Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing On Games.
A little heads up – today I’m going to be talking about Campo Santo’s recent release
Firewatch.
This game is, as you may already know, almost entirely centred on its narrative – as a
result, it becomes incredibly difficult to discuss in a critical sense without going
into at least some cursory story elements.
It’s a game that I’d recommend playing, so if you haven’t played it yet and want
to go in blind I’d suggest you go and play it before watching this video.
I’ll try to avoid any major spoilers but what you define as a ‘major spoiler’ might
be entirely different to me.
With that in mind, you have been warned.
Now, let’s talk about Firewatch.
Firewatch is a game about choice.
It is an aggressively linear game which focuses on telling an incredibly singular tale that
the player has little to no control over, but it is about choice nonetheless.
It is about choosing to run away from one’s problems, it’s about choosing to start a
new life, and the player gets a say in how their character shapes their own identity,
but ultimately every choice in the game proves to be futile.
The game always follows the same steps, hits the same narrative beats, and concludes in
the same way.
How, then, does the game make these choices in any way meaningful?
There are indeed many choices in terms of dialogue between Henry and Delilah, but they
never actually amount to anything tangible in terms of how they affect the game’s progression
through its narrative.
You get presented with a choice, you choose the line, Henry says the line, Delilah responds
and the game continues.
Furthermore, critics of other adventure games such as Life Is Strange and the developer’s
previous work The Walking Dead Season One have criticised the games for the illusory
nature of their choices – that is to say, they feel (rightly or wrongly) that the games
pushed themselves as games where the player’s choices could really affect the outcome of
the story, and they were disappointed to find out that their impact on the game’s outcome
was perhaps not as grand as they might have been lead to believe.
Many players measure the rather nebulous concept of choice by how different the presumed multiple
endings of the game can turn out.
However, as I will attempt to exemplify through analysis of Firewatch and other games of a
similar nature, this is perhaps not the best metric by which to measure the value of a
game’s choices.
In fact, one might go so far as to say that the seemingly inconsequential nature of the
choices presented to the player in games like Firewatch and Kentucky Route Zero for example
actually end up giving the player a greater sense of place within the world their character
inhabits.
Perhaps we can analyse Firewatch’s approach to character in the way that Barthes imagines
the death of the author – in his essay on the concept, whilst analysing and asking hypothetical
questions of the identity of the author in Balzac’s Sarrasine, he states that:
It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all writing is itself
this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature
is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin:
literature is… the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity
of the body that writes.
Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted… this disjunction
occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.
It’s important to note that Barthes here is largely discussing the idea of metafiction,
or texts that are about the idea of being a text, which Firewatch very much is not,
but there are some interesting parallels to be drawn here.
This idea of ‘writing beginning’ once the origin of the author becomes obfuscated
and therefore becomes placed on the person experiencing a text, is perhaps at the very
heart of the way games like Firewatch present their choices to the player.
The simple dialogue choices presented to the player might not alter the overarching story
in any particularly meaningful way, but in the moments they are presented to the player,
they help the player subtly shape their character (or at the very least their understanding
of the character) which in turn helps contextualise the more significant narrative beats at a
more identifiably individual level.
For example, take one of the earliest scenarios in the game – where Henry confronts some
drunken teenagers setting off fireworks at the lake.
The outcome of this situation will always end with Henry taking some form of action
(or inaction) and the teenagers becoming annoyed and running off.
The game builds up to this situation by first presenting the player with the remnants of
the teenager’s excess – beer cans strewn everywhere allow Henry the option to pick
these up or leave them be, as well as presenting the option of taking some whiskey for himself.
He then passes by the teenager’s clothes which Delilah ribs him about, until finally
he is presented with the teenagers themselves, naked, accusing Henry of being a pervert,
with the stereo blasting.
One can do many things here, but the outcome is always the same – Henry walks away having
caused some form of annoyance to the teenagers, causing them to swim away.
What’s intriguing about this is that despite the outcome always being the same, the way
the player navigates the dialogue choices presented to them from as early as the very
beginning of the game shape Henry’s character in very subtle ways which contextualise this
situation somewhat differently.
With the text segment at the start describing the decline of his wife’s health, players
can make decisions regarding Henry’s reactions to various situations.
Is the player’s Henry the kind of guy that will get visibly mad when she comes in late
or will he pretend that everything is OK and let the anger fester due to his inability
to assert himself?
Is he the kind of person who worries enough to lock his ill wife in her room whilst he
goes to drink, or does he treat the situation with a reckless abandon due to his distance
to the situation around him?
These small choices help to characterise Henry in drastically different ways – regardless
of your choices he is going to be flawed and his life will play out the same, but in the
player’s head it calibrates Henry’s character as either an assertive, violent asshole, or
an awkward, clumsy oaf.
This continues as the player comes across the beer cans – is the player’s Henry
the kind of person to obsessively pick up every can despite its lack of impact on the
larger narrative?
Does he take the whiskey for himself or confiscate it?
When he comes across the clothes, does he respond to Delilah’s quips or does he become
coy about it?
All these choices create something of a metagame, where each choice branches out into the same
set of choices but with a different context depending on your previous choices – all
for the sake of contextualising Henry’s character in the player’s head.
For example, does Henry leave the cans and go straight for the whiskey because he’s
a borderline alcoholic that doesn’t care about his job, or does he treat the whiskey
as a reward for doing his job (still hinting at some kind of alcohol problem), or does
he confiscate everything altogether?
These choices culminate in the meeting with the teenagers, which now can take on several
different forms of context in the player’s head.
Does Henry shyly and awkwardly ask the teens to stop setting off fireworks before just
walking away from their barrage of emasculating insults?
Does he take the stereo and run (still running away from confrontation in a situation where
his opponents cannot effectively respond)?
Or, does he present his aggressive side by picking up the stereo and violently tossing
it into the water before shouting at the teenagers?
Again, it all ends in the same way – the teenagers swim away.
However, each subtle choice the player has made up until this point that seemingly have
no consequence on the game at large help them make this cumulative decision of how they
are to deal with the situation regarding the teens.
These subtle dialogue choices place the authorship of the more subtle elements of Henry’s character
onto the player, and therefore each situation becomes more meaningful to the player as it
is their individual, subtly crafted version of Henry experiencing and responding to them.
Each version the player can create in their heads will inevitably be flawed as the larger
narrative beats remain the same for everyone, but the ways in which he is flawed are left
up to the player.
Is he a violent thug, an apathetic weirdo or an awkward manchild?
These outcomes are all Henry, as written and constructed by the developers and writers,
but the decision as to which version of Henry the player takes on is left at almost every
turn to the player.
This, arguably, is the kind of situation Barthes talks about when he states that ‘the unity
of a text is not its origin, but its destination’.
In order to make the game’s choices more meaningful to the player, the writers must
give up authority in a way that only games can allow, and place faith in the intelligence
of the player to value consistency in their vision of the character.
Is the game fully successful in achieving this lofty vision?
Not entirely.
I would argue that the game almost doesn’t go far enough with the idea of transferring
authorship onto the player.
The main reason for this, as I see it, is that the game doesn’t seem to know whether
it wants to be this compelling character drama based on the player’s vision of Henry formed
through subtle dialogue choices, or if it wants to focus on the creeping mystery, until
right at the game’s conclusion, and ends up resolving neither in a particularly satisfying
way as a result (and another warning, this section might get into some spoilers but I’ll
avoid them as best as I can).
In order to illustrate this I’m going to have to compare it to what may be seen as
a somewhat easy comparison, but it’s apt – Gone Home.
These games, on the surface, appear to do very similar things – they both feature
some form of mystery regarding the character’s place in the world, and ultimately resolve
to reveal that the mystery is more grounded and human than the player might have initially
imagined.
However, the way in which both games go about this is what differentiates them.
Gone Home almost starts with a kind of unbearable tension (in many ways it almost feels like
a horror game) but as the game progresses this tension that there might be strange,
occult and hostile events taking place slowly gives way to a more human story about a relative’s
struggles to find their sexual identity.
The tension starts high, but gradually falls away, allowing the player to slowly become
accustomed to the shift in focus.
Firewatch does the opposite, and ends up bungling its mystery as a result.
It starts off with almost no mystery whatsoever, and then as the game goes on begins to hint
more and more to the player that something strange might be happening.
It actually builds this tension in a pretty masterful way – constantly upping the ante
to the point where the player begins to question the reality they find themselves in and foregrounding
some of the more mechanical elements of the game (the recordings of radio conversations,
for example, presented almost like a script), and every turn the player takes as a result
feels like it could result in grave danger.
This tension is taken to almost absurd levels as the player begins to wonder about potential
government conspiracies, or even if the developers are playing some kind of sinister mindgames
with the player…
only for the game to do the Gone Home thing and reveal to the player that actually the
mystery doesn’t matter and the whole point of the story was the building up of Henry
and Delilah’s relationship.
Not only was this a disappointingly obvious way for the story to go, the difference between
Gone Home and Firewatch is the way that Gone Home allows the player to acclimatise early
on to the idea that the mystery doesn’t matter, whereas Firewatch builds the mystery
and tension to a point where it seems like the developers want the player to focus on
that rather than the relationship between Henry and Delilah.
It represents a disappointing lack of consistency in a game which could have truly been considered
one of the better implementations of narrative delivery in a game if the writers had just
stuck with either the relationship between Henry and Delilah and the way the player’s
choices contextualise larger situations, or stick the landing in terms of the mystery
by providing it a satisfactory conclusion, worthy of the tension the game creates before
then.
Despite this lack of a satisfactory conclusion however, it is hard to deny that at least
initially the game does some incredibly interesting things with the notion of player choice.
If we imagine that The Walking Dead Season One presents the player with numerous massive
decisions that shape the nature of the larger narrative going forward but change little
about the way the player views the characters, Firewatch chooses to focus on how the player
contextualises very singular events by bringing the consequences of their choices down to
a micro, character-driven level.
This is where Firewatch absolutely shines in my opinion, and as a result I would still
recommend people pick up and play.
If it exemplifies anything however, it’s that games as a medium are still in a state
of constant flux – we are far from reaching the supposed pinnacle of narrative delivery
in games at this point, and these games can very much be viewed as narrative experiments,
which in turn draw from the narrative experiments in games of the past few years such as The
Stanley Parable or Dear Esther (which, for the record, is one of the least fulfilling
experiences I have ever had playing a game, but it was significant for the development
of the medium nonetheless).
It is incredibly interesting to trace the lineage of this game through those earlier
experiments in narrative delivery in games that seemed so revolutionary at the time but
now feel strangely dated.
It’s also immensely exciting, however, to imagine how these kinds of games can develop
and iterate on both the successes and shortcomings of these games, and I for one very much look
forward to engaging with the evolving discourse as more of these games are released.
Also, I should say that I’m very happy to have you along for the ride with me on this
as well.
And with that said, I’m Hamish Black and that concludes yet another episode of Writing
On Games.
Thanks very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.