Risk is something that video games understand because it is something that the player understands. Potential risk is how encounters are built (is it worth fighting the over-leveled boss for the potential loot drop?) and mechanical risk defines how they play out (Heal now? Dodge now? Run?). All Tech Considered Reading The Game: This War Of MineRisk is codified, incentivized, lauded, anchors the equations that drive decision-trees, is calculated as part of the experience. In fact, players basically spend around half the game controlling her - especially after a mid-game twist puts her in the driver's seat for a good ten to twelve hours. That might not sit well with some people, though, considering she bashes Joel's bearded face in a with golf club early on.Run free, Sweet Abby. Cartoonist Abby Denson is the author of Kitty Sweet Tooth (illustrated by Utomaru), the fun and fully-illustrated cartoon travel.Lots of people hate Abby in The Last Of Us Part 2 simply because she kills Joel.However, people also hate Abby because the game forces players to control her for nearly as many hours in The Last Of Us Part 2 as Ellie.In addition to the above, there are also some people who loathe Laura Bailey’s character because she’s buff.
They risked their lives for each other a hundred times and, against all odds, they made it to the hospital, to the doctor.That was when they told Joel what had to happen: That in order to make the cure and save the world, Ellie had to die.But in being expected, is it really risk? Because if we know it's coming — if we understand that the zombies are brain-hungry all the time and the Nazis are blood-thirsty all the time and all the monsters are out to kill us all the time — then the risk feels less like possibility (the potential to get something or see something or experience something in trade for an elevated chance of imaginary death) and more like inevitability. She came to see him as a father, and he saw her like the daughter he'd lost. Ellie and Joel grew close. Pretty much every minute of it was dangerous. It's why we've come.It took months. We accept that (virtual) risk is part of the deal.
They're the dependable, sturdy, straightforward rigging on which to hang whatever story you want to tell. It has the potential to alienate players, damage franchises and upend expectations to cause hurt feelings and push against calcified notions of what games are for.The reason games follow a three-act structure, chart redemption arcs, love a Big Bad, a Twist Reveal and a Boss Battle is that those things have proven to work in the past. Where simple risk and reward is essential to the functioning of any game, narrative risk is anathema because narrative risk is actually dangerous. It has the potential to alienate players, damage franchises and upend expectations.Narrative risk is the opposite of gameplay risk. Risky?Where simple risk and reward is essential to the functioning of any game, narrative risk is anathema because narrative risk is actually dangerous.
To do something that fundamentally alters the player's experience with your game takes guts and a commitment to storytelling that puts the purity of narrative first, and everything else second. The world is moving on.Partway through, The Last of Us Part II switches perspectives and forces players to play as Abby, a character they've been primed to hate.Real narrative risk (particularly in a big, high-profile, studio game) is rare. She's found friends her age, work that she's good at, a girl in town that she likes. He's teaching her to play guitar. Joel and Ellie have found themselves a town to live in, a community to be a part of.
Ellie has been with us (has been us) since the start. A choice that we misunderstand maybe, condemn maybe, loathe absolutely.Reading The Game Reading The Game: Red Dead Redemption 2Ellie, we know. It is a single choice that permanently and irrevocably changes everything. It is shocking and terrible in its violence and in the way it changes everything. It gives us Abby's story.It makes us play as the person we hate most.There's a moment in this game that you will never forget. It's insisting that there's something to say that can only be said, by doing something actually risky — first presenting us with Ellie's story, and then, later, offering us a new perspective, an entirely new story.
But we do.We're Ellie again when Ellie watches Abby beat Joel to death.We're Ellie when she lights out for Seattle with her girlfriend Dina, hunting for Abby and Abby's friends, meaning to kill every last one of them. Along the way, Joel does a good thing by rescuing a woman cut off from her friends and under threat from the zombies. We're him when he goes out on patrol with his brother Tommy and we're him when everything goes wrong.
She has made terrible sacrifices and done some awful things just to get to Joel. That's all that matters until the midpoint of the game when, suddenly, TLOU2 makes us play as Abby and forces us to come to grips with who she is and why she did what she did.Because Abby has spent years hunting Joel. Because these are the people who killed Joel, and for a while, that's all we know.
Instead, it fashions itself into a parable about the futility of revenge and the way that violence only begets more violence. Instead, it fashions itself into a parable about the futility of revenge and the way that violence only begets more violence.TLOU2 could've just been a run-of-the-mill revenge story, but it isn't. She was there (off screen, out of sight) when Joel murdered her father.'TLOU2' could've just been a run-of-the-mill revenge story, but it isn't.
Walking in Abby's shoes and experiencing the story through her eyes, we see that her vengeance is just as earned, just as necessary and just as pointless as Ellies. It makes us understand why.No matter how much we yell at the screen, the story unfolds the way it is meant to. It forces us into choices that we tell ourselves we would never make by making them the choices of characters who absolutely would make them.
It understands how dangerous it is being, and doesn't flinch.Narrative risk should be dangerous. It uses our expectations against us as it winds into nesting cycles of violence and sacrifice. Thus, we become the mechanism of vengeance, the instrument of violence, locked into a two-sided story which allows for no other ending. And she is no more or less good than Ellie. The man who killed her father.
But this, of course, is how we end up with dull games. It's easy to tell a story with no real stakes — where no one changes and everyone gets to feel good about their choices. But this, of course, is how we end up with dull games.Narrative risk should be dangerous.
Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. There are other risks it takes (the centering of unconventional characters, dealing with the trauma of violence, deliberately breaking the narrative flow with slow, quiet flashbacks that ignore the kill-loot-kill feedback loop in favor of deep character development), but its biggest swing is the structural choice to split its story into competing, oppositional perspectives, forcing the player to contend with the consequences of their own actions and to wonder at what point the cycle of violence and the duty of vengeance has become too much for anyone to bear.Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, video games, books and Starblazers. Because without narrative risk, all the other risk just feels rote.And TLOU2 is a game that reckons with precisely that idea.
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