I have never carjacked anyone

This is about choices, isn’t it?

I don’t think anyone else who has played any Grand Theft Auto game can make this claim, but honestly, I won’t carjack people in the game (Not unless I really have to). Instead, I make sure any car I steal is a parked car. OK, the person is still going to be really pissed off that their car is gone, but at least I didn’t put them through the trauma of being violently hauled from their vehicle. I didn’t physically hurt anyone. I’m happy to shoot, grenade or bazooka anyone. Usually, when I do, they’ve done something to deserve it. But I draw the line at carjacking civilians. I’m not a monster.

I know. I understand. That’s not how most people play the game. Maybe I wasn’t playing it in the spirit it was supposed to be played in. I knew this guy once, not a big-time gamer, young and naïve, but well meaning. He told me about some of the cheats you could use in the game and one in particular where you could make all the prostitutes follow you. If this guy wants to use a cheat to score as many prostitutes as he can, who am I to say he’s wrong? And then the tale takes a dark turn. He told me that he gets all these women to follow him down a dark alley. I was thinking that I knew where this was going. “And then I take out the chainsaw and start hacking into them and kill them all.”

He thinks this is what we all do?

I suppose he’s playing it more in the spirit of the game than I was. The game is supposed to be mayhem. I don’t think it should be used as a psychometric test. Games like this, and Borderlands and Saint’s Row operate in a reality where life is a cartoon, and everyone speaks in satire.

One of my favourite questions to ask when anyone tells me they’ve played Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy game is “Did you throw the raccoon?” Anyone who’s played it will know what I mean. You get to a point where you have a choice. You can solve a bog-standard gaming puzzle, or you can take the shortcut by asking Drax to throw Rocket Raccoon across a chasm. Rocket is not happy with that idea. What do you do? Well, I’m guessing if you’re playing this game then you like Marvel and you like the Guardians of the Galaxy and you’ve watched the films, even if you haven’t read the comic books. So, you know what the Guardians would do, right? You throw the raccoon! How can you not? You’re walking in this world. You know the characters. To not throw Rocket is the most un-Guardians thing you could do. And you rob yourself of the joy of seeing Rocket unleash a barrage of verbal abuse your way. Your life is only ever going to be enriched by throwing the raccoon.

These types of games have the right level of involvement with the character. Unlike in first person shooters or open world sandlot games, although you control the actions and choices, the narrative, as told through cutscenes, is going to show you who you’re watching. In most games you’re not going to be able to change who our protagonist is, any more than you control a character you watch in a film.

There are exceptions, where your choices decide a certain path. A game like Detroit: Become Human can send the story in so many different directions and you are rewarded with a better story for doing well in the game. Your decisions have an impact on the world around you and the story you tell. You can even inadvertently choose not to tell certain parts of the story. On my first playthrough one of the three characters has a choice to make. Kara is one of the three playable characters. She’s an android and subservient to her cruel owner. At one point early in the game, your cruel owner tells you to stay put whilst he goes off screen to discipline his young daughter. Even though you’re supposed to obey because you’re an android, the game, the story wants you to go and intervene. For some reason, I just didn’t. I think that maybe I was wondering what happens if you refuse to play, refuse to take the story where it’s supposed to go. What happened was that I never saw those characters again. That particular branch of the story was blocked to me. That will teach me to not obey the story.

Mostly though, it’s all about how you get where you’re going in any story. The endings have been written. Your choices shape the details along the way. The details enrich your experience of the story.

In Batman: Arkham Asylum, right at the end, you, as Batman, walk down a corridor to get to the final showdown with The Joker. On each side of the corridor, you see more than a dozen of The Joker’s goons standing to attention, to welcome you to the final battle. Instinctively I walked straight down the middle of the corridor to get to the last stage and none of The Joker’s men moved a muscle. It’s not that I didn’t want to fight them. That’s what the game is all about, that’s where you get your fun. It just seemed un-Batman-like to do anything other than single-mindedly walk past them, on my way to get the job done. In another playthrough I did stop to fight every one of them, but in my mind the story is so much better if you just walk in and do the things Batman is supposed to do and not mess about with getting into fights for the sake of it. Gamers do often commit to the emotional logic of the game they are playing and the story they are telling.

In GTA there’s a game and there’s a story and they almost exist separately. Chain-sawing your way through an alleyway full of women like some dark cartoonish psychopath is not part of any story. It’s just something silly to do. Maybe there’s something about storytellers that see the story in everything. That attachment to narrative, to the way a story should be, seems to be a major feature of many games.

The Last of Us 2 is a story where you are seemingly emotionally gut-punched at every turn. In a moment of respite, there is a flashback scene where Joel takes Ellie to a science museum. It’s not essential to the main story. It’s a sweet memory of Ellie and her surrogate dad. You can rush through the whole thing in five minutes, or you can explore and take your time. Is there much to be gained by climbing the dinosaur statue? What about putting the hat on? Or putting the hat on different dinos? Or putting the hat on Joel? Do you need to read the dead person’s suicide note? To move the game on you do not need to do any of that. It makes you think that the aim of any story is not to get to the end in any way you can. In a game that is brutal, emotionally brutal, draining even, you find that you care more about these people for all the things that make them people. They are characters and when it comes to Ellie’s final showdown with Joel’s killer, you feel her anger.

The urge to throw the raccoon or walk purposefully through the crowded corridor of henchmen or let Ellie try the hat on, is too much to pass up. You’re here. You may as well just fling the raccoon. You know the story. You know how to move things along. And you know what’s appropriate for the story you’re telling.

Most importantly, you have the options, and those options are written in to take you deeper. You want to see what story is going to unfold and in gaming that means, sometimes literally, looking under every stone. We forget or take for granted that stories are inert and that there is an instinct within us that can't ignore the different possibilities. The familiar guides us. We recognise the signposts because we’ve seen similar roads before. We don't always know exactly what lies at the end of the road, but we have a sense of the places a story might take us and an instinct to follow it there. The same instincts kick in when we read books and watch film and TV, but in games we control it, even if we forget that we’re in the middle of a story.