Gim crack’d

Choices, unconscious and not

I’ve been thinking about the idea of unconscious choice and how I might use it in the story I’m working on. The best example I can think of is Silent Hill 2, where it turns out the way you act throughout the game determines how the story ends. I have to admit, I really hated it when I found out that was what was going on, because I felt like the game misinterpreted my actions.

1. It’s a survival horror game, right, so you have to be really careful with resources so you don’t run out. I only healed myself when I was really close to death, when I was guaranteed to get all I could out of each healing item. This, the game took to mean I didn’t have much regard for my own well-being.
2. You meet a character named Angela who seems doomed and self-destructive, and at one point you manage to talk her into giving you a knife she seemed to intent on using on herself in the near future. I tried using the knife every way I could in the game, because I felt like there had to be a way that would save her. It turns out you can’t, and the game read my obsession with the knife as not a desire to try to save someone else’s life, but a desire towards self-harm.(p.s. man, did the voice acting not age well.)

These two factors led to the game selecting an ending for me where the main character kills himself, which felt odd, since the main character had suffered through so much and seemed to find resolution to his conflicts — but I admit, it fit with the storyline. When I found out there were several endings, in fact, it kind of annoyed me, as I felt like the game had fundamentally misunderstood me. To see a happier ending (relatively speaking), I had to carefully follow its rules, which seemed both arbitrary and ambiguous.

Nonetheless, I hate the idea of “push button, receive new ending.” One thing about Sean’s story that has always bothered me was that the choice of endings was so transparent and obvious. I guess that wasn’t the point, exactly — you were supposed to evaluate what had come before and decide what was right. But it also felt way too easy to pick the romantic ending, the one which would leave the main character with a sense of meaning to the experience.

I guess what I’m trying to avoid are obvious choices, perhaps because I feel that most of the ones we make in real life are unobvious. They do not feel as important as they are, their consequences are hidden, and we decide without ever really knowing we’ve decided something.

Is that a pessimistic thought? I don’t mean it that way, but it reads that way on the screen.

— Chris, 8 December 2008

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