Part 1: The theoretico-conceptual introduction
One of the things that makes video games not like novels or films, we're told, is freedom. “Freedom,” Gonzalo Frasca writes, “is the ultimate promise of so-called new media: virtual reality, the internet and videogames aim to empower their users with freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom).” [see note 1 below]
Frasca makes his claim in an essay about Grand Theft Auto 3. If you don't play many video games, it's worth explaining why GTA3 is special: in most video games, the division between aspects of the world the player-avatar can and can't interact with is pretty severe, largely due to hardware limitations. In Pole Position, you couldn't drive your car off the track, because as far as the game was concerned, there was no “off the track”--the world beyond the instrumental requirement of car racing simply didn't exist. Likewise, in the old text-based adventure games, trying to do things the game designers hadn't planned for (e.g., “Grab robot”) produced responses like “You can't do that.”
One of the ways to think about the ways video games handled this kind of limitation is with a narratological concept called “motivation.” Motivation describes activity in literary space that is driven by the actions of characters in that space: a description of the upstairs of a house is motivated if Madame Bovary has walked upstairs, but not motivated (that is, not generated from inside the story-space) if no one is home. For video games, the response “You can't do that,” like the indestructible walls surrounding the track in Pole Position, are effectively unmotivated; explanations like “You can't jump that high” are pretty weak efforts at motivation (the reason you can't get over a wall behind which lies, in some sense, the edge of the world is attributed to your character's weak legs); and something like “the reason your avatar simply reappears alive after apparently dying is because the gods have made you immortal” is a really good instance of motivation (it occurs in the game Planescape: Torment, which is still the most literary video game I've ever played).
All games restrict freedom in some way, of course; no game world can be infinite, and each game world establishes a physics that limits the range of possible things any player can do (you can't move diagonally in Pac-Man [unmotivated]; you can't fly through the air in GTA3 [motivated, since your avatar is human]). What made GTA3 revolutionary--and I do think it was revolutionary--is that it significantly expanded the limits of the player's freedom, so much so that what was actually a difference in degree (more freedom) came to feel like a difference in kind.
Let me propose that freedom in video games is fairly complex topographical space, and that “freedom” as Frasca uses it means something like “the right to affect the game world in whatever way I can imagine.” Another word for “freedom” might be “leverage.” You have “leverage” on some aspect of the game world when you can interact with it in some way: more leverage if you can move or change it, less leverage if you can only do one thing with it. If you can pick up a gun off the street and shoot other characters with it, that's leverage. If you can use it to shoot people, scratch your character's back or prop up the leg of shaky table, that's even more leverage.
In many games before GTA3, leverage existed fairly unevenly throughout the game space. That is, you could pick up some things, but not all things; you could move the lever on a control panel if it helped you open a door that got you to the next level, but you couldn't move another lever on another control panel because it simply wasn't “part of the game.” So part of playing the game involved finding places or situations where you might have leverage and avoiding (or simply passing by) places where, relatively speaking, you had little or no leverage. The games encouraged finding spaces with leverage by rewarding you (with points or cut-scenes or items or whatever) for finding leverage and exercising it. A game of Pac-Man lasts longer if you appropriately master the kinds of leverage you do have and give up trying to acquire the kinds of leverage you don't (and won't) have.
Leverage doesn't just have to do with the physical manipulation of the game world, either: it also has to do with the arrangement of the player's time. If the game gives you 10 minutes to accomplish a task (after which you have to start over), you have less leverage (less opportunity to manipulate your avatar) than if it gives you an hour. Likewise, when the Tetris pieces start falling faster, you have less leverage than you did when they were slow and you could, among other things, perform little twirly dances with the pieces before slotting them into a place that allowed you to continue to play.
What GTA3 does is expand not the outer limits of its leverage (you can't leave the city within which you begin; you can't quit your life of crime and open a newspaper stand) but rather the internal limits, both in terms of object manipulation and of time. Object manipulation: you can steal any car in the game, paint it any number of colors, and drive it anywhere you'd like within the large framework of the city (off roads, into buildings, and with relatively realistic physics, including damage from crashes). Rather than only being able to use certain cars or interact with particular people, you can interact with all the game's cars and all the game's people in one way or another. This means that you can engage in “play” disconnected from any particular kind of narrative structure: what Frasca calls “freedom” and what I'm calling “leverage.” As for time, none of the game's small-scale quests is mandatory (though some have time limits)--you can drive your pink SUV around town for as long as you'd like.
Here's what Frasca has to say about leverage:
Basically, the game has both motivated the act of driving around town (that is, it has given you a reason to do so consistent with the internal logic of the game world) and given you a lot of leverage in relation to it. The combination of motivation and leverage feels like freedom, because it feels like you are deciding what happens rather than being forced by the game to do a certain set of things or be punished.
Part 2: Where it gets a bit more interesting
Once you see all this, one of the things you can wonder is what connection there might be between GTA3's content and its form: that is, you can ask why or how the formal increase in leverage can be connected to what the game actually seems to be about. Here again Frasca is a useful guide, as he describes how the game's absence of conversation is profoundly motivated by its content:
I think Frasca's completely right. He's right that this is how GTA works, and he's right that most conversation in video games right now offers very little leverage (you can't just say whatever you want), making it a site of frustration or arbitrary choice rather than play. Until we have the hardware and software to build really good conversation parsers, that's going to true and games will have a much easier time modeling and motivating physical solutions to game problems, even when those problems are presented by the game as interpersonal ones.
The complicated part--and I don't really know how much of a problem it is, but it seems to me to be relatively serious--is that right now the trend in video game development is towards offering as much leverage as possible (and this is one reason MMORPGs are popular--nothing offers leverage and ludic play in language like another person). But the technology means that that in most gameplay increased leverage will inevitably suggest that solutions to gameplay problems are profoundly physical--whether that's true in the surrealistic physical worlds of many Japanese games, or in comparatively realistic ones like GTA3's aptly named Liberty City. Pac Man, for instance, doesn't have conversations with the ghosts, because he too lives in a violent world in which there's not much to say. And in games that do model the possibility of “diplomatic” (that is to say, nonviolent and therefore interpersonal as opposed to “inter-physical”) solutions to their narrative problems, those solutions inevitably (because of the hardware/software limitations) feel a little hollow. This is also because conversational solutions also involve giving up the spectacular pleasure of physical ones--if you could talk everyone in Liberty City into obeying traffic laws and generally resolving their differences through nonviolent collaboration, you'd miss out on all the fancy explosions and the kinetic fun of driving through the public park or off a parking ramp.
If current limitations on hardware are best equipped to sustain the extension of ludic “freedom” and leverage along largely physical dimensions, what does that say for the ability of games to “imagine” other forms of freedom, or of non-physical “leverage” in relation to others (since killing them is not an option, most of the time)? And what cumulative effect, if any, might those hardware limitations exert on the people who love games and play them?
These are real questions; I don't know what the answers are or whether the answers are even worth taking seriously.
Coda:
Frasca believes that games with vast amounts of player leverage require that game designers “trust their players.” I would say that here a Frankfurt School-style critique of the notion of “freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom)” being offered by these video games--one that might connect those forms of freedom to the “freedom” Adorno found so antipathic in jazz music (not that I agree with the particulars of that example)--might provide a useful brake on a blind enthusiasm for the concept.
[note one: In the weird shadow of the Bush administration's use of the word “freedom,” Frasca's sentence loses some of its rhetorical force, but we can't just let the bad guys decide what our words mean.]
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