All Your Well-Learned Politesse

As I sift through the fragments of a family history that seems as unfamiliar to Kathy as it does to me, one thing, at least, becomes all too clear: if you're going to play point-and-click adventure games you can't afford to be polite. This is a truism which also applies to computer role playing games of all stripes and it creates some serious problems for me because I'm really, really uncomfortable with rude behavior.

Peculiarly, I'm significantly more uncomfortable with it in fiction than in real life. I'm fairly certain that many, even most, of the people who've had to spend time with me over the decades would be able to come up with numerous anecdotes about times I behaved very much less than politely. I've been called on it often enough to know that much.

Why it is, then, that acting impolitely when playing in character causes me such discomfort I'm not sure. It's a highly nuanced behavior, too. I think one of the reasons I strongly prefer playing diminutive or childlike or animal characters is the license it affords me to behave, well, childishly.

As I've mentioned before, Mrs Bhagpuss and I both have a queasy tendency to roleplay immature characters. In Guild Wars 2 we have a clutch of loosely related Asuras who range in age from around eight years old to late teens. They bicker and tease each other and get emotionally overwhelmed. We have a slew of long-running in jokes that we indulge, most of which revolve around insulting each other. My most-played character can be cartoonishly rude at times. Quite a lot of times.

When I play my more mature characters there, my many Charrs, for example, I am much more polite. Formal, even. Mrs Bhagpuss's Sylvari and humans tend to behave like adults, too. It's not "roleplaying" as such. It's more that the physical presence and appearance of the characters sets a tone.

That's all well and good when the interactions take place between players, particularly in an environment that encourages a mutually sustained backstory, but it breaks down almost immediately as soon as external narrative imposes itself on the action. Whatever the established personality of my character might be, when faced with a set of alternative options in a dialog tree I find it all but impossible to choose any but the most socially acceptable.

I have to be polite at all costs. It frequently seems more important to me that I maintain social norms, by which I mean real-world social norms appropriate to the society in which I live, than that I either represent the supposed attitudes of the race, gender or class I'm playing or give the responses most likely to further the plot.

If I fail to do this I feel uncomfortable. Since I play primarily to entertain myself, feeling uncomfortable is not a desired outcome. Fortunately, one of the huge benefits of MMORPGs over most other video game genres is that almost all dialog options exist purely for flavor. It's highly unusual for a choice to have meaningful, far less significant, impact on how things turn out.

In single-player RPGs that's not the case. Rather, the entire genre has tended to align itself around the concept of decisions that matter. It makes things awkward at times but I can often find a narrative thread that's acceptably unabrasive. If not, I stop. Not ever game has to be for everyone, after all.

In adventure games it's much more of an issue. By tradition, adventure games tend to have linear narratives. There may be branches and alternate endings but whichever path you take has, eventually, to lead to a conclusion. Generally you can't just wander about, exploring the world and taking whichever side quests suit you until you feel you've had your money's worth.

Adventure games like Kathy Rain, with narratives that are effectively murder mysteries (it is, as Xyzzysqrl so astutely put it, Joan Jett as Nancy Drew) don't just require you to follow a set storyline, they expect you to apply mechanics that have little connection with either normative behavior or common politeness.

The tension between believable behavior and game function is extremely evident in Kathy Rain. The narrative takes considerable pains to emphasize the importance of behaving in a rational, acceptable fashion.

Kathy simply won't perform the kind of asocial acts we associate with video games. If a person wouldn't do something in normal life, for example try to enter a locked crypt in a graveyard where a funeral is taking place, she tells you in no uncertain terms that she doesn't need to do that right now.

She needs to establish relationships with people before she asks them questions and she needs to have good reasons for the qustions she asks or she just won't do it. All of which suits me very well indeed.

The problem comes when Kathy has run through all of her available, normative behaviors and still hasn't found the answers she needs. In common with most adventure games, new locations only become available when specific plot points have been met. If there's nowhere else to go and no-one else to talk to, all that's left is to keep returning to the same people and asking them over and over again about whatever options still remain.

And that feels wrong. It just does. Going in and out of Kathy's grandmother's house on the day the old lady buried her husband and Kathy walked back into her life after a decade and a half of unexplained absence, just to sit beside her on the couch and ask yet another question feels very uncomfortable indeed.

It might even be less uncomfortable if her grandmother called her on her bizarre behavior but instead she simply complies, running through the same acknowledgments and farewells as though they hadn't happened half a dozen times already.

It's freakish and the writer, Joel Staaf Hästö, knows it. He makes a sterling effort to explain and cover for the most egregious examples, as when Hacker Dave tells Kathy not to worry about having to call I.T. guy Clyde to come fix her PC as often as she needs because "it's his job".

In the end, though, the exigencies of the form override adherence to either naturalism or social niceties. And I have to put up with it if I want to play. Self-evidently I can put up with it, because I am playing, and enjoying myself.

Would I prefer a more moderated experience, though? One where the game compensated for my errors and omissions, filling in the blanks in my journal with insights I hadn't actually had, adding information I'd missed from conversational paths not taken.

It would be less of a game, more a narration, perhaps, but would that matter? After all, I already resort to walkthroughs, not only as soon as I get stuck but also when I intuit I'm going to have to press harder and become more intrusive than feels comfortable.

Maybe I should just read a Nancy Drew novel and listen to I Love Rock and Roll on hard repeat. (Full disclosure: I have never read a Nancy Drew novel).

Better yet, maybe I should just get over myself!