The idea that games should center "player choice" and react meaningfully to our decisions is repeated so often it's become a cliche, and BioShock creator Ken Levine has been a leading figure in that department—his games are all about moral decisions and meta-commentary on free will and game design. In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz about the state of the industry and his upcoming game, Judas, the director revived the topic, but he hasn't given us the stock 'your choices matter' marketing promise here, admitting that choice continues to be a "hard problem" to solve even after 50 years of videogames.
"It's very easy to show a player a story. The harder part is to get them to participate in it and react to how they participate," Levine said. "I don't think there's one way to make games, but personally, as a narrative games maker, I've never been a big fan of cutscenes because they're not interactive. One of the reasons Judas is taking so long is trying to figure out how we get the game to be substantially more responsive to player decisions. That's a really hard problem, and that's why you don't see a ton of it."
It's an interesting point Levine raises: In some ways, we're only now starting to catch up to the granular reactivity of classic '90s RPGs and immersive sims. Exponential increases in production values, development time, and costs made it hard to justify alternate story paths and other content players might be able or likely to miss. Baldur's Gate 3, to me, is the new high water mark of combining player choice with lavish, modern production values, while we've also seen exciting things from the indie space like Disco Elysium.
Judas will have this focus on player choice because Levine sees it as where games should go next: "In the future, it [will be] player-driven—that's where we want to go. Because that's what makes our medium unique." Levine pointed out that movies just can't manage the same illusion of consequence and participation, though I do have to object to him saying that the movie Clue having multiple filmed endings was "stupid." I think it's an all-timer spoof, goof, and/or gag. Levine was also critical of more rudimentary or cumbersome forms of "chose your own narratives" in games—he didn't name names, but I immediately thought of The Witcher 2's mutually exclusive second acts or—and I don't mean to be too glib here—BioShock 1's "Eat this little girl for magic powers? Y/N."
But what Ghost Story Games has cooking for Judas sounds much more granular and in-depth, more like Baldur's Gate 3 or my beloved crusty old CRPGs for sickos. "The approach we're taking with Judas is heavily based upon recognition of player action and response to player action," Levine said. "Even just characters' observing a long range of player action and commenting on it. 'Hey, you saw this and you did that and then you did this and that was interesting because that caused that'—we're doing that kinda stuff right now."
"And it's really just observing the players and then writing the types of lines that could react to various types of things. It's a huge amount of work because you have to think of all the things a player can do and then write in-character responses for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic."
I was very cool on Judas at first—I've never loved BioShock and Judas looks a helluva lot like BioShock—but Ken Levine stock is only going up in my book. His appraisal of AI in games struck me as sharp and well-considered, and the way he describes reactivity in Judas sounds genuinely meaningful and exciting. He also came off very sympathetic when explaining some of the events around Irrational Games' closure to Edge in its issue 400 last year (republished in full by GamesRadar): "My intention was to go and say, 'Look, I just need to go start a new thing, and Irrational should continue.' That's why I didn't maintain the name Irrational. I thought they were going to continue. But it wasn't my company—I sold the company, so I worked for Take-Two, and the studio was theirs. The decision was made at a corporate level that they didn't think they should continue with the studio as a going concern."
