Prey Solved My Biggest Problem With RPGs

Someday, I'll write a book about everything Prey does right, but today I want to talk about character immersion and the narrative techniques Prey uses to fix my biggest problem with role playing games: the disconnect between player choice and character id♓entity.

Setting The Table - Let's Define Some Terms

Immersive sims are a genre of games loosely ꦚgrouped together by an emphasis on player choice. Not simply a good or evil playthrough, but open-ended gameplay and reactionary systems which lead to emergent gameplay by responding to player choice.

When Corvo sneaks up and knock out an enemy in Dishonored, the unconscious body can be discovered by another enemy that passes by. If the body is found, the enemy will goꩲ on alert and begin an aggressive pursuit of Corvo. They may even alert other enemies to help them search. If Corvo can't find a place to hide, he'll have to kill the enemies blocking his path. Killing those enemies will lead to enemies in greater numbers later on in the game, as you're now a greater threat. As the body count rises, rats will begin to infest the city.

All of these simple systems respond to the choices you make, as a player, to creat🧸e emergent gameplay. How you🦋 play the game changes the game itself. That variety goes far beyond multiple skill trees and endings, too.

In an immersive sim, every ste🔯p you take is a choice y✃ou make.

Character Immersion - Becoming Who You Are

"Character Immersion" is a term I'm borrowing from Stanislavski's school of m﷽ethod acting.

Role-playing in a RPG is not unlike acting, in a sense. Playing an immersive sim is actually a lot like improvisational acting: you are given a role, such as Adam Jensen, and given the tools to do what he would do. You have control over the choices Adam makes, the things Adam says, and the values and morals Adam demonstrates as he experiences the plot of Deus Ex. Most RPGs do not give 🌟youꦦ a "blank slate" character to play. Rather, you play as a character with their own backstory, their own personality.

Here's the problem: When you make a choice, are you making the choice the you would make, or the choice the character would make? The cognitive dissonance created in the gap between player and character shatters our analogy to improvisational acting at every point where pla𒊎yer choice diverges from character verisimilitude.

When you ask yourself what Adam would do in a given situation, are you giving up the freedom of choice inherent to the genre? Conversely, when you make the choice you want to make without regard🔯 to what the character would do, are you compromising that character?

But, most importantly: does it matter?

Prey And The Player-Character Gap

For the most part, games don't really try to deal with this disconnect. Whether you play Corvo as an empathetic f𝓡ugitive who only wants to clear hi📖s name, or as a ruthless killer hell bent on revenge, there's no real narrative implication outside the standard alternate endings. No one in the game will ever confront you about the choices you make, nor bring up whether or not you're doing what the "real" Corvo would do.

The freedom these games give you to play them your way has a narrative cost. To this end, I think it's fair to say no matter how i♍maginative, fully realized, and beautiful the worlds can be, the characters in immersive sims have always been two-dimensional and archetypal, and the sto🥃ries have always been just as flat.

Prey, on other han🌳d, is not only brave enough to play with the disconnect between player and character throughout the sto🍸ry, by the end of the game, it mends that rift.

You play as Moꦇrgan Yu (either male or female,) a character who has lost their memories. This immediately puts you on the same level as the character, and while amnesia isn't going to work for every game, it effectively bridges the gap between player and character. But that's only the beginning.

While you traverse Talos 1 figuring out what happened there, you are also discovering who Morgan was. When at first you are making choices on instinct, where to go, who to help, what to prioritize, those decisions can (and should) be influenced by what you learn about Morgan. When you aren't sure who to trust, the best thing to do is trust yourself. As you learn about who Morgan is, and eventually what their plan was, you gain a little guidance to help you make choices, and indeed, act like Morgan. Not the original Morgan of course, but the Morgan you are ⛎now - the Morgan that's trying to do the most right thing: Morgan 2.0

Your choices are constantly in question by the other characters who knew Morgan 1.0. Much like Nolan's Memento, other people will try to use what you don't know against you. They'll tell you what Morgan would have done and what they think you should do, but they always reinforce the distinction between who🔴 Morgan was and who you are now.

As things progress, the game subverts many of the beliefs you've come to adopt about the people in Talos 1, including Morgan 1.0. Whether you continue Morgan's oಌriginal mission or take your fate into your own hands, your choices are both your own and Morgan 2.0s. When it comes time to make the big decisions about who lives and who dies, you're making those♏ choices armed with the information you and Morgan 2.0 have gathered.

There is no distinction that can be made between you and the character. Prey creates perfect character immersion.

Choices That Matter

I'm going to talk about the end of the game now. If you haven't played it, I'm begging you to go experience Prey for yourself, as this next part will absolute♛ly ruin it otherwise.

I've seen a lot of criticism about the final reveal, and heard more than one play♉er groan that it means none of your choices mattered. For me, not only did this ending matter more than any other choice-based game I've played, but it puts a beautiful bow on this conversation of character immersion.

Regardless of what you choose to do, you'll wake up at the end and discover that the entire game was a simula✃tion and that you are not in fact Morgan Yu. You are actually a Typhon implanted with Morgan's memories. What you've just experienced were Morgan's final days in an experiment to see if the Typhon arꦚe capable of empathy. You aren't actually Morgan, and never were.

But of course you aren't.

Morgan is a character in a video game and you are you. This ending drives home just how clever and thoughtful the deve🐻lopers have been about character immersion. Throughout the entire game you were trying to be Morgan, trying to do what Morgan would do, and eventually, trying to do what you think is ꧒the most right. The same can be said of your character. Players feel like its a cop out to be told that none of it was real, but that's entirely the point, isn't it?

None of it was real. It isn't about saving Talos 1 or defeating the Typhon, it's about you and the choices you make. As the saying goes, if nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do. Whether you chose to save yourself and risk bringing the Typhon to Earth or valiantly stay on Talos 1 and watch it get destroyed is not the choice with major consequence you initially assume it to be. In reality, Earth is already doomed, and the only difference your choices make is how they define your character. Prey acknowledges this by pulling back the curtain at the end and saying "I see you, I see what you've done." By eliminating "real" consequences to your choices, Prey is able to narrowly focus on player/character choice. Your choices are the only "real" thing that ꧋happened in the game.

Prey ends by giving you an incredible gift that no other game I've played ever has. Prey ends by telling you that the time you spent as Morgan wasn't about space adventures and alien invasion, it was about y෴ou and the choices you've made, and you did good.