GamePlay vs GameExperience

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Still with me? Good.

I was playing through Prince of Persia about a month ago and I had gotten to what I figured was the end of the game. I reimprisoned the big bad evil and accomplished what was presented as my goal at the beginning of the game, but the game wasn't over. Kind of like Return of the King, the game continued. The Prince's companion throughout the game, Elika, had sacrificed herself for the greater good and the credits began to roll as I controlled the Prince while he carried her lifeless body out of the temple. A short cutscene played showing me the four trees in the distance which had grown as a result of reimprisoning the big bad.

The game gave me control of the Prince again and taking a cue from the cutscene, I figured the trees were my next objective. I ran to the platforms on which the tree sat and navigated them as I did any other obstacle in the game. When I reached the tree, without thinking I commanded the Prince to strike it down. And as the ground around me changed from bright and full of life to dark and lifeless, it hit me. I was undoing the very thing that I had been working towards the entire game. I didn't want to cut down those trees, but I had to cut down those trees... a thought I'm sure was going through the Prince's mind at that moment (or would be if he were real). At that moment, I realized I wasn't playing as the Prince, I was the Prince.

For the most part our gaming experience is purely visceral. We feel the power of the characters as they accomplish amazing feat after amazing feat. We feel triumph as be overcome the obstacles and enemies standing between us and our goal. But we are never at odds with out goal. We never think twice about stomping on that goomba and squashing him out of existence. We almost never feel regret.

That's because the games we play rarely ask us to do something we don't want to do. We generally take the role of a physically or mentally superior character who has to fight against all odds to save the world/princess. Who wouldn't want to be that guy (or gal)?

But games are a powerful storytelling medium unlike any other. With other storytelling venues, we take the role of the audience, viewing from a safe distance the events that unfold before us. But with games, we are an active participant if not the protagonist of the events that unfold. This puts video games in a unique position to have the player fully experience what might just be an intellectual exercise when communicated through other media.

First person shooters literally put us in the shoes of the main character and provides us an immediate instinctual connection. But few games actually put us in the heads of the characters like Prince of Persia did with its ending. Most of the time, we play a game to beat it. But hopefully like the explosion of the first person shooter genre, more games will mix both storytelling and gameplay to a point so that we aren't just beating the game, we're experiencing it.