Video Games and Fate

"There are no choices. Nothing but a straight line. The illusion comes afterwards, when you ask 'why me?' and 'what if?'. When you look back and see the branches, like a pruned bonsai tree, or forked lightning."

— Max Payne, very heavily Leaning on the Fourth Wall, Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne

Video games (and other kinds of game such as tabletop games) differ from virtually all other storytelling media in that the player can actively interact with the world of the story, meaning that it is theoretically possible to create a game in which any choice the player decides to make is valid and they can dynamically change the story as they see fit. This will never be a practical possibility (Or is it?), however, so most video games with any sort of story focus tend to lead the player through a strictly linear story (albeit possibly one with prominent Story Branching and numerous Multiple Endings or Non Standard Game Overs) while continually presenting them with the illusion of free will and agency, and giving the impression that the Player Character is acting according to their own free will. The Player Character is typically significantly disconnected from the player themselves; see Player and Protagonist Integration.

Some game developers have picked up on the parallels between presenting the player with the illusion of free will while their future is predetermined, and classical ideas about fate and destiny, or the modern philosophical debate about the existence of free will, whether via psychological conditioning or so-called "hard determinism".

Hence, this trope is about video games in which the strict linearity of the storyline and the lack of agency afforded to the player is not employed just as a gameplay contrivance, but also as a storytelling device or thematic element. This can be used as a means of Painting the Medium or Leaning on the Fourth Wall, a device to express the themes of the game through its formal structure, or simply an amusing way to lampshade the inherent artificiality of the medium. It can also act as a convenient way to avert Gameplay and Story Segregation (as many of the examples on that page illustrate).

This can be done in various ways: by having characters discuss the concept of free will in dialogue; using tropes such as No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom to visually represent the player's lack of choice both in-game and in-story; or having characters actively announce their lack of free will. In terms of plot devices, this trope can encompass supernatural examples such as You Can't Fight Fate; or more mundane More than Mind Control plot devices, in which the character's actions are controlled by another party in much the same way that the player's actions are "controlled" by the game itself. ^note Or how the player character's actions are controlled by the player, who is in turn controlled by the game, but the player character is part of the game so oh no I've gone cross-eyed. It can often overlap with The Computer Is a Lying Bastard, in which the player is actively deceived by the game and their expectations about it betrayed, but this trope need not involve deception.

A subtrope of Gameplay and Story Integration. See also Sliding Scale Of Linearity Versus Openness, Sliding Scale Of Free Will Versus Fate, But Thou Must!, Railroading, Player and Protagonist Integration, Morton's Fork and You Can't Fight Fate.

Note: Unmarked spoilers below.

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Examples:

Adventure

• Antigone Will Take The Stairs Today explores the helplessness of characters in Greek tragedies by having the player control Antigone through the very linear gameplay.
• In Limbo of the Lost, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs of the Mary Celeste is chosen as Destiny's champion against Fate. In The Stinger, Fate decides to go for another round, setting up Limbo of the Lost 2: Flight to Freedom (which is unlikely to see the light of day).
• The Stanley Parable is a lengthy rumination upon and critique of this concept, and pokes fun at the concept of choice and free will in video games.

Action-Adventure

• The Legacy of Kain series takes place in a universe in which free will does not exist and all destinies are pre-determined; the only way to change destiny is to travel back in time and create a temporal paradox, which forces time to "reshuffle". Both player characters, Kain and Raziel, initially believe they have free will, before discovering that it is an illusion. At one point in the final game in the series, Defiance, Raziel is informed by another character that, as a result of a temporal paradox, he was in fact the only entity in the universe capable of free will, and yet his choices were nevertheless staggeringly easy to manipulate by outside influences. Thematically speaking, the series is heavily influenced by Gnosticism, in which a malevolent deity called the demiurge deceives and manipulates humans for its own selfish ends.
• In Hand of Fate, the Dealer will sometimes lean on the fourth wall.
  Think about the way we play this game. You continue to die, yet we reset the board each time. One has to wonder how it is possible to truly lose.

He also indicates that the player may have free will, but he himself does not.

All the world is a game, and us men and women merely players. I alone do not play - I maintain the rules. You have choices, and I have predestination. Your choices, though, are merely a rediscovery of that which you already know.

First-Person Shooter

• The strict linearity the Half-Life series is a plot element as well as a gameplay device, reflecting how the protagonist's actions are being controlled by a mysterious entity called the G-Man, who at one point boasts that he'd rather not offer the protagonist "the illusion of free choice". This is particularly ironic given that the protagonist's name is Gordon Freeman.
• The Player Character in BioShock, Jack, is eventually revealed to be a Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb who has been mentally conditioned into following any order that involves the phrase "Would You Kindly...", and Atlas, the mysterious freedom fighter who serves as Mission Control, has been using the phrase since the beginning to force Jack into helping him bring down Andrew Ryan, Rapture's corrupt and tyrannical ruler. The point is driven home twice in quick succession: First, Jack finds an audio diary of Dr Suchong testing the mental conditioning by making Jack snap a puppy's neck. Then, when you finally meet Andrew Ryan, he decides to commit Suicide by Cop and uses "Would You Kindly" to force Jack to beat him to death with a golf club, while repeating his motto "A man chooses, a slave obeys".
• BioShock Infinite is something of a direct expansion and response to how its predecessor approaches the subject, tying in a paradigm of "constants and variables" in its narrative explicitly about the merging of alternate realities defined by such. Like its predecessor, some of this ties to the player/gameplay experience:
  • The protagonist, Booker DeWitt, is characterized as a very flawed man who brings chaos, tragedy, and corruption through his mere existence, tying to the Twist Ending reveal that Comstock is an Alternate Self with the same terrible baggage but traded out his morally-ambiguous lot in life into fanatical totalitarianism. Booker's own influence on the world is integrated by the game's jarringly violent gameplay set against the (at least aesthetically) bright and idyllic setting, demonstrating that no matter how much he wants to redeem himself from it, he's an agent of chaos where misery and pain follows him at every turn.
  • The game's ending also fully explores the existential fate of Booker as we know him — while there are many Bookers of many realities, the one we play as is The Constant of realities that include himself and the Alternate Self that undergoes a baptism and becomes Comstock as we know him, and the only way to cease their realities of pain is there to be no more Booker, and so he dies, retconning them from existence. This fatalistic approach is the big reason why the game has no Multiple Endings unlike the previous BioShock titles — in spite of all the opportunities presented as being potentially relevant to different endings, the plot only allows one way for his existence to go down.
• The Marathon Trilogy's Security Officer, in contrast to the other FPS protganists at the time like Doomguy and Duke Nukem, is for all intents and purposes a pawn (If a pawn could kill the entire board) on the AIs' figurative chessboard, particularly Durandal, who enjoys rubbing it in about the protagonist's lack of freedom while bragging about gaining his. In the second game, Durandal, the Security Officer is hinted to be an Eternal Hero destined to battle evil for all eternity, whatever he likes it or not. And then in the final game, Infinity, the Cosmic Horror screws everything up, and the Security Officer has to take matters into his hands, while going slightly insane in the process somewhat similar to the AI Rampancy, in the end managing to break free from the A.I.s control. In the epilogue, moments before the heat death of the Universe, Durandal muses about the Security Officer, and concludes that he is Destiny itself.

Roguelikes

• After completing Darkest Dungeon, the game acknowledges that there is nothing much more than to start anew. The ending narration shows that the Heart of Darkness is manipulating your lineage again and again to feed itself your fallen heroes, so that one day it may destroy the planet The Heir doesn't take kindly to this, to say the least.

Role-Playing Game

• The topic of destiny is a major element in Dragon Age II: nobody really asks Hawke's opinion on being the catalyst of the Kirkwall disaster—it's just that no matter what s/he does, everything builds up to a catastrophe that erupts in the game's finale, sending quakes across all of Thedas. Exemplified by this quote from Flemeth:
  "There are men who struggle against destiny... and yet only achieve an early grave.
  There are men who flee destiny... only to have it swallow them whole.
  And there are men who embrace destiny... and do not show their fear.
  These are the ones that change the world, forever."
• Tales of the Abyss features an extremely detailed prophecy that dictates the game's plot. It's always correct, and there's an entire religion built around following it. It's called the Score, and part of the overarching story is trying to escape it, because it predicts the end of the world. The game is also extremely clever about letting you think that you've managed to Screw Destiny, only to yank it back again and reveal that you've been following the Score's path all along.
• The Elder Scrolls
  • Morrowind notably plays with this. The details of the plot instigating event and Plot-Triggering Death long ago in the backstory have largely been lost to history, and those who do know offer highly conflicting versions of those events. The PC is supposedly The Chosen One mentioned in the relevant prophecy, but may also be The Unchosen One, or one of the Multiple-Choice Chosen, or simply an Unwitting Pawn of the Empire and a Daedric Prince. It is left deliberately vague even after the end of the main quest, so you must draw your own conclusion.
  • In Oblivion's Shivering Isles expansion, Jyggalag is the Daedric Prince of Order who has (had) a library containing a record of every action ever taken by any being in any realm, along with predictions of possible future actions those beings will take. He (and Dyus, his former librarian) state that the fate of the PC is "blurred and uncertain", as the he/she defies all their logical formulae.
  • Also comes up in Skyrim, where several characters (most prominently Paarthurnax) will talk about how it's the PC's fate to fight Alduin. You can either agree with him, or argue that preventing The End of the World as We Know It is simply the right thing to do and that the next world will just have to take care of itself.
  • Further embedded in the series in the concept of a "Dragon Break," a localized phenomena where time itself becomes so convoluted that otherwise impossible things happen (such as both sides winning a battle, or a man being his own grandfather). This is mainly used to justify the lack of need to support the multiple possible endings in a few of the previous Elder Scrolls games, by making all of them simultaneously canon.
• Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel have fate as one of their Central Themes, though it is only first expressed in the gameplay in the latter: Serah learns to manipulate time and thus to replay events leading up to the ending as many times as she wants, even creating paradoxes along the way, but nothing can really change the conclusion of her story (namely, that The Bad Guy Wins and The Hero Dies). In the first game, the moment where the game drops No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom is the moment when the characters realise they should stop blindly following their Focus and attempt to Screw Destiny instead.
• The Baldur's Gate series has this as a theme: since the Player Character is the son/daughter of a dead murder god, s/he is fated to bring death to everyone in his or her wake, directly or indirectly, no matter how peaceful s/he may try to be. In Throne of Bhaal, a prophecy is more directly used as a plot device to justify But Thou Must!.
• Deltarune, in marked contrast to its predecessor (which is all about making choices in how one plays games), repeatedly invokes this on the player. You're presented with a Character Customization menu at the start—only for it to be rejected in favor of the predetermined protagonist. Even though minor variations in the linear plot are possible, the outcome is still essentially the same. And at the end of the demo, the protagonist forcibly ejects the player (in the form of their SOUL) and acts on their own free will.

Stealth-Based Game

• The protagonist of the Hitman series, No. 47, is a clone who has been genetically engineered and conditioned for his entire life to be the perfect assassin. Although he is a relatively sympathetic Hitman with a Heart who desperately wants not to be an assassin and often feels guilty about the crimes he has committed (even attempting to retire at the beginning of Silent Assassin), he finds it impossible to go against his genetics & conditioning, and continues to carry out assassinations.
• The Metal Gear series has this as an ongoing theme. Creator Hideo Kojima referred to the dominant themes of Metal Gear Solid, 2 and 3 as "gene, meme and scene" respectively, referring to the extent to which these three concepts could influence an individual's destiny:
  • Metal Gear Solid's protagonist is, as in the Hitman example above, a clone named Solid Snake who was cloned from the world's greatest soldier, Big Boss. Throughout the game, numerous characters opine that, as he is a clone, his genetic destiny is essentially pre-determined and he has no choice but to become a vicious Blood Knight. This theme is reflected in several of the other characters also, who often insist that they were pre-destined to make the choices they made as a consequence of their genetics. Subverting this, however, the game's "good" ending seems to more optimistically suggest that Snake's destiny is not pre-determined and he can choose to live however he pleases.
  • Metal Gear Solid 2 uses this as part of a Mind Screw Tomato Surprise plot device. The game centres on a new Player Character named Raiden, who is placed in a situation that exhibits eerie similarities with that of the first game in the series. At the end of the game, the villains reveal that their goal is to control society at large by systematically deleting information from the Internet which goes against the party line, and their More than Mind Control plot was to see if they could control an individual's behavior and choices simply by providing them with the appropriate context and misleading information for their actions (that is, if they could control Raiden by putting him in an artificial simulation similar to the first game). Even after Raiden learns the truth, he still nevertheless follows his orders to the letter, as he has no real choice (just as the player does not).
    Ocelot: Given the right situation, the right story, anyone can be shaped into Snake. Even rookies can fight like men of experience.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3 drops the anvil that the Cold War was this in Real Life. Snake's mentor explains, at length, during the tutorial, that "enemies" and "allies" are never chosen by the people who are called thus; in World War II, America and Russia were allies against the Nazis, and immediately became enemies once they were defeated, fighting over the resources they created to fight them.^note Better yet, in Kojima's original proposal, said resources included the spoils of the war - the wealth and scientific discoveries the Nazis acquired through ruthless conquest, human experimentation and mass murder. She herself had a Russian lover - the father of her child - whom she was later forced to kill on a Cold War mission on orders from her superiors. The events of the game itself only occurred because those same superiors ordered it - and she only obeyed because she couldn't think of anything better. This is the start of the Protagonist Journey to Villain - his transformation from loyal soldier to fanatical anarchist guerilla leader - because he refuses to die the way his mentor did, let alone sacrifice his allies and subordinates for the sake of his superiors.
    The Boss: People's values change over time. And so do the leaders of a country. So there's no such thing as an enemy in absolute terms. The enemies we fight are only in relative terms, constantly changing with the times.
    The foibles of politics and the march of time can turn friends into enemies just as easily as the wind changes. Ridiculous, isn't it? Yesterday's ally becomes today's opposition. And this Cold War? Think back... When I was leading the Cobras, America and Russia were fighting together.

Third-Person Shooter

• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is entirely linear, with No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom (although there are two Multiple Endings depending on difficulty level). It also features numerous ruminations upon the nature of free will and destiny, with several of the characters debating whether they truly have agency of their own or if their actions are simply pre-determined (see the page quote).
• Spec Ops: The Line plays with this. Throughout the game, the interventions of the entirely well-meaning Player Character Cpt. Martin Walker only succeed in making the game's situation worse until the situation has degenerated to the point that hundreds of people have been killed and the entire population of Dubai is doomed to die of dehydration in less than a week. When questioned about his actions, Walker repeatedly insists that he had no choice but to carry out the actions he did, and so cannot be held responsible for the deteriorating situation. However, at the end of the game, another character calls him out on this and points out that none of the tragedies of the game would have occurred had he simply stopped interfering. Where it gets complicated is that, although in-story Walker could have turned around and gone home at any time, in-game the player is not afforded the choice to do so. The development team have however stated that putting the controller down and stopping playing the game is an entirely valid ending.
  • It's interesting to note that simply not buying the game in the first place would also be an effective ending (or at least "lack of a beginning") using the "don't play it" viewpoint, but that was not an option brought up by the developers. This would presumably correspond to Walker never starting his interference in the first place.
  • Amusingly (or tragically), this is also a probable part of why sales for the game never took off: the game relied heavily on word of mouth advertising (it pretended to be a generic military shooter to catch people off-guard), but the people who bought and liked it would repeat the "stop playing" message the game has and accidentally drive away players who would be interested, but got the wrong idea.

Visual Novels

• Psycholonials repeatedly presents the player with options, only to lock the suggestion boxes as the narrator, a supernatural entity, insists that you don't have a choice, as Z. (the protagonist) has no control over her actions, as she hasn't earned it yet, leading to an almost entirely linear storyline. In Chapter 9, the player is finally presented with a choice, but if you select the "Crown" option repeatedly Zhen says "Don't tell me what to do", and the epilogue reveals that all possible choices lead to the Sword path, as the choice was Zhen's to make, not yours.

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