This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
From Gameplay Guided Amnesia Discussion:
Andrew Leprich: Maybe it's the splitter in me, but the focus of this trope as it stands seems to be a tad muddled, largely due to my additions. From what I gather, it seems to encompass four situations:
- . There is a tutorial or exposition that provides the game player with information the Player Character already knows (or should), and no explanation is provided (as in the first Phoenix Wright game).
- . The Player Character is stricken with amnesia, setting up a tutorial/exposition (as in the second Phoenix Wright game).
- . There is a section of gameplay in which the Player Character loses his memory, and the next part of the game is spent gaining it back.
- . The game arbitrarily withholds knowledge from the player that the Player Character has (or should know), as in the first Arcanum example.
Maybe it's just me, but number four seems to be unrelated from the rest (no amnesia is involved), and, as it is a form of Fake Difficulty, is probably distinct enough to warrant its own page. Just a rambling of mine, probably worthless, I just want to see what everyone else thinks.
Morgan Wick: Actually, number one appears to be a subset or corollary to number four. It's just that it's more tightly related to number two. If anything, number three is the unrelated one.
Andrew Leprich: True, but it seems to me that this trope is mainly a general account of the various ways the convenient device of amnesia is used in video games, whereas #4, while somewhat related, seems like something that is big and different enough to stand on its own, imo.
Seven Seals: I blame myself for the title now... With a title like that you can easily expect it to be about any use of amnesia in games, but that's not the intent. This page is really supposed to be about #4, and by extension about #1 (it's the same thing, just with the tutorial angle added). It's not really about amnesia.
#2 and #3 are different because they have in-game reasons. They affect the story. A protagonist with amnesia is something different from a protagonist who's being forced to play dumb. Example: Planescape: Torment has a protagonist with amnesia, and this is a very prominent part of the story; Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (whew) has a protagonist who is not an amnesiac, but whose backstory is not revealed to the player immediately (which puts some distance between the character and the player, unusual for an RPG).
It can be hard to draw the line in the case of #2 because it's such a flimsy device, and doesn't really affect the story. It's just #1 with a hand wave -- it happens to involve amnesia. #3, on the other hand, is wholly different.
Best I can think of is to say that this trope ought to be about withholding knowledge from the player that, by all logic, the protagonist should have. True amnesia doesn't count and is a separate trope because it's about knowledge even the protagonist doesn't have. The first breaks Willing Suspension of Disbelief, the second is just a cheap plot device.
Andrew Leprich: Great way to put it. Judging by the YKTTW, it seems as if #4 was the original concept, but things gradually branched off to include literal amnesia. I think we can all agree that a split makes sense. In my view, we should have #4 separate, and another trope for the video game usage of amnesia to set up a tutorial or exposition. The question is which one goes under the current trope and which one is split off into something else. Personally, I think the usage of amnesia should be left under Gameplay-Guided Amnesia, while #4 should be split off into something like Selective Memory or something. In it, we can make the distinction that when amnesia or memory loss of the Player Character is used to set up a tutorial/exposition, it's Gameplay-Guided Amnesia, but when the game withholds information from the player that the protagonist has (or should logically have), it's a break of the Willing Suspension of Disbelief and can be a form of Fake Difficulty, and it's something else entirely from the Player Character getting amnesia. Just my $0.02.
(addendum). Hopefully no one minds, but I did this.
My question is this: Why is this considered Fake Difficulty at all? I mean, I can certainly see how it is a form of Gameplay and Story Segregation. The game has a task for the player, but one that the actual character should be able to perform trivially. Difficulty doesn't enter into it. If the game design wanted the player to perform the task, they could have found a cleaner way to do it than to break with the storyline, but the task itself is still there.
