I distinctly remember during a 2nd grade dress rehearsal for "Puss and Boots", me and a couple of other boys decided to go up to the teacher and tell him that neither we, nor the feline protagonist would never, ever, ever, under ANY circumstances, share his feelings with the maiden he was set to rescue, as it said he would in the script. Me and my cohorts bravely walked up to Mr. Oates and told this to his face. He quietly took off his horned rim classes, set them down on the desk. And with a smile I'll never forget, he looked at us and said "Well it doesn't matter if you would. What matters is if the character would."
His words rung in my head a few days ago after talking to a friend about their recent run through of The Last Of Us. My friend said that the game was lesser, in his opinion, due to the fact as during the end level, he had no choice but to murder the doctors in order to rescue Ellie, at the cost of damning the whole world. I thought on this fact for a while. Would the game have been better if we could have let Ellie die to find a cure? Would that have been in keeping with Joel's character? Why do we play as Joel?
That last question is one I ask when playing any narrative driven game; Why do we play as this character? Most of the time the answer is simple: The character is merely a vessel for the player to experience the world. Gordon Freeman kills the combine because it is fun for the player to kill the combine, nothing more, nothing less. Mario jumps because it is fun to jump as Mario. Their actions are predetermined from the start, the player is merely the catalyst.
My friend felt guilty for killing those doctors, but was it really him killing them, or was it Joel? An actor takes on the role of Hamlet, but he does not feel personally guilty for the death of Polonius does he? Perhaps we as designers can do more to ask such questions, both for our sake, and the players.
