A shot rings out, and you press X. Too slow, the bullet goes into your stomach. You fumble with the new dramatic camera angle and try to glean some small piece of information about the scene. Again, you were too slow. If only you’d looked a little further to the left, you might have seen the prompt to call for help. Anyway, you’re dead. Sorry. I trust you had an immersive time.
Detroit: Become Human, and many games like it, frequently asks you to make fast decisions to decide the fate of characters and situations. Sometimes the consequences are small, like an ally trusting you less in the future; sometimes they’re big, like death. These quick choices come in many forms—choosing between dialogue options, picking from two paths during a chase, mashing a button fast enough to open a door—and are supposed to simulate the speed of real choices, as well as the responsibility of owning them. But how well do they actually convey those ideas to the player? Does it ever really feel like you have a hand in the fates of these characters?
Let’s discuss Connor dying in Detroit’s news broadcast building, and Life is Strange’s Kate Marsh jumping off a ledge. These are both dramatic, permanent events which force in-the-moment decisions; both of them strip away some player agency to impress the urgency of the situation. Connor first, though. In many timelines he doesn’t die, but we’re only interested in his gruesome, preventable, frustrating death. While interrogating a set of androids, one of them manages to rip out Connor’s power supply and pin him to a table with a kitchen knife, which is rude. Getting out of this situation with your life requires the player to handle a shaky camera (already not Detroit’s strong suit in general) and press a specific sequence of buttons while a timer counts down. The camera difficulty is deliberate here, an attempt to replicate the physical stress and mental uncertainty of a traumatic injury. At this point in the game, regardless of your nuanced dialogue choices or investigative skills, Connor’s future rests on the player’s physical capabilities matching up with the control system’s operational ability.
In the following scene—if you’re still alive—Connor chases the android into a corridor and needs to make a three-way fast decision when the suspect grabs a gun. One of these choices kills you, with almost nothing by way of warning. Again, the game prioritises quick reactions over thoughts, reflex over considered decision-making.
Kate Marsh’s attempt to commit suicide on the roof of the school dormitory is no less stressful. Not only is a friend of main character Max driven to take her own life, but Max’s usual ability to turn back time is out of action, which means anything that happens in this scene is irreversible. Stuck on the roof, alone with Kate, the player must rely on their negotiation skills and the information they picked up about Kate so far. Much like the rest of the game, this scene plays out as a series of dialogue choices, and the wrong decision will lead to Kate leaping to her death. But for much of it there’s no literal timer, nothing hurrying the player along beyond their own desire to resolve the situation; and the mechanics of the scene are in-sync with the previous play experience. Everything you did up to this point has prepared you for the scene, so even though your powers are gone, you feel comfortable making the right call.
Detroit’s approach, while outwardly more realistic, ignores external factors like distractions, accidental button presses, and familiarity with the controls required. It also leaves players feeling unsatisfied because their fate is in the hands of a reflexive, physical action even if the focus of the narrative is normally testing your mental and emotional abilities. The story becomes “did I press the buttons in time” instead of “did i make the right choice.” In addition, a lack of contextual information leaves players unable to make an educated choice; without proper context, the likelihood of an unexpected outcome is high. The end result is players feeling cheated out of their planned path through the narrative, with no easy way to reverse the mistake.
Character death is something of a canary in the coal mine when it comes to this sort of decision problem, even in games otherwise lauded for choice. In The Witcher 3, players can encounter the sorceress Kiera Metz, and eventually come to a narrative point where she and Geralt disagree on a particular issue. Many players will be blindsided by a particular dialogue path, which ends unexpectedly when Kiera suddenly decides to fight Geralt to the death. Wow, we were having a lovely dinner naught but a few hours ago, you’ll think, as an angry blonde woman fires lightning into your chest. Assuming the player doesn’t let Geralt die, they’re forced to kill Kiera and left confused by the interaction. Again, the lack of context is what causes consternation, as there’s little indication before the battle that Kiera will react so poorly; with some digging and hindsight, one can glean the probable reasoning is her fear of being hunted by the mad king, but in the moment, when the decision is presented, players are walled off from the information but still expected to make the choice. It’s a scene which stands out by virtue of the rest of The Witcher 3 being so dedicated to providing narrative nuance.
Contrast these with Life is Strange, a game built with a narrative conceit that allows for choices to be reversed, pondered within a certain time frame. Max can rewind time, up to a few minutes, and (like the player) retains the information she gathered before the rewind. The player’s ability to act quickly is sometimes hinted toward but never becomes the focus of the decision, since players can decide to skip backwards if events fail to go their way. Serious situations are still possible, and they can definitely still end in failure, but they never rely on physical capabilities in a game that focuses on mental acuity. Players can retain the consequences but also take responsibility for their actions, given the appropriate context.
Designers of such fast choices would argue that forcing players to make snap judgements is a better simulation of making decisions in real life. You choose, and life goes on. No take backs just because the outcome causes discomfort. Except, of course, there are a thousand ways to take back a decision in real life, few of which are ever simulated in games. Maybe you say something rude, then apologise; maybe you drive down the wrong road, so you turn around; maybe you get into a fight and realise halfway through that you should back off. What a game like Life is Strange understands is that it’s better to emulate the idea of choice, because a simulation will fall short. You can’t go back and convince a character you didn’t mean what you said, but you can rewind time until it never happened. And just like in real life, even when everything is smoothed over, you still feel the sting of the mistake.
So, should Connor die? There’s no reason to make him immortal, and part of the allure of Quantic Dream et al’s games is choosing your path. The idea of heavy, consequence-laden decisions is perfect, conceptually, for the medium of games; indeed, you could argue that giving players choices and making them mean nothing is disingenuous at best, and poor design at worst. But for the death to be meaningful, for players to actually care about the outcome, and for them to take responsibility for how the story plays out, designers need to let go of the notion that a decision needs to directly reflect the real version of the same choice. Games consistently tweak the time and space of video game situations to present a particular view or provoke a certain emotional reaction. A fast decision doesn’t need to be fast, it just needs to feel fast. Picking a path should test the player in ways that are appropriate to the game’s mechanics and message, rather than be simple motor-skill and reflex challenges. Shocking twists at the hands of player choices don’t need to be spoiled ahead of time, it just needs to feel like the logical result of previous events.
Connor doesn’t die, of course, even if he does. Detroit: Become Human’s story does not function without the awkward detective Pinocchio, and, soon after his blue-bloodied corpse has been appropriately cried over, they dispense another copy from the Connor Factory. This is, perhaps, a tacit acknowledgement by the developers that such a heavy consequence can’t be entered into quite as quickly as the design requires. That maybe the game should treat the survival of the character as seriously as the script. And honestly, most players would probably be fine with a dead Connor, as long as it felt like it was their fault, and not because Connor refused to look left.
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