, Jack is forced to murder his own father,
unable to resist the politely-worded command. Ryan is disappointed in
his son’s inability to be more than a slave, and the player is similarly
given no control in this climactic moment.

The events in this cut-scene occur regardless of the choices the player
makes, since, as Robert Jackson (2014) points out, “BioShock
embodies the very worst of late capitalist logic: it offers you the
ambiguity of moral agency, ‘the freedom to decide’ -- when the real
technical, social and structural decisions have already decided what will
happen anyway” (p. 36). BioShock’s narrative is particularly concerned
with agency and free will, and the “would you kindly?” cut-scene has
been lauded as subverting traditional notions of player agency,
reminding players of their own lack of choice in pre-programmed, pre-
scripted videogames. In an interview, Ken Levine, the lead creator of
BioShock, admits that his decision to deny any agency during the
climax of the game “was really the ultimate insult to the player”
because “you can't choose to do anything. You have no will at all”
(Remo, 2007, p. 1). Levine wanted to design BioShock as a self-
reflexive critique of agency in videogames:

[I]n BioShock, I wanted to take it to the point where the

player was doing things that were, in retrospect, out of
his control. He was being mind-controlled by someone
else, doing things that are usually done in a very mind-
controlled fashion in video games. You know, ‘Go do this
thing,’ then, ‘Okay, I'll go do it because the game tells
me to.’ … And you have no choice. You have to do this
stuff or the game doesn't go anywhere. (Remo, 2007, p.
5)

Although BioShock was marketed as a game which involves heavy

ethical choices, the player’s agency is denied during the climactic cut-
scene and the only meaningful choice possible -- that of saving or
harvesting the Little Sisters -- determines only which ending cut-scene
the player sees. And yet, the game was wildly popular. This may be
explained by Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy’s (2008) argument that
interactivity in videogames is not, in fact, premised on the exercising or
extension of player agency. They argue against the problematic notion
that “the experience and pleasures of gameplay are bound up with the
attainment and exercise of mastery by players” (p. 18). Rather, they
suggest that “activity and passivity are not opposites in videogame play
but fluctuations in the circuit,” meaning that there is pleasure to be
found in a “lack of agency,” in “being controlled,” and in “being acted
:
 upon” (p.30). Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska (2006) similarly posit
that “[t]he pleasure of playing lies, often, in a particular combination of
freedom and determination, control and lack of control” (p. 34).

While Levine decided to insult the player by marketing BioShock as a

game which offers moral choice while self-reflexively undermining the
sense of agency offered by the game, this type of subversion is rare.
Most developers create games which offer affordances and constraints
to foster the player’s sense of involvement, and therefore his or her
sense of “immersion.” Offering multiple choices and multiple endings to
the player is also a wise marketing tactic, as Mark Wolf (2002)
observes, “[t]he changing nature of a game’s narrative outcome from
one playing of the game to the next is one of the prime reasons for
players to return and play again” (p. 107). In providing multiple
branching narratives and endings, Wolf observes that “the real
narrative becomes the player’s own passage through the narrative
maze of branching storylines and events” (p. 109). However, simply
providing branching narrative trees is not enough to satisfy the player if
he or she does not feel that the choices offered are meaningful.
Although players are aware that all the possible choices and their
outcomes are already determined by the developers, if the choices
offered seem meaningful within the gameworld, that awareness can
fade and the player can maintain a feeling of control and agency.

In his studies on ethics in videogames, Sicart (2009) examines how

some games fail while others succeed at acknowledging players as
moral agents. He critiques game designers for trivializing ethical
decisions by labelling them as “good” or “bad,” rewarding players for
making some choices over others, and turning decisions into puzzles to
be solved. As he states:

By embedding the morality of the players’ actions in the

game design and systematically evaluating them as
“good” or “bad” actions, these games are taking away
the player’s moral responsibility, making the process of
self-evaluation just another element in the game system
and not a part of the moral interpretation of the game
experienced by the player. (p. 212)

Sicart critiques games such as Lionhead’s Fable (2004) and BioWare’s

Knights of the Old Republic (2003), which award players with
“good/light” or “evil/dark” points based on their actions, thereby
reducing moral behaviour to a gameplay strategy. In these cases, as
well as in BioShock, as discussed earlier, the player is characterized “as
a mere input provider” rather than a moral agent, and moral problems
are perceived “as mere gameplay challenges, strategic decisions that
affect what branch of the game narrative will be explored, and when”
(Sicart, 2010, p. 106). Games which feature choice-based content in an
attempt to foster a sense of player agency are becoming common, yet
few of these games acknowledge players as moral agents by allowing
them to make challenging decisions with little possibility to predict the
consequences of their actions and without any system of evaluation or
reward. Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead (2012) is one game which,
based on Sicart’s criteria, does succeed in this area. As a result of
seemingly meaningful decision-making, players experience a strong
sense of player agency within each individual navigation of pre-scripted
decision trees.

“Clementine witnessed what you did”

The Walking Dead is an episodic point-and-click style adventure game

based on the comic book series of the same name. Events in the first
season of the game take place in Georgia shortly after a widespread
zombie outbreak. The player adopts the role of Lee Everett, an African-
American university professor who has recently been convicted of
murdering a state senator. The game opens with Lee being transported
to prison though he quickly gains freedom due to the chaos caused by
the zombies. Shortly after, Lee encounters a young girl named
:
 Clementine and joins up with her to protect her and find her parents.
The relationship between Lee and Clementine is one of surrogate
father-daughter and the game makes it clear that Lee’s main
motivation throughout the game is to protect Clementine at all costs.
While violence is certainly ubiquitous in the game, it is never the
central focus of gameplay. Rather, making difficult survival decisions,
managing interpersonal relationships and mediating conflicts is what
this game is all about. As Lee encounters other survivors and attempts
to keep the group intact, the player is forced to make decisions about
Lee’s behaviour, which in turn influences how others behave, who
survives and who does not, and what kind of a person Clementine
develops into.

The Walking Dead’s unique selling point is that “the story is tailored by
how you play” and the player is often reminded of this by being
informed that “this action will have consequences.” The weight of the
player’s choices is especially heavy when the game informs the player
that “Clementine witnessed what you did” and “Clementine will
remember that.” Many of these morally-questionable decisions must be
made within a matter of seconds, and each major choice leads the
player down specific branches of decision trees, thereby granting him
or her the responsibility of deciding what kind of role-model he or she
wants to be for Clementine. While other characters will certainly voice
their opinions, the game offers little moral guidance and no reward for
playing the game as selfish and antagonistic or as kind and heroic.
While some choices can be made strategically, there are often
completely unforeseen consequences to each decision. Clementine
functions not only as a motivating factor but also as a moral compass,
as she reacts negatively to anger and violence.

The quality of the writing is such that the feelings of protectiveness and
concern for Clementine, as well as the guilt felt for frightening her, are
real sensations experienced by many players. Reports of “real-life”
emotions in response to the consequences of player choice in The
Walking Dead have been explored in the microethnographic studies
conducted by Nicholas Taylor, Chris Kampe and Kristina Bell (2015a &
2015b). The authors observed the choices made by male and female
players with different gaming experiences and backgrounds, and asked
the participants why they made certain choices in sequences that were
deemed challenging, stressful, or morally heavy. The authors observed
that players adopted the role of protective, surrogate father-figure,
stating that they were able to see an enactment of mature paternal
identity in the play of their participants: “a conscious shifting of thought
and behavior as they become more focused on Clementine, and
express emotional openness, patience, compassion, and selflessness”
(2015b, p. 15). The statistics given at the end of every episode of The
Walking Dead also reveal the effects of in-game consequences on
player choice. After completing each episode, players are shown the
statistics of other players’ decisions at major moments in the game.
Depending on how the player chooses to act, Clementine will learn to
trust others, or to be wary of them. Choices do not matter on a grand
scale in The Walking Dead -- Lee will never save the world from its fate
-- however, the player’s choices do influence what kind of person
Clementine becomes and how she acts in subsequent installments in
the series.

In their discussion of The Walking Dead, Smethurst and Craps (2014)

understand complicity in videogames as “founded on a combination of
interreactivity and empathy,” meaning that “the game fosters the sense
that players have a responsibility for what happens on-screen” (p. 9).
While some scholars have suggested that videogames provide a safe
space in which players can engage in deviant behaviour, delineated by
a “magic circle” keeping it separate from reality, statistics from The
Walking Dead suggest that most players tend to prefer taking the moral
high ground when available. As Telltale’s marketing director Richard
Iggo claims:

Some of the stats we’ve seen coming back from player

decisions have created a perception that even in dire
:
 times -- and when faced with no-win situations where
each decision is morally grey -- the majority of people
will try to do the ‘right’ thing if they can, even if there’s
really no ‘right’ decision to be made. It’s fascinating
because even when we offer players a decision where the
apparently darker option might make sense from a
purely logical point of view, they’ll often try to choose the
‘higher’ ground at personal cost even if that means being
put in danger or having a relationship with another
character suffer because of it. (cited in Keyes, 2012,
para. 4)

This suggests that in The Walking Dead, players act as what Sicart
would call moral agents because they react to dilemmas with a moral
stance rather than with logic or strategy. In her 2016 talk entitled
“Playing (as) a better me: Choice, moral affordances and videogames,”
Mia Consalvo also found that, in games which offer moral choices, the
participants in her studies claimed that the “good” option was generally
more in line with their natural dispositions, and so felt like a more
realistic choice. She also pointed out that most games usually reward
the player for choosing the “good” option because that option falls in
line with the game’s own narrative logic -- you are playing as the hero
so you behave like a hero.

BioWare’s Dragon Age series (2009-14) approaches the evaluation of

player decisions differently, as there is no inherent system of morality
within the games. Rather, the non-player companions which join the
player-character throughout the games have their own opinions and
reactions to player decisions. Consalvo reported that her participants
felt that this kind of judgement system was more natural and realistic,
particularly because players become attached to these companions
throughout the potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay and often
value their opinions. This is similar to The Walking Dead in its more
natural, potentially more realistic approach to morality. Rather than the
game superimposing an evaluative system, players make their
decisions based on the limited information available to them -- such as
the opinions of other characters, who are written to be flawed or even
untrustworthy -- and their own gut reactions to each situation. The
Walking Dead follows the popular branching decision tree format in
which the narrative splits based on player choice and then converges
again at specific points in the game. This is a clever way to give the
player the feeling that every choice he or she makes matters greatly
while not expending excessive resources on narrative content that
might not even be seen. As such, while the sensation of agency is
cogent in The Walking Dead, many of the decisions offered to the
player are actually false choices because the different options
eventually lead to (mostly) the same outcome. As Smethurst and Craps
(2014) point out:

The narrative branches that the player does not travel

down but perceives as possibilities are just as important
to their understanding of the story as the events that
actually play out on the screen. One could reasonably
field the argument that this overarching antinarrative or
phantom narrative is even more powerful than the
narrative itself, since it colludes with the player’s
imagination to create might-have-beens that the game’s
developers could not possibly have anticipated or
included in the game. (p. 15)

This kind of trick is only fully possible in a medium like videogames, in

which the player believes that the narrative is responding to his or her
actions. By allowing the player to make morally-heavy decisions and
making it seem that those decisions truly shape the narrative outcome,
The Walking Dead, and games like it, foster an incredibly strong illusion
of player agency.

An alternative kind of agency

:
 The concept of agency is rendered even more complicated when two
opposed meanings are applied to it. As Perry Anderson observed in
1980, the term agency is generally used to refer to the autonomy,
control and freedom one has; however, agency can also suggest that
one is an agent, or the representative of another. Both meanings can
be read into the player-avatar relation, as Andrew Burn (2006) points
out:

On the one hand, we might choose to celebrate the

unprecedented degree of participative agency allowed for
the reader within the text … Yet, on the other hand,
there is a sense in which players merely accept and play
out the roles determined for them by game texts devised
by global corporations, dominated by patriarchal
narratives and what Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) calls the
male-dominated power rhetorics of combative play. (p.
82)

It would seem, then, that players are merely agents within the
gameplay experience since, for the most part, they are following the
path set out for them by another. However, as Eichner (2014) points
out in reference to Stuart Hall, “[a]gency is inherent in media literacy,
in our competency to evaluate and to make use of media adequately,”
and so “[a]gency is at stake when recipients oppose the implied
meaning of a text and take on a negotiated or oppositional position” (p.
13) Although it has become clear that the kind of “agency” that
videogames afford players is illusory, the agency enacted by players as
they interpret the game text cannot be overlooked. As Gareth Schott
(2006) states, “the human mind of the player is not just ‘reactive’ but
generative, creative, proactive and reflective” (p. 134). This
observation reinforces Steven Jones’ (2008) point that since play is a
highly mediated, complicated and social experience, “[p]layers make
games meaningful, make their meanings, as they play them, talk about
them, reconfigure them, and play them again” (p. 9). Players, like
readers and viewers, actively interpret the text and exercise agency
over how it is received, discussed and understood, though that agency
is itself constrained by socio-cultural realities. Players also exercise
collective agency through participation in fan communities, which often
engage in dialogue with developers and help to shape a game’s
paratext, which is itself integral to the experience of play.

Fan communities engage with the videogame industry perhaps more

than with other media industries, to such an extent that developers
have even changed endings to games due to player outcry. The ending
to Bethesda’s Fallout 3 (2008) was met with widespread fan outrage
and so the studio released downloadable content to provide an
alternative ending to the game. The same occurred regarding the
ending of BioWare’s Mass Effect 3 (2012), which fans accused of not
respecting the choices they made throughout the trilogy. As Kotaku
writer Stephen Totilo (2012) notes:

Many people complained about the [sic] Mass Effect 3's

conclusion because they felt it was abrupt and
distressing, that it didn't properly pay off this multi-year
saga and didn't let players feel closure with the many
characters they'd adventured with across three games.
They say it throttled the series' trademark freedom of
choice. (para. 6)

Indeed, the Mass Effect series allows players to make several

seemingly important moral choices, though unlike in the Dragon Age
series or The Walking Dead, these choices fall along a specific
“paragon/renegade” moral alignment. While this is not exactly a
“good/evil” categorization, it functions in the same rather simplistic and
reductive way as the “light side/dark side” dichotomy Sicart criticized in
Knights of the Old Republic. Regardless, players were offered moral
choices that seemed to matter, and when the series’ ending failed to
reflect the importance of their choices, many of them complained.

On the other hand, by releasing new downloadable content to change

the ending in response to player demands, BioWare also received
:
 criticism for “surrendering their artistic integrity” (Totilo, 2012, para 7).
Some players stated that “acquiescing to fans -- some of them rude or
overly entitled -- who petition and Tweet and make a huge commotion
about how a work of fiction ends undermines BioWare's position as
independent-minded creators” (Totilo, 2012, para 8). In “failing to
stand their ground,” BioWare was accused of “doing something we
wouldn't respect -- or even expect -- in other forms of entertainment”
(Totilo, 2012, para 11). Certainly, the idea of changing the ending to a
film or television show simply because fans did not like it seems
ludicrous, however, videogames have always been different. It is not
uncommon for games to be released before they are entirely ready,
due to time or budget constraints, and so patches, updates and other
modifications are often developed after the game has been released.
Many of these patches and updates are developed and released based
on player reports, which suggests that many studios “bug test” on the
public -- a common problem within the technology industry. Changing
the narrative is certainly a bolder move than simply updating content to
remove glitches, yet in doing so, Bethesda and BioWare revealed their
belief that videogames, unlike other media, are “a conversation
between game players and game creators” (Totilo, 2012, para 16).

By engaging in this kind of conversation, players can truly exercise

agency and even create a reversal of power structures: while normally
the developer dictates the player’s actions through the very structures
of the game, in these cases, the players are dictating how the game’s
narrative should respond to their actions. This certainly does not mean
that players get to re-write the game, but it does mean that if the
narrative is not good enough, or is perceived as too insulting to or
dismissive of the players, some developers are willing to change it.
Although this does not mean that videogames are what Barthes would
call scriptible texts, it does suggest that the “interactive” quality of
videogames is less in the feedback loop between the computer and the
player, and more in the conversation between fan community and game
developer.

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