A great distraction.

I haven’t been watching much anime recently.  I mean to post soon about the reason why, but the basic problem is that I’m doing something cool next semester that requires me to do a lot of advance reading over the summer.

I have, however, been playing a lot of video games, mostly Oblivion and Chrono Trigger, with some Pokemon Blue thrown in.  Given that I’m playing an Elder Scrolls game, my mind’s been on side quests a lot.  If you don’t know, all the Elder Scroll games are famous for having more sidequests than storyline – it’s not a sandbox game, but a game with a similar mindset, that you can go live in the world as an adventurer of sorts.  You can enter the Mage’s Guild and work your way up the ranks or become an assassin (or, as thekittymeister has decided – to my wholehearted approval – to become the world’s greatest thief, in the grand tradition of Lupin III and Garrett).  Everything’s a quest, from the rare plant behind the guild house to the missing artist in the little village a day’s ride from the capital.  It’s good times.  But given the contrast in the games I’m playing, it got me thinking.

As you already know, I watched my GF play Earthbound recently.  In addition, I’m playing Final Fantasy XII, Oblivion, Chrono Trigger, Pokemon, and am in the middle of a playthrough (with the GF) of Final Fantasy VIII, inspired by Spoony’s review of the same.  So I’ve been messing around with a lot of RPGs recently.  Nearly all these games have sidequests.

When I think of sidequests I actually still think of The Legend of Zelda; specifically, I think of Ocarina of Time.  That Biggoron sword is still one of my favorite sidequest items.  Even though it wasn’t really practical and didn’t do me a whole lot of good, I loved that thing.  It was huge, man, huge!  I had to roll across half of Hyrule, because I could never get up on my horse quickly enough to get those ingredients to the old lady in Kakariko.  That would be one of the first games I ever played with sidequests, I believe.  I didn’t actually get to play many games until the Playstation/N64 era, and even then I got a lot of them late.  I played FF8 before 7, and finished 7 just as 9 was coming out.

Sidequests serve a lot of different purposes.  I’ve been asking this afternoon on Twitter and Facebook about sidequests, and the (admittedly small, you guys should have gotten on the ball) consensus is that sometimes they’re padding and sometimes they’re great opportunities to develop a character.  Granted – it always comes down to how good the game is, in its writing and its gameplay.

But Oblivion continues to stick out.  Its sidequests aren’t bad (or I don’t think so), but they don’t really develop a character, as the character in an Elder Scrolls game is basically you – there aren’t any dialogue trees where you can choose how you respond.  I guess there are a few, but they don’t ever appear to have a huge effect on things.  There’s a fame/infamy score adding up in the background, but I have to dig into several menus to see what’s going on, it doesn’t throw the results in your face.

So what are the sidequests doing in Oblivion?  What do they do in general, given that they don’t always develop character?  I didn’t learn anything about Cloud by raising chocobos, and all I know about Tidus, given his chocobo racing, is that I’m terrible at catching balloons.

For the most part sidequests don’t actually teach us anything about the character(s). If they did, we’d have to do them, because we need to know as much about the character as we can. Sometimes they can tell us stuff about the setting, though sometimes it’s not what the developers want – for instance, what do we learn when we leave Sin’s insides to go race chocobos? At the very least we learn people will continue running frivolous games underneath the apocalypse. Also, we learn that said people will withhold valuable quest items (Tidus’s crest, remember, is what you get if you get that chocobo in in less than 0.0 seconds), in the face of destruction, until you jump through their hoop.  Oops.

Of course, games are only now getting so they can contextualize. Oblivion changes what’s going on depending on what’s happening in the world, but only to some extent. For instance, the Mage’s Guild missions focus on a story that could actually be the A story of a game; you have to save the guild and the world from a dark necromancer returned from the grave to wreak vengeance. And no one notices outside the guild. I suppose the gag is that it all happens behind the scenes, but still, it’s a little odd. I just saved the world, and outside the guild hall I’m still just a “citizen.” Indeed, I went back to a Mage’s Guild to do a Fighter’s Guild mission, and the person I was technically boss of ordered me around like a moron, because my quest switched her dialogue to “talking to Fighter’s Guild dope.”

Despite all that, the potential seems to be there for context-sensitive worlds.

And anyway, that still doesn’t illustrate why some of us bother with sidequests. Certainly if we love a game we’ll try to milk every drop of actual play from it, but sometimes we do sidequests in games that are, at best, OK.

I suspect it’s this: we choose to do sidequests. They are entirely optional. In a medium defined by our input on the system, sidequests represent the ultimate expression of our input (outside a sandbox game; more on that in just a bit). A sidequest is, by definition, something that happens outside the parameters of the game itself. It may even take you to places where no storyline stuff ever happens (the Deep Sea research facility in FF8, for instance). We do the story because we’re following it, but we do the sidequest because we’re following nothing but our own will.

There is always the truth that someone has been there before you, when you play a game. On a practical level, you probably just weren’t the first person to beat it. But deeper still, you always know a programmer did this stuff, and a tester somewhere did what you’re doing. Even the sidequests aren’t actually new. But that’s not the point. You are entirely free to ignore the sidequest. You don’t actually need Cloud in FF: Tactics, not at all. But any accomplishment that happens within the sidequest is your accomplishment. The game is built for you to beat it, as is the sidequest, but if you choose to do the sidequest, your victory is contingent on your choice. You wouldn’t have succeeded if you didn’t start. That, I think, might be what makes sidequests somehow different than the story they’re appended to – they’re up to you. You exert your influence on the world.

Sandbox games could have made the sidequest obsolete. I don’t believe that, but a lot of what I’m saying we get out of sidequests appears to be delivered, and more fluently, by sandbox games. But most sandbox games, by their nature, can’t have you succeed. Again, that’s changing as programming develops and systems get beefier, but in GTA I can’t actually change anything in the city. San Andreas allowed the player to take territory, but if you steal that plane and slam it into a building and escape to save? Nothing will have changed. You did nothing. You had fun (God knows I don’t want to knock random acts in GTA; I especially like to see how extravagantly I can wreck a car). But you didn’t alter anything, you didn’t achieve a victory, as a sidequest will allow you to.

Also, a sidequest usually appears in a more linear game. Can you have sidequests in a game that doesn’t insist on its own narrative? Everything’s to the side, isn’t it? But if you’re playing a game that’s essentially linear (and the strong narrative of any rpg makes it linear to some degree), then the sidequest is a valve, a way for you to escape that linearity while still playing the game. It’s no longer true that the only way to beat the system is not to play: you could just breed a gold chocobo.