About 20 minutes into The Matrix – Path of Neo, you’re presented with the same choice as Neo is given in the movie: take the red pill and begin your journey to self-discovery and bullet-dodging, or take the blue pill and go back to being an office drone with a side-line in grimy noughties clubbing. It’s the classic call to adventure moment, and since by this point Neo’s already done the ‘refusal of the call’ and all the standard hero drama, it’s something of a no-brainer. Still, the game actually gives you the choice to refuse once and for all, and you can take the blue pill to kill the adventure before it even gets started. After being treated to Morpheus’ disappointment and a short animation where you wake up back at your computer, it’s game over (or load from the autosave).

There are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing. In Batman: Arkham City, there’s a brief section where you play as Catwoman and can choose to leave Batman to die. It actually stands out as one of the few choices in the game that can affect the plot, and unsurprisingly, it leads to a narrative cul-de-sac (what with letting the main character die). The game then drags you back to the corridor outside Batman’s cell and offers you the same choice again. In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, you can choose to jump off a multi-storey balcony instead of Will Poulter’s character, and plummet to your death – before being given the option of going back and letting the other guy take the fall. I could go on and on (the old Sierra games and choose-your-own-adventure books are lousy with this kind of thing), but hopefully that’s enough to illustrate what I’m talking about here. These are bad choices – not necessarily ‘bad’ in a moral sense, but choices that obviously go against the goals that the game has put in front of you. Stupid choices, in other words. Often they lead to a gameover before giving you the option to go back and choose differently (you idiot), and usually they don’t have any effect on the course of the game as a whole. The reality in which you continue is the one in which you chose correctly (even if you happened to catch a glimpse of the one in you which you chose poorly).

So what is the point of having these choices in a game? After all, if you actually want to stop playing, there’s a menu for that – no need to literally kill off the protagonist. They’re barely choices at all, since once you’ve made them you’ll be forced to unmake them if you’re going to keep playing. And it’s not fair to dismiss them as bad game design, either – they’re clearly serving some sort of purpose, since with all of the narrative tools at the designer’s disposal it’s far easier to just avoid including these choices altogether. For example, The Matrix – Path of Neo, which otherwise liberally uses footage from the films for its cutscenes, goes out of its way to animate the red pill/blue pill sequence. Time and money were spent on having digital Lawrence Fishburne badly lip-sync the lines that real Lawrence Fishburne already articulated perfectly for the camera, all so the player could make the choice to short-circuit the game they’ve just started playing.

If we’re thinking about what functions these choices are serving, a couple of explanations might spring to mind right off the bat. These are the functions I want to get these out of the way quickly, not because they’re ‘wrong’, but just because I don’t think they’re as interesting. The first is thematic: The Matrix movie is all about choice and free will, and it’s not exactly subtle about it. Even though the game strips out most of the philosophy to really double down on the slow-motion violence, it’s keeping this most important of choices as a nod to its origins. The same goes for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch: choice, free will, possible worlds, video games within a video game, so on and so forth. But what about Batman: Arkham City, and all the other games where the player can make an obviously stupid choice to kill off the protagonist? Not every game is making some kind of point about free will, and even when they are, it’s not as if theme explains everything that’s going on.

Another possible explanation for the ‘bad choice’ is: because it’s fun. There’s something compelling about self-destruction, which is perhaps why people can so often be relied upon to position the metaphorical foot under the metaphorical barrel and gleefully pull the trigger. The bad choice allows the player to safely indulge this impulse by proxy, a function which is often held up as the function of art in general (let’s not get into all that here, though). Sometimes this will also be part of establishing the game’s tone, and the choice’s consequence will lean hard into the absurd or the grotesque for humorous effect. And sometimes the impulse that drives the player to pick it more a case of gratifying curiosity than masochism (‘Will the game really let me screw up so badly?’).

Yet although this idea may have some purchase, when it’s applied across the board it starts to seem a bit… gratuitous. It becomes the equivalent of an optional sex scene in a violent game (or a violence scene in a sex game) – rather besides the point, but there just in case the player fancies a bit of self-destructive titillation. Include it, don’t include it, it doesn’t really matter, right? Look, here’s a free one for you:

There is a third explanation for the ‘bad choice’, and it’s one that doesn’t either pump it full of meaning or totally trivialise it. This explanation considers the ‘bad choice’ as serving to heighten player agency – or more specifically, the player’s sense of agency. In a nutshell, the sense of agency is the feeling we have when we’re controlling an action. Philosophical and psychological research demonstrates that this sense/feeling can be quite easily misattributed (i.e. people can be entirely wrong about what they feel they’re controlling), and can also be disrupted (for instance, in conditions like ‘alien hand syndrome’ where people feel like a part of their body is moving entirely outside of their control). It’s an incredibly complex feeling, with various different conscious and non-conscious parts that contribute to it (things like perceptual feedback, awareness of intentions, a sense of effort, etc.).

According to some theories, one of the things that contributes to the sense of agency is an awareness of the potential for inhibition – a sense that we could always stop an action in progress. This accounts for why we still feel like we’re in control of actions we take automatically, like walking while talking, or picking up a cup of coffee. We don’t need to think about these actions, and we certainly don’t need to pay attention to all the little adjustments of muscles and limbs that we’re making, but we also certainly don’t feel like we’re lacking agency. The same goes for actions we’re compelled to take by external or internal forces (e.g. handing over money at gunpoint, succumbing to the demands of an addiction). We don’t ‘have a choice’ in the sense that it seems like choosing differently would be foolish or morally unconscionable or overwhelmingly difficult or whatever – but that’s not the same thing as saying we don’t have a sense of agency for the action. (Of course, people sometimes do dissociate in such situations, but that’s a part of what I’m getting at – feeling like we’re not in control of our own body is pretty much a condition of dissociation.)

An awareness of the potential for inhibition at least partly explains how we have a sense of agency for these sorts of automatic and compelled actions without recourse to things like ‘conscious decision-making’ (or even ‘bodily feedback’ if we’re going to include thoughts). Even when some of the other things that might contribute to the sense of agency aren’t online, we’re still aware that we could always inhibit/stop/interrupt the action (or at the very least, try to). We might not want to, and we certainly don’t need to think about our potential for inhibition – but it’s something that’s there in the background.

To go back to choices in video games, it seems like the inclusion of the ‘bad choice’ is mimicking part of the basic structure of agency. It’s there to make the ‘good choice’ actually feel like a choice, even when the player knows it’s the only choice that will keep the game moving forwards. The same kind of function is being performed by ‘bad endings’ in sprawling RPGs like The Witcher 3 or Mass Effect. It doesn’t particularly matter whether the player already knows which choices lead to which endings (which is why a second playthrough or checking a walkthrough doesn’t necessarily detract from the pleasure of the game or the feeling of making a choice). After all, making an informed vs. an uninformed choice doesn’t make the choice feel any less agentive – quite the reverse, in fact.

These three functions of the ‘bad choice’ aren’t mutually exclusive, and there may be more that I haven’t covered here. Of course, it’s always possible to have ‘bad choices’ that don’t lead to a game over, or to present the player with two obviously undesirable choices and so drop them into a moral quagmire. Since this post is already getting quite long, though, I’ll have to deal with that another time.