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Title: Literary Ethics and Rhetoric in Video Games: An Analysis of Choice-Based Gaming
Author: Mark Frantz
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Introduction
Being both audience members and performers within video game narratives, we must
often make decisions and determine player-character actions and motivations. These decisions
and actions can tell us about ourselves as “self-involving fictions” that are just as much about
“those who consume them” than anything else (Robson and Meskin 2016). They can greatly
affect the textual meaning of a game, as Grant Tavinor (2017) has shown in his research, through
the details of player-character motivations that stem from our interpretive performance. Berys
Gaut (2010) argues that this performance relies on our ability to create features/traits beyond
those required that “suggest or ground a critical interpretation” (145). Ultimately, our choices in
games like Detroit: Become Human (Quantic Dream, 2018) have a significant impact on the
motivations, traits, and progression of the player-character(s) that we control which, in turn,
determines our interpretations and receptions of the overall narrative. Players, both as the
audience and as performers in choice-based games, collaboratively develop unique tellings of a
story with the guidance of game developers. These tellings or playthroughs arise from the
asynchronous dialogue between author and audience similar to traditional literature—an author’s
presentation and the reader’s response. The field of literary ethics defines the bonds of trust that
facilitate such a dialogue between authors and audiences in literature and is studied by narrative
theorists such as James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz through the lens of rhetoric. Video games
that incorporate significant levels of choice which affect player-character motivations, traits, and
progressions such as Detroit: Become Human need similar attention from researchers since the
structure of the literary dialogue is changed so much by the collaborative nature of choice-based
narratives.
It is clear that developers of choice-based games like Detroit: Become Human work hard
to provide the space for performative experiences that are filled with nuances which make the
experience of playing a game unique to each player and to each playthrough. In games like the
Fallout series, the Life is Strange series, and Detroit: Become Human, both parties demand and
sacrifice control of the narrative from and for each other to build unique game experiences. In
many games, both choice-based and otherwise, there are spheres of narrative control available to
both the player and the developers; however, each game has different levels of overlap between
these spheres of control. Detroit: Become Human, in particular, has significant overlap. An
important aspect of these types of games worth investigating, then, are the tensions of control
between developers and players over authoring the played narrative—particularly regarding
player-character motivations, traits, and progression. From there, I can then begin to formulate
an ethics of the experience that reflects the bonds of trust and communication between author
and audience found in traditional literary ethics but which also takes collaborative storytelling
into account. The ethics of the experience would attempt to catalogue and analyze the core
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concepts and strategies that developers of choice-based video games use to create collaborative
storytelling spaces and would serve to initiate the development of a framework for evaluating the
affordances and constraints players have with regards to choice-based narratives.
Imagine you are playing a game where you take control of an android named Kara and
you live in a future Detroit that enslaves and segregates androids. You have just been sold to a
single father named Todd to cook and clean for him and his daughter, Alice. On your first day,
you learn more about Todd: He is unemployed because of the numerous advancements in
android labor and thus harbors anger towards them (and you). Because of that hate, among other
factors, he has also developed a serious drug addiction and violent, abusive tendencies. If you
develop a close enough bond with Alice, you would learn that Todd has destroyed you before in
a fit of rage, then had you repaired and wiped your memory.
After serving dinner to the father and daughter, you stand by the table and watch as Todd
works himself into a rage, flips over the dinner table, and hits Alice… hard. The two separate
quickly, Alice to her bedroom and Todd to the living room to get high before he goes after Alice
again. You are ordered by Todd to not move from the dining room. Now, imagine that despite
being ordered to stand still, you decide to move (for whatever reason). This triggers the game to
allow you (and Kara) to become “deviant” which means that, within the storyworld, you have
officially broken Kara free of her coding and she can now function autonomously. If you don’t
do this, Todd will kill Alice, and Kara’s story ends—alluding to her own destruction. After
becoming deviant, you have the option to go upstairs and protect Alice; the alternative is to try
and reason with Todd while he gets higher and a lot angrier. On your way upstairs to Alice, you
remember the gun in Todd’s bedroom that you might have found when cleaning the house in an
earlier chapter. You don’t have long to act. Do you take it? Would you take it? Would Kara take
it? Why?
Maybe you took it because you (or Kara) fear the worst from Todd’s anger and you want
to kill him to be 100% sure he can never hurt Alice again—maybe it’s hatred for Todd that
drives you instead of fear for Alice. Maybe you took it but hope you don’t have to use it. You
might not take it at all because your compassion allows for you to see Todd’s potential for
change despite his egregious behavior towards you and Alice. Maybe you didn’t grab it so you
could prioritize getting to Alice before Todd does. It would certainly be reasonable, even, to
leave the gun alone out of fear of accidentally hurting Alice—even though you might not really
care what happens to Todd all that much. Furthermore, what do your actions and motivations say
about who Kara is and what her character traits and progression look like thus far?
Spheres of Control
As the designers and architects of the game, the developers of Detroit: Become Human
have much more authorial control than players. Developers can determine certainties about non-
player characters (NPCs), the storyworld, the narrative structure as a whole, what choices are
available to players, what consequences will arise from those choices, and even some certainties
about player-character traits. As Miguel Sicart points out, games are designed systems that
function as “moral objects” which “have values embedded in their very design” (2011, 221). In
other words, Although the player begins a game with certain values and morals, they can (and
usually are) presented with a designed game system that might favor or impose certain values
which might not align with their own.
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Players, relative to developers, have very little authorial control in the traditional sense.
They don’t write dialogue for their player-character, they can’t implement their own choices, and
they can’t write their own endings. Players are, in a way, guests in the developers’ world;
however, they can still tell themselves a story—despite the restrictions of developers. While
narrative choices are presented, the players only have storytelling agency insofar as the
developers allow. For choice-based games, developers often allow players to narrate their player-
character’s motivations, traits, and progressions on a deep and internalized level.
Authorial Overlaps
Narration, entirely dictated by the author of a novel, is comprised of three primary tasks
according to rhetorical narratologists like James Phelan: “[They] report (along the axis of facts,
characters, and events), interpret (along the axis of knowledge or perception), and they evaluate
(along the axis of ethics)” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012, 34). Reporting in video games is
always within the developers’ sphere of control—as mentioned before, they dictate certainties
about the storyworld and the characters within it and present them to you. The tasks of
interpreting and evaluating, on the other hand, are both well within the player’s sphere of control.
I think of it in a similar way to how humans have developed narrative to understand time,
process, and change in our everyday lives. In their book Memory, Identity, and Community: The
Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman explain that
memory and identity are intrinsically linked to narrative such that “[who] one is, from the
perspective of narrative theory, is inseparable from the way one’s personal history unfolds, the
telos (if any) toward which it builds, and the way that its overall course is emplotted and
interpreted by oneself and others” (119).We don’t literally narrate the plots and progressions in
our lived experiences, but our conception of it all is a kind of internalized narration because we
personally report, interpret, and evaluate the events, people, and choices in our lives to ourselves.
Video game experiences, then, are at least interpreted and evaluated in a very similar way.
The first notable overlap of authorial control using internalized narration are the player-
character motivations which inform our decisions. In the dialogue between developers and
players surrounding motivations, we see the authorial presence of the developers leading us to
want to protect Alice. Much like Telltale’s The Walking Dead series (2012), players are tasked
with caring for a helpless, innocent child. Developers impart these responsibilities to us via
compliant instances that must be completed in order to progress. However, players do decide
(and internally narrate) the reasons for helping Alice (or choosing not to) which dictate the way
in which players interact with her—an example being the decision to kill Todd due to unbridled
rage or to spare him due to compassion.
The next overlap are the traits of the player-characters which are sometimes determined
by character-character interactions. Dialogue is especially important to how a player-character’s
traits are formed because, while we use motivations to inform our decisions and form certain
traits, dialogue choices allow us to shape how player-characters think of themselves and others.
Consider when developers have Alice reprimand Kara for stealing money and clothing so they
can stay in the motel after escaping Todd (if that is indeed what the player chooses to do). The
developers want you to confront yourself with questions about you and your player-character’s
morality. Do you (and/or Kara) feel justified? Then maybe you have Kara tell Alice that it is
what needed to happen in order to survive. Is Kara genuinely good natured and (after Alice
confronts her) does she feel regret for her actions? Then maybe you have Kara agree with Alice
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and promise never to steal again. You might even have Kara lie about stealing money in the first
place if you believe that Alice is too young to understand the situation. You can even promise
never to do harm again and then go back on that promise later. Each instance of choice within
dialogue at an interpersonal level allows for the ability to build character traits beyond those
made from motivations of actioned decisions.
Finally, the last overlap is the progression of the player-character(s) which ultimately
determines the overall narrative interpretation of a playthrough. Developers have complete
control over the plot structure of a game which includes all the possible sequences of events and
their principle connections—that is, what can happen and how those things can happen. Players,
on the other hand, have significant control over player-character progression which, in Phelan’s
rhetorical narrative theory, is the underlying logic of a narrative's movement. Progression
consists of the synthesis of two components: textual dynamics (the plot, characters, setting, etc.)
and readerly dynamics (the developing responses of the audience to the textual dynamics)
(Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012, 59). So, while developers might determine certain aspects of
textual dynamics like plot, players define character traits and the logic of the plot in addition to
their responses to textual dynamics. In Kara’s case, if you agreed to never steal again and
successfully play through her story upholding positive morals such as avoiding murder or theft,
then at the end of her story (depending on other choices leading to the event), you have the
option to steal bus tickets from innocent humans so that you can cross the border to freedom in
Canada. In this instance, her character progression can be narrated as to imply that after a certain
point, she is willing to part with her previously defined morals in favor of ensuring her and
Alice’s safety. However, she might (after everything she has endured) decide not to steal these
bus tickets and thus uphold those same morals as she did before. Both of these examples (and the
many other possible choices/outcomes) are instances of character progression that shape how we
interpret characters and their stories—all of which depend on the player, their particular
combination of events, and the motivations/traits/progressions they prescribe to the player-
character(s) they control via internalized narration.
Ethics of the Experience
The ethics of the telling, according to Phelan, is “an ethics based on reciprocity and trust:
The author and the audience assume that narrative communication is a shared enterprise, albeit
one in which the author takes the lead” (2011, 67). He informs us that this bond of trust
presupposes that “if [the reader] gives the author their attention, they will be repaid with a
worthwhile experience” and that the author must then assume “the audience can be trusted to
connect the dots, fill in the gaps, and follow the art of mediated communication” such that the
author can use ethical rhetoric to make a moral argument via narrative (Phelan 2011, 67). So, in a
similar sense, what can developers of video games do to ensure a positive, ethical telling of their
moral arguments via game experiences? The short answer is that they avoid imposing an
overarching argument altogether, instead setting players up in situations with moral dilemmas,
letting them make their own choices, and allowing them to evaluate those choices for
themselves. This reinforces the idea that choice-based games are less about a direct moral
argument from author to audience than they are about player exploration and introspection with
regards to personal values/morality. Developers, ideally, try not to take the “lead” as with
traditional literature by crafting an argument that supposedly educates the reader on what is right
vs. what is wrong. Instead, they provide the tools for exploring morals/values in game
experiences by inviting players into some aspects of authorial control. Although filtered through
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the developer’s political and ideological values, these guided experiences, as Stephen Davis’
theory on artistic interpretation might suggest, have no singular/correct ‘good’ ending, but that
there are multiple coherent and valid interpretations (Davis 2006)—just multiple endings with
multiple possible interpretations/evaluations for choices and consequences. This is the interactive
space in which the dialogue between player and developer mainly takes place. The ideological
beliefs of developers are encoded into the narrative options intrinsically, and players will
reconcile with and respond to them via authorial control, internalized narration, and audience
response.
There are many examples of strategies developers have with regards to the ethics of the
experience that highlight the interactive spaces they present. The most noteworthy in my opinion
is that the developers of Detroit: Become Human create instances wherein you play as some
combination of the three player-characters simultaneously. Markus’ and Connor’s storylines are
in constant conflict throughout the narrative, but developers let them interact on certain
occasions with the player experiencing these scenes from each character’s perspective. This
strategy pushes us away from the lusory warrant in games, that which drives us to ‘win’ or obtain
the ‘good’ ending, because the choices available in these situations typically seem to be asking
players to consider more narratively diverse and morally questionable outcomes than the ideal
‘good’ ending which ultimately incentivizes personal exploration of morality through
interpretive and interactive work instead of direct authorial presentation.
A defining feature of Phelan’s “ethics of the telling” is that he dubs it “the default ethics
of the telling in literary narrative since modernism” (67). So, even though “we can all think of
authors who talk down to audiences, deliberately frustrate them, and otherwise depart from the
default” (67), there still exists expectations for bonds of trust between author and audience.
Choice-based narratives should also have a ‘default’ or ‘benchmark’ ethics of the experience
which would help frame future discussions about literary ethics and collaborative storytelling in
video games. In line with what narrative theorists like Phelan have described, then, developers
can trust players to be able to do interpretive work without going too far given that many players
are willing to engage in critical thinking and interpretive/performative work during play as well
as recognize and respect instances of developer control. Players can also trust that developers
would do what they can to make choices feel meaningful, give players a sense of freedom and
control, avoid incentivizing a perceived ‘good’ ending too much, and provide opportunities for
narrative diversity and interpretive meaning in choice-based games. These acts of trust and
shared control ensure that players and developers can fairly engage in a dialogue about choices,
morals, and consequences in a situational and experiential sense as opposed to a less interactive
experience of an argument such as traditional literature—this is what I mean when I talk about
the ethics of the experience in relation to the ethics of the telling. So long as developers are
‘playing fair’ with what they present (so to speak), players can then attune to what the developer
prescribes within the storyworld and they can also play an active role in the experience by doing
interpretive and evaluative work as performing agents in the game.
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Works Cited

Davies, Stephen. 2006. “Author’s Intentions, Literary Interpretations, and Literary Value.”

British Journal of Aesthetics 46:223–247.

Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge University Press.

Herman, David, et al. 2012. Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates. Ohio State

University Press.

Hinchman, Lewis P., and Sandra K. Hinchman. Memory, Identity, Community: the Idea of

Narrative in the Human Sciences. State Univ. of New York Press, 1997.

Phelan, James. 2011. “Rhetoric, Ethics, and Narrative Communication: Or, from Story and

Discourse to Authors, Resources, and Audiences.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary

Journal, vol. 94, no. 1/2, pp. 55–75.

Robson, Jon, and Aaron Meskin. 2016. “Video Games as Self Involving Fictions.” The Journal

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74: 165–177.

Sicart, Miguel. 2011. The Ethics of Computer Games. MIT Press.