Choose Your Own Adventure Books And How I Can't Play RPGs Well

I hate make decisions. I mean, of course, I make decisions every day. That’s life.

I mean I hate making decisions that affect the outcome for characters I play in video games.

When I was a kid, I was the one who would fold all the pages in the Choose Your Own Adventure books whenever a decision had to be made. I would follow one path to an end and go back to each folded page and follow another path to its end, over and over, until I had read the entire book and followed all possible outcomes.

So you can see my problem with making choices in video games. There are no pages to fold. Well, I guess there are saves. I could make a save file for every decision I make, but that’s not quite a corner folded down in a book for me to come back to now is it.

I know that people find making choices that affect and change the game and the character as you go to be innovative, and I do too, but I shouldn’t be filled with anxiety, worrying about whether the choice I make now will not let me play certain story lines or get certain gear/bonus/spells/whatever later. It’s this anxiety over possible futures that stops me from playing RPGs, no matter how beautiful the story or the world.

Why is that? I know it’s just a game. What is it about me that makes me hesitant to play a damn game? I think maybe I just don’t want to make such weighty decisions when I am trying to have fun and enjoy myself.

With games like Tomb Raider or Uncharted, I can just play. Most decisions don’t affect how the ending will be. But you shift to Read Dead Redemption 2 and your decisions change how people in the world perceive you. I didn’t get super anxious playing that because it was easy to choose to be good or bad and the ending happened no matter how good or bad you were.

Then, there are Witcher 3 and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, where every decision, big or small, affects short-term and long-term game play. These games encourage you to save and save often (like most games do) but again these games don’t make it easy to remember what or why you saved at a certain point. So, in order not to have hundreds of save files. I resort to looking stuff up online and making my decisions that way. I feel like crap when I do but I figure cheating is better than the anxiety over playing an RPG and making shitty decisions for shitty unwelcome outcomes.

I guess all of this boils down to I don’t want to make major life decisions for fictional characters when it’s hard enough making life decisions for myself. I think that like all things in my life a perspective change might me necessary for me to get some enjoyment from these games I have chosen to play. They are great stories and I have found that playing these games to be as rewarding as reading a book or watching a movie. Maybe, if I can recapture the feeling of joy in reading a Choose Your Own Adventure book, I can find my way past the anxiety of making decisions in RPGs.