How Choice-based Video Games Helped Me Politically and as a Person

I like my video games to have stories. It doesn't have to be a big story built into the game itself - I can craft an epic story around my Pokémon games, and the plot has barely changed from the eight badges, Elite Four, champion route. However, I especially love it when games give me the chance to make choices for myself.

 - Spoiler warning, particularly for the plot of the Mass Effect trilogy

Mass Effect. Dragon Age. Countless VN's. Fallout. Skyrim. All games with some element of dialogue choices to them. I can influence a part of the story. My favourite thing is being able to define my character's personality - I tend to make good characters who nonetheless snark at party members and NPCs. If the game gives me a personal reason to dislike someone, then I like to play that up - picking revenge-focused options when available. On the whole, though, my characters are good, ones who would try anything to broker peace between two tribes rather than let either side die. They ask questions before shooting - but still shoot if necessary.

In Mass Effect 3, there are large parts of the game where you can help refugees on the Citadel. Whether that is by talking to them, reuniting families, or getting supplies, it feels good. It wasn't hard to help them - taking a small detour to pick something up and take it back. In real life, I understand this might be harder - the game doesn't account for time spent travelling and fuel costs on the Normandy, for instance. But it felt good to be helping people.

Dragon Age 3 has a different mechanic that is worth mentioning - the War Table. On it, you would receive events, but instead of going yourself to sort it out, you would delegate some of your forces to go in your place. Your three advisers would discuss whether to do it by military force, espionage or diplomacy. Pick well, because you could make the wrong choice. And it showed the direct result of your actions, not just on the people you helped, but on the people imvolved. I've never felt worse than when I lost considerable numbers of my army when I could have picked the diplomatic option.

Also in Mass Effect, you encounter a political party wanting your endorsement, whose entire platform is "Earth First." You can choose to endorse them or not, and if you don't, you manage to counteract every one of their points. If you have the party member who was most, shall we say, sceptical about including aliens on a military ship, she will also stand up against them.

After a few playthroughs in Mass Effect when I punched the reporter Khalisah Al-Jilani, it stopped feeling so satisfying. If you refute her points calmly, you come off better and endear yourself to the general public. Not to mention the implications of a trained military soldier punching a member of the public not feeling right to me.

Throughout Mass Effect (I love this game and therefore have a lot of thoughts about it) there are decisions that I struggle with, to this day. There is one woman apprehensive about giving her unborn baby gene therapy to cure the gene that lead to his father's early death, as there are possible complications. I can never decide if it's a woman's right to choose in this case, or if she comes off similar to anti-vaccination movements nowadays, since a lot of her information comes from extranet articles. However, you don't make the choice for her, just advise her one way or another.

In Mass Effect 2 this time, you are forced to work for Cerberus, an explicitly human supremacist organisation. I hated everything about this. It made no sense for my Shepard to turn around and go right back to the Alliance. I did this, as soon as I got to the Citadel. I sort of play it like my Shepard is their gathering intel on Cerberus for the Alliance, but I believe that everyone who calls you out for working with them is in the right. I wouldn't be happy if I found out someone I knew was working for a terrorist organisation.

And there's the decision at the end of Mass Effect - do you save three of the most important politicians in the galaxy at the cost of many others, or let them die? The ones who die go down as heroes, but that's little consolation to the families devastated by it. Are three lives really worth that many others? I tend to know ahead of time what choices I will make for the story I am telling on that playthrough, so I don't struggle with the choice exactly, but I find it hard to press the button. However, the two things I'll never do is support an all-human council or place Udina on it.