AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Life is full of choices, and more and more, virtual life is, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "AVOWED")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As The Voice) And we could give you the gift of our healing touch.
CHANG: Choices are at the center of the story in Avowed. That's a new video game out this week from Obsidian Entertainment.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "AVOWED")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As The Voice) Would you help us in return when we ask it?
CHANG: You have to make the decision - help the mysterious voice or don't. NPR's Vincent Acovino reports that this kind of storytelling has roots in an older kind of game.
VINCENT ACOVINO, BYLINE: Avowed is a classic fantasy role-playing game. It's got magic spells, swords and the role-playing aspect of it is deep. You make your own character and lead them through a plot you are shaping as you play.
CARRIE PATEL: I think that's one of the unique things that video games offers, is we can put you in this context, give you this set of choices, and you can really decide what you're going to do about it.
ACOVINO: That's Avowed's narrative director, Carrie Patel. She says unlike reading a novel or watching a TV show, you can choose to be the hero or not.
PATEL: The choice to be good, noble, honorable, et cetera doesn't really exist if you're not giving players an actual choice to do something different.
ACOVINO: While choice is nothing new for the genre, Avowed is an example of a game that's pushing what it means to play in an open world, but it comes from an old-school format.
PATEL: RPGs of the kind that we make have deep roots in tabletop RPGs.
ACOVINO: Tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, specifically. In D&D, players sit in a room with a dungeon master or a story guide, and they make choices together. Everyone describes the fantasy and tells the story as they go.
JOHN ROMERO: The reason why the early computer games going forward were a lot of medieval fantasy type stuff is because D&D came out in 1974. And, you know, it was like an explosion.
ACOVINO: John Romero is a software designer who was also inspired by D&D. He made the classic shooter game Doom.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)
ACOVINO: Romero says the computer games industry really got underway in 1977, as personal computers were becoming more of a thing. And earlier video games used text rather than visuals to tell their stories, but they had the same interactive approach.
ROMERO: Back then, the form was reading and writing (laughter). It's like a book. You're reading this amazing novel, and you are talking to the novel. And it's responding, and you're, like, going places in it.
ACOVINO: Romero says, in some ways, those games were ahead of where we are even now.
ROMERO: You could type entire sentences to this game as if you were talking to somebody, and it would take the sentence and analyze it and break it down. It was far more elaborate than anything that you can find today. It was unbelievable.
ACOVINO: Years later, stunning graphic worlds, interactive combat and professional voice acting have fundamentally changed the genre.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Video games are the new storytelling medium of our time.
ACOVINO: That's fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. We talked about the RPG Mass Effect, which came out in 2007.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "MASS EFFECT")
RAPHAEL SBARGE: (As Kaidan) How could we just leave her down there?
ACOVINO: It was a big hit for a lot of reasons - good graphics, compelling characters, world building. But the thing that sticks with him and many others about that game is the tough choice he had to make at the end of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "MASS EFFECT")
MARK MEER: (As Commander Shepard) Lieutenant Alenko, I am your commanding officer. I did what I had to do. Don't question my orders.
ACOVINO: You have to save one of two characters that you've been with throughout. The other dies.
SANDERSON: You know, this is a gut punch because the game does an excellent job of making you really interested in all these characters. And it presents this final decision as you, as a team, are all committed in stopping the catastrophe that's coming.
ACOVINO: That choice is what many fans of the genre crave most, and that's the challenge that writers and designers and developers are faced with. More options lead to more writing and more code.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "AVOWED")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As The Voice) Wolves fighting for territory.
ACOVINO: Andy Bickerton reviewed the new game Avowed for NPR, and he says that the story takes a while to get interesting. But when it does, it's surprisingly introspective.
ANDY BICKERTON, BYLINE: One of the main plot threads deals with the themes of trauma and redemption. I was really guessing all the way through the game, all the way up until the end, like, I think that my choices are leading toward an ultimately, like, good ending. But I had this nagging feeling all the way through that this could end up being really bad.
ACOVINO: But a good or bad ending works differently in a game like this.
BICKERTON: This story and the choices that you make speak to my own personal philosophy and make me reflect on themes, like, in my own life.
ACOVINO: The best role-playing games, like most art, hold up a mirror.
Vincent Acovino, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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