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Game Design

Freedom?

I don’t play Grand Theft Auto IV anymore. I have neither reached the conclusion of Niko Bellic’s story, nor achieved anything approaching one hundred percent completion. I have ceased playing because I’ve found that for all this sand-box nature it is inherently devoid of freedom.

I can murder a dozen people or more in the space of a minute and, putting aside the dubious moral nature of such an act, I feel nothing. I was arguably free to murder those people or not, but it is a freedom that doesn’t feel liberating in the slightest. The more I am given free reign to murder, steal and cause chaos the less appealing each of those options becomes. When I have the option to murder one person that is a choice of massive significance and consequence, when I have the choice to murder dozens the action itself means very little.

Liberty City is a manifestation of Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, when I am free to steal at will the entire notion of property breaks down and without property theft means nothing; when I am free to murder anybody life itself is devalued.

This sensation of devalued choices is compounded by the narrative of Grand Theft Auto IV itself. In the course of the story and character arc of Niko Bellic, murder goes from being of major significance to something he agrees to with little regard simply to earn money he does not need.

As a work of fiction I can accept acts of violence within the context of the world and so do not feel a specific moral outrage at being asked to commit murder at certain points. However each time I am explicitly asked to murder there is a dichotomy between that moment and the rest of the game. Either murder is significant and therefore I should only do it selectively or murder is meaningless in which case having the choice of whether to let a particular character live or not is an empty choice.

Of course murder is hardly unique to Grand Theft Auto IV, it is also the primary means of interacting with the world in real time strategy games or first person shooters. However, at the expense of sounding callous, in those titles the act of murdering a virtual character comes as the final action in a sequence of choices. You decide which weapon to use, which enemy to target; where, when and how. Murder in these types of games is abstracted to the consequence of a sequence of tactical and strategic decisions. In such cases murder has a meaning because, even though it is performed repeatedly, each time the world changes based on your actions.

Murder in Grand Theft Auto IV is made meaningless because often there are no consequences, and it is so easy than you can even do it accidentally; take a corner badly and you’ve probably committed a hit and run without realising.

I am dealing specifically with virtual murder because it’s the most obvious example available, but the core problem remains regardless of the choices on offer. If I have freedom to go anywhere, nowhere is special and therefore the value of choosing where to go is diminished; if I can buy anything, nothing has any value.

The greater your freedom the less that freedom means, the more choices available the less value each choice has in and of itself.

One reply on “Freedom?”

That’s one reason I love Gothic 2 and 3 so much. Finite creatures, enemies, NPC’s, caves, loot, quests, etc. makes everything you do in some small way significant. If you kill all the deer in the game world, the world becomes totally devoid of deer; If you kill an NPC, that NPC is gone forever; if you buy an expensive item, that uses up some of the finite (though very large) amount of gold in the game. It’s still a free world to explore, but the fact that my actions have permanent, non-erasable effects gives it so much more impact than Oblivion.

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