Critical Game Analysis: The Strange Ox

Occasionally, I am asked about my work as a critical game scholar, and I have to come up with some kind of short-hand for explaining it. Usually my go-to is comparing game studies to film studies or literature, which usually helps get us to a perspective of analyzing games for social, artistic, or cultural significance rather than technical complexity or some other scientific or “objective” measurement (such as a rating score in game reviews). The next question to answer then is about how one can perform criticism in the spirit of literary or film studies, but of games with mechanics. How do you analyze the gameplay? The mechanics?

In the early days of (computer) game studies, this was the only question that certain game theorists wanted to pursue. The strongly ludological focus of folks like Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen are famous for eschewing any “narrative” content in favor of the mechanical analysis. For me, this was always an artificial, analytical move that may be perfectly valid for certain purposes, but could never tell the full story of any videogame. So, then, the question remains: how do you analyze games while accounting for both the mechanics and representation?

There are some theoretical tools I can mention here, but I don’t intend for this to be a lecture on the theory of game studies. Suffice to say that applications of procedural rhetoric (Bogost), or actor-network theory (cf. Latour), or systems thinking (cf. Hayles), are very useful high-level frameworks. I do think that the systems thinking is essential, in a very broad sense, to understand that games (even non-digital games) are algorithmic and are comprised of agents, rules, actions and outcomes. Ontologically, they are not “narratives” as in a fixed series of retold events that can be interpreted. They are engines that create events based on rules, and those rules are described through representation, and therefore related in some way to the human condition, and can be interpreted as such.

 So let’s analyze something from this perspective.  

This example comes from Act 2 of Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. I want to talk about the Strange Ox.

I first noticed the Strange Ox among the other oxen in the druid’s grove. Like virtually every other living being in the gameworld, the player can highlight the Strange Ox and learn something about it. In this case, not only does the narrator provide some commentary, but one of your companions will comment about the Ox’s strangeness. In the first instance I wasn’t able to discern anything else more meaningful about it, so I left the Strange Ox behind and carried on to other more pressing matters.

When I encountered the Strange Ox again, in a different location, my interest became more pronounced. (Note: The Ox was part of a caravan of other NPCs, it wasn’t as if he was following me across Faerun all on his own. He wasn’t that strange.) At that point I realized I had in my possession a scroll of animal speaking, so I used it. This mechanic allows the player character to converse with animals in the same way as other non-player characters. (Truly, Larian have created voluminous content for this game…) So, I cast this, and greeted the Ox.

He was not inclined towards conversation. He very clearly asked to be left alone, more than once, with increasing intensity. It was, indeed, strange. Was the Ox hiding something?

I was presented with several alternatives at this point, one of which was to accept the Strange Ox’s request, and simply walk away. There were other choices as well, and in true RPG fashion, some of the dialog options were truly actions, in which mechanical tests are made against the system. In my case, I was able to use my superior skills in charisma and nature knowledge to intimidate the Ox (ie. Literal dice rolls pitting my statistical values against the Ox’s level of resistance) into revealing more about its true nature.

The Strange Ox suddenly transforms into a roughly ox-sized gelatinous ooze creature—a shapeshifter. It reiterated, emphatically, that all it wanted was to be left alone, to live life as a well-cared-for beast of burden. But, having been forced to reveal itself, the game now switched into battle mode, and the slime attacked. My party fought back, and we defeated the slime creature. Upon its death, I gained a couple of minor trinkets as loot, which most defeated entities will usually drop. My party also gained a small but important allocation of experience points towards their next level, again as victory in combat situations generally provides. 

And that was the end—at least, as far as I know. My knowledge as a player is critical here, so keep in mind that I have not played this game before, that I have yet to actually finish it, and therefore I have no way to know whether anything related to this Strange Ox is any more significant than my description here. When playing games, and particularly this style of RPG, players are constantly making decisions based on limited and imperfect information. Sometimes decisions have consequences that do not reveal themselves until much later. Remember, I could have simply walked away—I was given multiple opportunities to not force the issue, but I did.

So from an analytical perspective, what do we have here?

Let us first take the game-mechanical “ludological” approach. In purest gameplay terms, I made the obviously correct decision. I was presented with a low-risk opportunity to gain further resources to make my characters more powerful, through wealth, possible equipment loot drops, and through the acquisition of experience points. I will take these on to my next adventure and be that much closer to victory because of the death of the Strange Ox. There is some chance that simply walking away after the Ox asked me to would have led to some XP gain—in Baldur’s Gate 3 peaceful resolutions can generate that kind of reward as well—but it was not guaranteed, and I definitely would not have received the loot from the dead ooze.

So, tactically, this seems like a very straight-forward decision.

But what of the content of my interaction with the Ox? In this kind of game, I feel that the “role-play” matters as much as the “game-play.” That is, we are constantly making decisions not only based on the most efficacious route to competitive, agonistic victory, but to portray a character that we may have carefully constructed ourselves, or that which Larian has fashioned for us. In this case, then, there are additional rules about the personality of the character which we seek to enforce upon ourselves. That is to say, we are constantly thinking “What would my character do here?” not only “what is the most advantageous action?”

That element of the play within an RPG is what made this episode stand out to me in the first place. My character is playing things in a fairly even-handed manner, leaning towards an ethically good path through the world. Therefore, this unnecessary destruction of the shapeshifter who was, genuinely, just minding its own business, struck me (the player) as out of character for my druid, Tav. I interpret it as a mistake, as something he did but would regret, and try not to do again. For, what did it benefit him? Maybe 50 gold and experience points? For the life of someone who never actually threatened the party?

If I were to only factor such "economic" incentives into this calculus, it would almost always be correct to murder virtually every non-player character in the game. Old women, young children, wounded soldiers, beggars on the street—all of them are mechanically valid targets for aggression, and all of them would provide a few points of experience that would improve my character’s power. Even if I were selective, and only killed those that would go unnoticed by guards, and in general present low combat risks to my party, that would still total a very large number of characters. In short, I could play the game like a mass-murdering psychopath, and become more powerful for it. And indeed, even within the bounds of the scripted and performed storylines, it is very much possible to play Baldur’s Gate as an extremely cruel, self-serving bastard. (In Dragon’s Dogma 2 this has been taken to an even wilder extreme, with the discovery that the actual technical performance of the game [ie. frames per second] is improved through the mass murder of neutral NPCs.)

The fact that these options exist, and there are mechanical reasons for undertaking them, is precisely what makes them meaningful when the choice is made. Suddenly, it becomes possible to discuss this system from an interpretive angle and relate these otherwise purely “rational” economic choices to a much more humanistic tradition of thought.

Initially, I can analyze my own perspective and interpretation as I have done here. I am “role-playing” a character who now has this seemingly inconsequential but regretful memory that may impact a future decision. Later, with more critical distance, I will be able to analyze the situation at a game design level. I can review what other options exist and their outcomes. I can measure the benefits of each of those possibilities, and make an argument about what the developer might want to encourage. If the rewards are much greater for killing the Ox/Ooze, then perhaps the developer is suggesting that indiscriminate murder is a good thing. Or, equally valid, that the ethical/moral route involves personal sacrifice, and that is what makes it meaningful. If they are closely balanced, then I can argue that the developer wants players to create their own reasons for decisions, at least in this case, and that is a valid way to create meaning as well.

The analysis is, then, a telling of the tale, with my perspective and interpretation worked into it. I use the evidence the game offers, my actions, and experience of those outcomes, to illuminate the meaning found there. Game criticism is about meaning and interpretation, not objective facts. We don’t ask a film critic or literary scholar to tell us the “truth” of a film as if there is one, only one, and happens to be the one that that critic can explain. There is no “right” and “wrong” or objective set of value measurements to be made here. Even though we can objectively state that if X happens then Y will occur, that is only the beginning.