Against the wall: Freedom?

But how do games realize their freedom? The short version: if we look at the narrative they don't. The longer version: First it is important to state that games can have two components: story-based and rule-based. All games are rule based and some games also have a narrative component. Another component is mastering the controls and training your reflexes, but I'm not dealing with that. Lets have a look at the narrative component:

• The main character from Quake III arena (looking like Arny in commandos) is standing with his back against the wall. He grabs whatever shooting power he has and blasts away until kingdom comes.
• Raziel from the game Soulreaver is standing with his back against the wall. He knows he has to fight and/or solve a puzzle to escape from this situation. And if this does not work, he decides to go temporarily into the world of the dead and come back later. (But I truly like this concept: going back and forth between the world of the living and the dead.)

And then there are the more movie-like games like 'Metal Gear solid', 'Resident Evil', 'Max Payne' and 'Final Fantasy':

• Games like Resident Evil, Max Payne and Metal Gear Solid are sometimes called interactive movies. Which means the game presents the player with readymade moviescenes as a reward for defeating one of the bad guys or solving a puzzle. So standing against the wall in these games can result in a fight or in a nice moviescene.
• And even in an RPG like Final Fantasy there is not that much interactivity in the narrative: all narrative elements are ready made movies. All you can decide about is what abilities to train first, who is going to be in your team, what attacks to launch, etc. There are some other possibilities that are quite interesting: you can decide for yourself where you want to go, there are all kinds of mini-games, but this has nothing to do with the story the game is based on. These are - at best - short subplots.

If we look at the narrative in most games every wrong turn leads to the death of your game character or it leads to a situation where the player runs into a point that is hard - and maybe even impossible - to overcome. From this point of view there is not that much difference between 'Larry' (Dos), 'Out of this world' (Amiga?, Mac) and the above mentioned games.

A lot of gamers never seem to finish a game. Getting stuck is one of the main reasons next to getting bored. (See also: 'Turning a lineair story into a game'). Trying to solve this by simply offering more choices in your narrative is NOT the way to go. You will be confronted with the garden of forking paths problem all over again. I think the rules-based component of games hold the bigger promise.

What are the rules of the game? One part is simply the things one can do (shooting, activating mechanisms, moving from one place to another, communicating with AI's, picking up items). The other part is the way the game (read: AI) reacts to your actions. If you press a button the door is opened and when there are creatures behind that door they will try to kill you. Most of the time. Or: if you steal a car you can drive around town and shoot people. And if you shoot a lot of people the police will chase you down. Or: If you approach someone you can talk. Maybe you can discover something new when you do so.

These rules describe the way the game can be played, they describe what you can and can't do in a game. If there are more things you can do, there is simply more freedom in the game. If the way AI's react to the things you do is more diverse, the game is more alive. This part is mostly the work of the programmers. They design the AI, they do the things that make the rules work.