I think we can all agree that yesterday was a big day. Here at Critical-Distance, we had an amazing new guest curator (Jill Murray!) to present This Week in Video Game Blogging, and there was also a big thing with lots of expensive ads to watch on TV – you guess it: the Puppy Bowl! What with all that excitement, we wanted to hold back on the Blogs of the Round Table roundup to make sure you had time to take in and digest everything yesterday had to offer. Hopefully, you’re now recovered/recovering from yesterday’s happenings and are ready for an exciting roundup. This month’s theme was ‘Player’s Choice’

This month, we’re interested in hearing about self-regulated or self-inflicted rules. For instance, do you take stealth games so seriously that any detection causes you to restart from the last save point? Or maybe, when you played Skyrim you completed the game without once using a melee weapon? Alternately, perhaps you refuse to run left in side scrolling games – no backtracking allowed. Maybe you only ever allow yourself to rotate Tetris pieces two times. Maybe you played with an all female cast in Fire Emblem? Maybe, just maybe, you always choose the last dialogue option in games, no matter what it is. These are the circumstances we want to hear about: choices you make as a player that aren’t dictated or necessitated by the game, but which alter your experience and understanding of the game. Tell us about your choices and commitments to self-regulated play circumstances. Let’s talk about the resolutions you’ve made and how strong your resolve was in sticking to those modes of play.

Kicking us off this month, Oscar Strik of Sub Specie uses the theme to discuss the ways players create subgames and what the creation of those subgames reveal about play styles and player types. His analysis covers stealth play and role play. Strik’s analysis also considers what happens when the play styles we once to incorporated ourselves become a part of the game itself. He says:

The more your specific playstyle becomes part of the official game rules, the less it becomes a game within a game.

Commodore Purry’s Cupcake Party contribution also discusses roleplay by musing over self-imposed roleplay in Fallout: New Vegas. Commodore Purry developed a list of constraints to make playing in hardcore mode even more meaningful. I won’t detail the list of constraints here, though there are some good ones, because the really interesting bit is in how the constraints changed morality in the game:

I felt myself playing the game differently as well as viewing my own morality in a more disposable way.

PeterZ was also thinking about morality this month. Over at One More Continue, PeterZ discusses the eternal conflict between the dedication to play as the bad guy when we’ve been socialized to want others to like us. This is especially difficult, PeterZ notes, when unlike real life, video games validate our goodness thereby making it even harder to be evil.

Taking a different tack, Phil of Tim and and Phil Talk About Games, took the opportunity to discuss ‘Player’s Choice’ in terms of multiplayer games – specifically Counterstrike. Phil describes his self-imposed play style is being comprised of ego (challenging himself to use challenging weapons) and empathy (considering whether everyone in-game is having a fun/good experience). Phil states,

These two tendencies–one which is essentially showing off and another that boils down to some kind of strange fairplay–might seem to be at odds with each other. But they find a home in exploring the joy of competition within the rules of the game. The theatre of it.

This month, Leigh Harrison also considered the theme in terms of a multiplayer setting: a Half Life mod in which a group of role players made the most of the mod’s limited amenities to create a rich world of interaction. Harrison then uses this as a springboard to compare and contrast the role player’s dedication to eschewing the game’s rules against his own, more “adversarial” mode of play.

Over at Depth of a Failsman, Taylor Hidalgo recalls his experience with Shenume and his exploration play that stretched and reformed the limits of its narrative. Hidalgo notes,

The more choice the game gave me, the more I pushed at the boundaries. However unorthodox, though, I don’t think the game ever made my choices “wrong,” per se. They never did more than waste a few minutes or yen, for the most part, and sometimes managed to help Ryo’s quest along.

Also considering the bounds of narrative, but this time through the lens of translation philosophies, The Rev catalogs an experiment in which a friend, Rick, plays through the original Japanese version of Catherine (Kyasarin) to see if the game is different in translation. To make the experiment more interesting, Rick must play with some other, alcoholic, parameters too. The end result, in addition to what I imagine would be a rough hangover, is that Rick’s perception of the characters and story did change.

In a similar vein, Zachary Kerr reflects back on his experience of trying to be a pacifist in Skyrim, and how playing this way revealed the inherently violent undertones of the game itself. He states,

My pacifistic experience reveals dissonance between the heroic tone of the game and the nature of the acts I’ve committed. There is Skyrim the story, and there is Skyrim the game. The clash between my story and the mechanics weakens the game for me. The game pretends that I am a hero while I commit severe crimes against other people.

Over at Vidyasaur, Steve Hernandez played through Castlevania: The Adventure and added one simple rule: No destroying candles unless required. Dorin remarks how much additional difficulty this adds to the game – stage 3 was impossible:

I didn’t make the game harder by changing the difficulty within a menu, I made it harder by choosing not to interact with a ubiquitous and useful element throughout my adventure.

Tom Holt talks about his experience with the (as he notes “poorly named”) Straight Character Challenge in Final Fantasy Tactics, and the six things he learned in the process. In addition to six specific learning outcomes, Holt also advises others to try playing with self-imposed rules and reflects,

self-imposed challenges are a great way to learn something. I strongly encourage everybody to try playing games in a new way, whether officiated or not. Limit your toolkit, and learn to adjust for the gaps. It’s like the old saying: When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I Think that’s a great thought on which to end this month’s roundup. I hope you enjoy reading this round of submissions as much as I did. It was great to see so many people contribute. If you haven’t already, feel free to use this code to embed the links in your blog (provided your publishing platform allows iframes, that is):

<iframe type=”text/html” width=”600″ height=”20″ src=”http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=January15″ frameborder=”0″></iframe>

Also, make sure to check back tomorrow for Mark Filipowich’s February theme. I’ll look forward to your submissions!