Saturday Soapbox: Careful What You Choose

Now, I love Mass Effect as much as the next man - in fact, probably more than most of the next men put together - but the truth is that this notion of cause and effect is just as much of an illusion as explosions going off around you when you race your skidoo down a mountainside in Modern Warfare 2. Nothing you do or say in Mass Effect 1 fundamentally changes what happens at the end of Mass Effect 2.

Fellow Eurogamer scribe Christian Donlan and I have this recurring conversation about the difference between games which are readable and writable. Mass Effect and Call of Duty are really good readable games: they are a series of managed interactions that culminate in gratifyingly revelatory (or explosive, or sexy) outcomes. Writable games are things like Just Cause 2, or Crackdown, where half the things that you remember are stories you wrote yourself - that time you used a toppled statue as a wrecking ball hanging from a chopper using your grapple hook, or the time you tried to drive a buggy up a skyscraper.

Sid Meier once said that a game is "a series of interesting choices", and I've always liked that definition. I also think it's great that our range of choices is no longer limited to which guy we shoot in the face first. But my worry about choice-and-consequence games is that the more game developers focus those choices into the story side of a game, where the outcome is predetermined, and less into the things you do between conversations, the less meaningful those choices become and the less writable their games will be.

The great thing about gaming is that I'm sort of knowingly worrying for nothing. The games I've mentioned so far include Gears of War, Call of Duty, L.A. Noire, Uncharted and Crackdown. There are similarities in them, of course, but there's also an amazing diversity - and that's all within basically the same broad genre, target demographic and platform group.

There will always be this plurality and diversity in gaming because it's just so broad, and the fact that Commander Shepard isn't really doing anything impactful when he does or doesn't save Urdnot Wrex in Mass Effect 1 isn't going to make the existence of Noby Noby Boy or The Witness any less likely.

All the same, I think games that are built around the illusion of so many choices will be much better over the long haul if they also decide to be more writable. Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the example du jour, and it fits: you all end up killing the same final boss, but on the way I stacked boxes to climb up to a fire escape to sneak into a police station, whereas maybe you charmed the desk sergeant.

As long as that sort of thing persists - and Dishonored looks like it's keeping the dream alive, as hopefully will Eidos Montreal's Thief 4 - then we'll have no truck with choice and consequence. But please, keep it writable.