Overview
Allowing players to make choices when playing video games adds to replayability and player involvement. However, the ways that game designers implement choices range in quality. In some games choices are shallow, unimportant, and ultimately boring or distracting. In others choices are character (or player) defining, captivating, and rewarding. I’ve been thinking about three rules that make choices in video games crunchy and delicious.
In AI War, player choices are incredibly important at the strategic level.
The Rules
The following are three non-exclusive rules of including awesome choices in videogames
- Choices must be meaningful
- Outcomes must be obvious
- Wrong options must be prohibited
I will explore these rules over the next few entries.
Do any of you feel I’m missing any key rules? Am I wrong?
Your homework for this post is to play AI War by Arcen Games.
I’m not really sure what you mean by #2. As in, it must be clear that you have made a choice?
Here’s a choice: I’m exploring a level in Diablo. The path splits left and right. I can guess that one path probably goes to a down stair-case and the other probably leads to a random treasure. If the designer’s intention is to have me to choose taking an easy way out and going down or taking a risk (fighting monsters) and getting treasure, the designer has failed since they haven’t communicated to me what those paths are. I don’t know which one has the stairs and which has the monsters and treasure.
Now this is kind of a flawed example because part of Diablo is not knowing which way to go, but we can imagine other games or situations where this is more applicable.
Aah, interesting. I think a lot of game violate this, but that doesn’t make it right.
Well, I could be wrong too. I’ve been wrong before.
I think rule # 2 is redundant. If you have an obvious outcome, it’s already defined by the meaningfulness from rule #1. Id suggest something else like :”the outcome must me understandable when connected to the choice”. such a formulation will allow for “learning by doing” principles in the game design. Do something and learn from the effect..
I am looking forward to yout explanation of rule # 3. How do you define wrong options ?
Thanks for the comment! What led me to formulate it this way is the critical choice in Bioshock: you can save Little Sisters or harvest them. Writing post was partly inspired from this article: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2007/08/little-sisters-save-or-harvest-we-break-down-the-best-approach-for-adam.ars
In this case I think the outcomes seem obvious (I want to be a powerful evil villain or a hero or resists committing evil acts for power) but the choice is rendered meaningless because the rewards work out more or less the same. Imagine alternate universe Bioshock where you couldn’t gain more power without killing Little Sisters. This would provide way more temptation to be evil.
The distinction also allows for four sectors of choice:
The choice is meaningful and the outcome is obvious.
The choice is meaningful but the result is opaque.
The choice is meaningless but the outcome is obvious.
The choice is meaningless and the outcome is opaque.
I think examples could be constructed or found of all of these.
In any case, I like your formulation and I think we’re on the same track, but I want to avoid having players needing to learn the effects of individual choices in games. It probably depends on the gameplay you want to create though. And I do support the concept of learning by doing when approaching systems of choices. Anyway, I’ll be posting more on this later.