The events were caused by me …

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the effects of playing advanced story-based computer games. As players are in control of major events of a narrative, they can start to feel responsible for the effects of their decisions.

When making difficult decisions, we often ask ourselves if going for the alternative route would have been better and reduced the negative effects. Naturally, we cannot estimate what the real effects would have been, but it seems to be a common habbit to question our own decisions. While we know these thoughts from our daily lifes, having these kind of thoughts being evoked by a computer game is a very exciting experience.

As discussed last week, I currently play Life is Strange in the hope that I can finish it before other things start to keep me again from playing it. Life is Strange is an advanced story-based game that challenges players to decide how the narrative shall continue. The choices a player makes have drastic effects and even determine whether one of the central characters lives or dies. Thus, the continuation directly affects the players as it was their choice how the story continues. They decided to perform a certain action and have to deal with the consequences.

A similar game is Orwell that puts the player into the role of a member of a security agency who gathers information about citizens of a fictive nation. By accessing their private digital data and communications, they find information that subsequently is used against the citizens when being uploaded to the agency’s database by the players. As a result, players are responsible for the fate of the observed people. By uploading certain information, citizens are suddenly regarded as a major thread and taken into custody or even killed during the story.

As a result of this kind of gameplay, players question their choices in a similar way as they would if this would be a real world event. Often, the decisions are quite complex when the player has to pick a side between two parties who all have valid arguments. By making the decision, one party might negatively react to the player. More importantly, the choice might significantly affect the continuation of the story later on in a way a player cannot predict at the time of the decision.

Personally, while progressing through the narative of Life is Strange, I found myself several times sitting at my computer after having ended a playing session and thinking about my choices. Where they really the right choices? I always tried to pick options I probably would also use when I would be in a similar real world situation. This makes it even more complicated as it results in a test of my own principles. Hopefully, my choices will lead to a happy ending of the story and not reveal that I did a huge mistake at some point. In the end, those games teach us how to make decisions and to accept their effects as a part of life and the passage of time.

In conclusion, experiences made in advanced story-based computer games affect our real lifes as it were our conscious decisions that led to certain events. These kind of computer games use the immersive effects of playing computer games with the challenge of making complex decisions in an environment and setting we might also experience during our daily lifes. Suddenly, it is no more just playing a game, it is a test of our personality and the experience of feelings that are real even though being evoked by a simulated environment.