This article talks about how players like to avoid making an irreversible decision.
This resonates with some things I’ve been working on lately: instead of presenting the player suddenly with a choice (even a choice that has a lot of emotional resonance built in), I’m trying to tantalize the player for a while with the idea that if they do everything right, they might be able to have their cake and eat it too. This ratchets up the tension as the player tries not to lose either of the two valued opportunities, and gives them a chance to think about which they would choose if they really had to.
Maybe when you get to the point, you do let the player have both things and not decide after all. Or maybe you gradually make it harder and harder to balance the two, so it becomes clear that a decision is going to be absolutely required after all.
Either way, the player gets to see the choice coming, and the agonizing over it becomes part of the PC’s characterization; it’s a deeper part of the story, not something you can save-restore out of significance.
Anyone else playing with this pattern?
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
To be honest, I tend to loathe this kind of choice, to the point of stopping to play the game entirely because I don’t want to make a choice.
My reason for that is not necessarily the agony of choosing, but:
1) Some options offered deteriorate the gameplay severely. For instance, while I often do have the option, I never ever kill NPCs in RPGs, simply because the whole city will attack me and I can’t finish any quests. The result is simply no fun to play. What’s the point of giving that “choice”, then?
For the romance mentioned in the article, my luck has it that the party member that just left has a special ability that is mandatory for beating the next boss, and the whole game is suddenly rendered unplayable.
2) Consequences are not communicated clearly to me. For instance, especially in IF, the only way to test whether some action is possible is to actually perform it, even though that was not the intention at all. Concerning the romance, I am shell-shocked when the other party member leaves, for I would have chosen differently had I known that this might happen.
3) “Replay value” and lawn mowing. Children don’t mind playing a game again and again to see how every tiny options pans out, but I simply don’t have the patience enough since the fun / time ratio is too small. When I play a game, I want to play all of it because I won’t touch it again after having finished. If I have to chose one romance, I know that I will never have the fun of experiencing the other ones.
In other words, the out-of-world consequences of this kind of choice are severe and dominate the decision. There is no fun in choosing whether I should have a romance with Viconia instead of Aerie.
All fair points. My own interest in the pattern is not because I want to produce a Bioware-esque story, but because I’m interested in stories about significant choice, and in the problem of making the player understand and care about the choices in a game.
Part of the idea of flagging a choice in advance (and making it something to try to avoid as long as possible) is to make sure that the player does know a decision point is coming, and what the consequences are likely to be.
That kind of choice might well appear towards the end of the story, and the whole story is about how you lead up to making it.
You’ve really hit the nail on the head here. This is an annoyance I’ve felt with just about every Bioware game: the story is so long and involved, and the choices are so many and varied, that by the time I’m making the “significant” choices at the end of the game, I’ve already painted myself into a corner by choosing which party members have the right level of reputation, the right skill balance, the right amount of experience points, etc.
I did thoroughly enjoy Dragon Age, I’m really on the fence about buying any of the expansions; a major contributing factor to this indecision was that I am frankly insulted by the idea that I need to slog through another *80 hours* of alternating tedious grinding and brutally difficult resource micro-management (combat in that game is … not well balanced, difficulty-wise) in order to see how the two other dialog choices which I missed out on at the end of the game might pan out.
So, in these games, I am rarely ever thinking about the dramatic tension and the in-character ramifications of a choice, but instead, the real-life consequences. I want to experience as many endings and as much of the dialogue as possible, with as few repeated leveling-up gameplay sessions as possible.
At the risk of sucking up to our host here, Alabaster was a poignant counterpoint to this experience. Since I didn’t have to worry about managing resources, and I knew I could trivially experiment with the outcome by re-playing a relatively short game, each play-through I cared considerably more about the in-character ramifications of the conversational choices that I made than I did in any Bioware game. Playing Alabaster my thought was “I wonder how the narrator feels about this” or “Man, that is some really creepy shit that Snow White just did”, and not “How can I possibly string this along until I absolutely must make a choice, so that I can save/restore through all the different branching endings as quickly as possible”.
Although to some extent the fact that the game is short contributes to this feeling, I *do* wish that games like Alabaster had a bit more of a commercial backing so that they could be a bit longer and explore their themes in more depth. While I might not want to play through Dragon Age again, I did get nearly 100 hours of enjoyment out of it, while Alabaster was the work of an evening at most. I suspect that more important than the length is the fact that in Alabaster, all I’m doing is making choices, whereas in Dragon Age, I’m quite frequently making *mistakes*: failing to drink a health potion (sorry, “poultice”) quickly enough, mostly.
The one game that had this type of gameplay which didn’t bother me quite as much was The Witcher. They did leverage the player’s indecision as dramatic tension: the factions you have to choose between are really morally ambiguous; both sides have good people that you don’t want to get hurt, but both sides have also done some really despicable things. I put off the choice as long as I possibly could, but when I finally needed to choose, I was really thinking about the in-game motivations of the character (“Okay you jerk, that’s a bridge too far, I’m siding with the other guy”) and not my own frustration with having to play through again.
I hope few enthusiasts of interactive fiction share the opinions of the anonymous commenter above.
Our actions almost always have unforeseen consequences. To argue that a game should always and clearly express the consequences of decisions made within that world is to argue that games should be as unrealistic as possible. I’ll grant that if it has been established X will provoke Y, then we should have a reasonable expectation that X –> Y. That’s good game design — for games qua games.
But I don’t think we’re talking about games qua games. We’re talking about how to amplify the emotional and artistic resonance of our medium.
I’m not saying that it’s fair to design King’s Quest 5 puzzles wherein the consequences of eating that pie is death by yeti. But neither can it be satisfying to possess absolute knowledge of the future.
Our imperfect knowledge causes the agony and the ecstasy of choosing. The weight of choice makes me feel as though I matter, as though I am connected to others. I wouldn’t give that up for anything, not for all the ‘fun’ in the world.
FWIW, the idea of choice as threat excites me. That’s a very interesting device.
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
To argue that a game should always be fun is to argue that games should be as unrealistic as possible, too. Life is not always fun. I don’t think that I’ve ever felt any “ecstasy” over random unforseen consequences of a choice that I’ve made. (And saying “agony” would probably be overstating the case, too.)
Sometimes, the problem is not even that the *consequences* of an action are sometimes unforseen. Sometimes, even the action *itself* is unforseen. I click on this dialog option, and my character decides that “Huh. Well, I give up.” means to say that, and then attack my interlocutor. What? I didn’t want to attack! But I can’t save during dialog, and another unforseen choice was that I *initiated* dialog when I walked across some invisible line on the ground and didn’t have an opportunity to save *before* the dialog, so now I have to live with the fact that I’ve slaughtered an important ally’s son or re-play two hours of dungeon running.
Sometimes stuff like that happens in real life, too, but when it does, I tell my wife that I had a shitty day, take an ambien and go to sleep early. I would not buy the sequel to that day. In fact, I wouldn’t play it even if it were free.
Pain can give greater meaning or value to enjoyable moments in games – as an example, I initially made what I thought to be a “bad” choice in Mass Effect, the saving of NPC Kaidan Alenko, instead of Ashley Williams, who I felt a greater affinity for.
If I’d known in advance, I would have made sure to save Williams, at the cost of Alenko’s life, however, due to the lack of foreknowledge, events played out naturally, and I unknowingly permitted Williams to sacrifice her life.
The loss of Williams hit me hard when I descended to the hold to talk her after the mission – except she wasn’t there.
Compared to Williams’, Alenko’s death would have been relatively meaningless.
And yes, I did attempt to delay many choices in playing ME, though mainly through fear of advancing the storyline too far a missing out on side missions/extra content.
Some would argue that player choice is the very heart of game design. Character choices are certainly at the core of all compelling literature.
For a game example outside of IF, the freedom to choose where to place bricks in Tetra has short to medium term effects on how long the game will last.
In literature, all drama derives from the choices and consequences of the protagonist. Risking cliche, I’ll note that in Lord of the Rings, Frodo spends a good deal of time *not* choosing to destroy the Ring in hopes that someone else would do it for him.
I can think of no better game device that the choice. However, the consequences should be clear to the player. Agonizing choices are also terrific. The new Starcraft 2 has a few of these kinds of choices in them.
I guess I would want either choice to be playable and satisfying in their own way. I do not like sudden, unheralded game-ending choices like “you open the box; it explodes; you die” unless the box was described as “ticking.”
This reminds me of similar discussions in face-to-face RPGs. The problem, as anonymous puts it, is that failure so often isn’t very fun, and the consequences feel like punishment. If winning is the only interesting path, and replay isn’t that fun, then why litter a linear plot with dead ends? Like a meaningless death at the hands of random monster, all you get is failure to reach the rest of the story. Choice is a means of either succeeding or failing to stay within the story.
In contrast to this, one interesting way to look at choices is as a means of of exploring the /player/.
Just off the top of my head, I enjoyed making choices about who to marry in the Harvest Moon series and the Sims. It was fun because it said something about my character and maybe about me the player as well–even if it was only what character’s design I liked the most. If the character in a game is invested with the player’s personality a choice is fun because it says something about you.
When my little niece played Harvest Moon for the first time, the minute she saw the pink-haired girl who you can marry she shouted out: “I’m marrying her!” It wasn’t a hard choice for her at all!
Choices in games are frustrating to me, really. It is nice just to have a linear story where the author has made the choices for you and is giving you the experience of a story. I would never want to have to make the choices, even in play, of one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines for myself, or Jane Eyre, or, heaven forbid, Medea. A lot of those stories aren’t possible if there is a choice, also. For the character in a great story, there seems to be no other way to live…
But good luck with your work, I always enjoy your games.
In all storytelling, the longer the audience remains unsure how the story will end, the further they crawl towards the edge of their seat. In conventional fiction, this is usually a matter of disguising what, exactly, the hero will have to sacrifice in order to succeed. That the hero succeeds at the quest attempted is a virtual certainty, but no aspect of the hero’s character (faith, family, or financial security, for example) is necessarily safe. Destroying any of those aspects early in the story necessarily decreases tension, as its loss is no longer a threat.
In most interactive fiction, multiple endings are largely a measure of how completely a character has “won”. Not so much what they might have to sacrifice, as what’s still available to grab. The moment when the player realizes there is no perfect ending, that at least one sacrifice must be made, is the moment their search for alternate endings becomes entirely completionist. They must determine a preference and choose one.
Making them choose a sacrifice too early makes it unlikely they’ll play again, whether they’re satisfied with the ending or not. The more players left unsatisfied by an ending (even if others were available), the poorer their game experience.
Popular writers keep their protagonists juggling as many sacrifices as possible for as long as possible. IF would be well served to emulate them, and you’ve suggested one way to do just that. Good luck!
Speaking as a reader/player, the stories that hook me in are the ones that create the suspense. I get invested in the characters, I have to care about what will happen to them at the end. I play in hope of reaching the best outcome, and attempt to navigate away from options that would threaten it.
So my choices are about keeping away from what I fear and reaching what I hope will be the best(winning)outcome. Unless threatened with death/premature game ending, I don’t tend to save a lot. I like playing through to the end to be immersed in the game world. However, I do replay if the outcome I fear occurs at the end. I replay until I reach the most satisfying ending, and depending on who you are and what you believe, that can be different.
Recently, I played a flash game where in order to win it, you had to kill a sentient computer program, but the author had done such a good job of making you care about this character, that I could not perform the winning action. I simply quit. Similarly, I appreciate when IF offers choices, but at the same time allows for the fact that inaction also could be an option.
“Freedom from choice / is what you want…” -Devo
Yeah, that’s interesting. Lately I’m tinkering with creating classic dramatic structures (a la Aristotle / Freytag / Foster-Harris) where the game gives the player an outcome-determining choice halfway through the game. Choices before this are false choices, where the player is allowed to go with the flow of the narrative one way or the other, but not to challenge it. So, basically they’re toys.
Doing it this way means you’re writing 1.5 times more game than a player gets in any one run-through. And another downside is that the structure invites lawnmowering, but doesn’t necessarily reward replay, since the first half the game is more-or-less invariant. I’m working on solutions to the second of these (the first is just the way it is).
In my opinion, a game ideally would allow the player to determine the duration of his involvement, and replay is one way to do this. The complementary way is by allowing *escape*. For example, in your team-written _Alabaster_, you allow the player to end the conversation and continue on the path at any time. That’s a form of escape; the player can terminate the game and keep the narrative intact.
A very different example was in last year’s Comp entry by Tiberius, _Yon Astounding Castle of some sort_. That game had almost no narrative, but nevertheless it provided the player with an escape option in the “WIN” command, which wrapped up the dungeon-crawl by awarding the PC with a statue (awarding you the rank of Novice Adventurer or so forth).
A game that both allows replay and escape easily accordions game play to the level of interest of the player. And to some extent you can apply this thinking to scene design. The narrative is not then being used as a reward for proper puzzle-solving (or other simulator-based behavior); rather the simulator is proving contexts for narrative loops, enabling the player to draw out enjoyable scenes and abbreviate uninteresting ones. You’re treating each scene as a mini-game, in other words.
I’m still working on it, but it seems promising.
Conrad.