I’ve played a lot of Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption this week, and I’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch others play them too. The contrast between my play style and those of others has made me realize that there’s a way to play videogames that might be new, or maybe it isn’t - all I know is that I’ve never seen anyone outside the Squadron of Shame doing it. And the rest of you might be missing out!

For instance, when most people play videogames, they run everywhere at full speed. They scour every inch of the game world for collectibles and easter eggs, no matter how much the story urges them on. Watching my friend poke around for coffee thermoses in Alan Wake while another character was being torn to shreds in an adjacent building made me realize that what we call ludonarrative dissonance is not always the developer’s fault, and can sometimes be our own.

When I’m playing a singleplayer game, I don’t generally talk to anyone else in the house. I turn off all the lights. When exploring the world, I walk at a normal pace (I’m grateful to games like Assassin’s Creed and Red Dead Redemption for mapping “run” to a button so the character walks by default). I don’t make a point of searching for collectible items, because that’s not real-life behavior. If the story demands urgency, then I run my ass off.

Whereas most game designers, academics and indeed players view videogames primarily as systems or models, I believe we can benefit from approaching certain games with a less concrete mindset. Some games, particularly story-driven singleplayer ones, have more in common with a stage performance than they do with chess. When we sit down in front of a film or a play, we know that we are meant to suspend our disbelief, and we accept the story’s reality in place of our own, stepping into what screenwriters call the magic circle (a concept unrelated to that of Salen and Zimmerman). When someone talks in a movie theater, we ask them to be quiet so we can remain absorbed in the film, but few people do this when playing a videogame, which strikes me as a bit odd.

When we look at games as systems, it’s easy to see why many players act in a way that’s incongruous with the narrative. When dealing with a system, our goal is to get optimal results, which means taking advantage of every mechanic and opportunity available - such as hunting down collectible items - regardless of whether our actions are in line with our character’s motivation. Many games are meant to be approached this way, and for the majority it works perfectly. But there are certain games that beg for a less mechanical approach, and are sometimes panned when this is misunderstood.

Consider, for instance, the opening sequence of the “Red Letter Day” chapter in Half-Life 2. The player is met with roughly five minutes of expository dialogue from Alyx, Barney and Dr. Kleiner. During this part, the player still has control of Gordon Freeman, and is free to walk around the room as he pleases. I’ve actually tested some of my friends with this scene to see what they would do while the other characters were talking. One or two of them played the scene in character: they stood still, looked at the characters who were speaking, followed them to Kleiner’s teleporter and continued their escape at the conclusion of the scripted sequence.

But the majority (about a dozen or so) chose to run around Kleiner’s lab, pushing over crates and bumping into doors in search of their next objective. They seemed unaware that the other characters were speaking. When the sequence ended, they had no idea what to do, and in their disorientation they declared that Half-Life 2 sucked. This seemed strange to me; after all, I’ve never seen anyone run around my house looking for the bathroom in the middle of a conversation.

When some of them said they’d gotten bored, I took it to mean that either the writing needed editing, or that the entire game just wasn’t a match for the player’s personality. In all of our systematic tinkering, I wonder if we sometimes forget about personal taste and just keep optimizing in the hope of pleasing everyone. Could we benefit from simply saying “hey, we’re making a game for a particular kind of person,” and then committing to that decision?

As a thought experiment, I wondered how HL2’s teleporter sequence would feel if the scripting were changed so the characters would only speak when the player was standing in front of them, within social proxemic distance, and looking directly at them. If the player didn’t do these things, the characters would simply give up their exposition and talk amongst themselves indefinitely until the player indicated that they were paying attention.

Most game designers recoil in horror when I talk about doing this, because it’s manipulative and it impedes on player freedom. But I fail to see how that’s necessarily wrong; fiction is nothing but manipulation. Some have said that it would cease to be a game, but what’s the significance of that? Surely one should be more concerned about making things than about categorizing the things one makes? Then again, I’m not exactly a paragon of intellectualism. As Neil Gaiman once said, I’m just a writer. What do I know?

Nonetheless, it’s especially fascinating to approach certain games not as rule systems, but as a kind of low-impact method acting. Get into character. Live the protagonist’s life, experience his or her feelings toward the other characters. If the hero’s best friend is screaming for help and there’s a glowing treasure chest in the opposite direction, forget the treasure! Your friend needs you! Outside the reality of the game, we’re aware that there’s no penalty for grabbing the loot before running to the rescue - since we know that the event won’t trigger until we get there - but what if we forget about all that? You can put yourself in the story’s reality, let it wash over you, so you’re no longer focused on game mechanics and min-maxing.

Of course, it takes at least an adequately written game to actually let you do this without shaking you loose, so it’s fortunate that both Alan Wake and Red Dead Redemption are suited to this kind of play. This also works with Outcast, Beyond Good & Evil and almost any character-driven singleplayer title. Myst, Riven and Another World were specifically designed with this in mind, and I’m willing to bet that their success came directly from it.

Are all games built this way? No. Should they be? Absolutely not. But it’s a beautiful and misunderstood facet of our craft, and I believe we should learn to recognize and nurture the games that benefit from a “method acting” approach (though I could be biased because it’s my favorite kind of game).