I have a very strange love for the Fable series. I didn’t own an Xbox when Fable 1 was released, I had never read any of the hype, and I had never seen anything on the game besides a single tiny thumbnail in an Electronics gaming monthly. So, when I came home from school, and received a phone call from a friend, who told me that Fable was here, my only response was, so what?

I should probably explain that my friend is like one of those dogs that when you say it’s name too many times, it shits itself. So, when I showed a complete lack of interest in a game I had never heard of, I was then treated, in a shrieking pre-pubescent voice, why I was wrong.
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So much to do . . .

A child-like accord has swept the gaming mass: The majority seem to prefer the sandbox. When I say that, I am, of course, referencing the sandbox-style gameplay that is introducing itself into all manner of game as “nonlinearity”. What the public doesn’t realize while playing with their little, sand-soiled, plastic Ferrari knock-off is that they’re actually playing a blatantly linear game with mini-games carelessly mottled in.

“Nonlinear” video games utilize a couple of devices in order to mask their true nature. Firstly is the multi-mission structure that suggests it’s offering varied constructs for the player to follow in order to shape his own in-game identity. Instead, it’s actually just one set of missions linked exclusively to the story mode that all lead to the same end no matter what you do, and another set of side missions that can be interesting, but offer little to no effect on the main story. Fallout 3 is perhaps the biggest offender here, with Grand Theft Auto IV entering as the most deceptive and offensive: It offers exactly the same sort of structure despite being the industry leader.

Niko’s notorious crime simulator also hints at the second device: the allusion of choice. The game offers points in the story to choose whether or not certain characters die. One problem with this is that it acts like a dialogue tree out of a Bioware game. It pauses the action so that the player can choose from one or the other as if it were a selection on a menu, which generally detracts from something that would normally be intense and spur-of-the-moment (I’ve played God many a time in my day). However, the biggest problem is that it, again, has little to no effect on the overall story. The player still heads to the same drawn-out conclusion, which could be a slight on the pointlessness of life, but lets not pretend that the developers actually hire competent writers (that’s a rant for another day).

The final proponent of the nonlinear delusion is developer’s assessment of good vs. evil. Countless games capitalize on this epidemic, and they do it amazingly arbitrarily. The ability to steal and slaughter and then dance away the sin as if emotes were baptismal, never, never gets tiresome. My personal favorite is starring at the screen wondering if Dialogue Choice A or Dialogue Choice B is the one that the developer defines as “good” and then having to reload, because my already heavy conscience and rife personal distress wouldn’t allow me to see Little Stevey form a robotic frown. Goddamn. In the end, it’s all arbitrary, anyway, because it either leads to the ending or the same ending but with horns.

So, what have I learned today? Hmmm.

Developer’s are overtly ambitious. However, I can’t fault them for that. If you have a passion for creation but you don’t have the tools to create, you do your damnedest to do it anyway. One day the technology will catch up with developer’s ambitions and then they’ll overshoot the mark again and fall flat. The world’s a vicious cycle; what can I say? At least we might have legitimate nonlinear games by then.

Maybe.