Metaphorical adventure vs. Litteral adventure

I’ve recently come across a discussion thread about whether or not Red Dead Redemption was deserving of Game of the year title. The detractors ranted about a sensible fact found within the bulk of the game : if James Marston, our cowboy protagonist, was indeed on a quest for redemption, then why was he killing so many people? If he really was worried about his children and wife, then why was he losing so much time doing pointless side-quests, hunting, gambling and so forth? If he really was the good guy the cut-scenes depicted him being, then why would he tie up a damsel and bring her up to a railroad (and in my case, he kinda did it a few times)?

This is an interesting concern, if only because it highlights one of the only inherent flaws of an open-ended, systemic game design : the player is given almost-complete freedom of action, thus it is possible for him to ignore game indications such as directions or even the moral personality of the protagonist. Since Marston is someone who pretends to have good morals and pure intentions, the player left to his own devices still can just go on a killing rampage in any town, creating a very clear contradiction with the character he’s playing as.

In short, what frustated these gamers was that the game played like a game. If Marston were to have lived the adventures depicted in the game in real life, he wouldn’t have gone far, he would have been shot and killed very early on (as proven by every game over screen you saw when you played the game). Games aren’t real life, they are adventures boiled down to a few restrictive game mechanics.

While that may sound obvious, mainly because it is obvious, more and more gamers complain about these details as games get close to photo-realism quality. It’s the simple uncanny valley theory, but applied to videogame mechanics : the closer we’ll be to absolute reality, the pickier we’ll be about the details that derail us from that absolute reality.

We seem to have forgotten that games aren’t supposed to mimic life. The further we go back in videogame history, the clearer that becomes. Pong is more or less a game of ping-pong as boiled down to its basics : two paddles, a ball and some score-keeping (the last of which isn’t that necessary, come to think of it). In the Batman (NES) game based on the 1989 movie, the caped crusader faces strange alien-looking mutants in the second stage, based off the chemical plant where Jack Napier will fall in a vat and come out as the Joker. Were there mutants and aliens in the movie? Of course not, but the game needed enemies other than criminals (for variety’s sake, I imagine), so it created enemies and obstacles that were metaphors of what Batman faced in that scene from the movie. The chemical plant was labyrinthine in its depiction, so the stage is made as a plaforming challenge to reflect accordingly.

This is a drastic example, but it serves to make a point. If Red Dead Redemption really was about Marston finding his friends and bring them to justice, there would be a lot less shooting and a lot more travelling around. The game would have been shorter and gamers still would complain. So the game needed a metaphorical adventure, one that would make full use of the gameplay mechanics and extend duration, so that everybody gets its money’s worth; an imaginary, exaggerated retelling of the events that would have happened in real life. We obfuscate the aspects of reality that aren’t useful to the gameplay, and put emphasis on the ones we want to offer the gamer. Why would Marston never want go to the bathroom throughout his whole several weeks of travelling? Why did nobody complain about that?

Almost all games we play nowadays are metaphorical adventures. No soldier in any war ever won the conflict he was thrown in single-handedly, unlike what a lot of FPSes would lead you to believe. We don’t heal simply by touching a convenient medpack. A single bullet, not necessarily a headshot, can kill you. Guns jam. I could go on. Now, some games try to offer the real thing, the litteral adventure, a 1 :1 copy of real-life events. There is no litteral adventure game that I know of, but some games come close. The Way of the Samurai (Spike) series can be completed, like a true samurai would, without killing anyone, which is much more realistic than, say, killing over a thousand enemies by yourself in most other games. The recent (and decent!) Fallout : New Vegas has a hardcore mode where you have to eat, drink and sleep, or else your condition will get worse until you simply die. The Sims series is one of the very few games ever designed that let you use a toilet, and certainly the only ones I’ve played that made it mandatory to use it. There’s even a few courageous gamers that play their games with an invented perma-death condition; die once and delete your save game, you are dead, that’s it. Perma-death is even a mechanic in many games, notably MUDs.

Now, a game that would be a 100% true litteral adventure, with its downtimes, biological needs and everything else considered probably wouldn’t be fun to play, not to mention pointlessly complicated. I’d go out and live my life, it would amount to the same. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you want to complain about a game, at least consider its internal logic in light of the mechanics. I’d rather have my games fun than realistic, and most probably so do you.