vrengames

Game Design: Choice and False Choice

Added 2018-08-05 05:57:08 +0000 UTC

I'm writing up some unique events for the Head Researcher role that will be introduced in v0.8, and some of these events include important choices for the player to make. This got me thinking about the different kinds of choices that are presented to players in games in general, so here's a post talking about them and their uses.

Allowing meaningful choices is a tricky thing to handle in a video game. On one extreme end you allow no choice at all and the game is nothing more than a procedural set of actions. On the other end you're trying to account for a near infinite combination of actions the player might want to take. Striking a balance somewhere in the middle is necessary to make a game satisfying while also being possible to create.

First, lets talk about what a choice fundamentally is. A choice is a set of options presented to the player that will give different outcomes from each other. These different outcomes will look different depending on the genre of game. I will be using the modern remake of Doom as a running example, mainly because it is not a game that many people think about when choice is discussed. In Doom most of the choice in the game comes from weapon utilization. Some weapons are powerful but have limited ammo, others are weaker but you can use them more freely. Making the correct choice to conserve ammo in one place and spend it in another makes the game interesting. In general we are also only interested in choices that are optimal and distinct from each other. The "choice" between a gun that does 5 damage and one that does 6 damage is trivial and not worth thinking about.

For choice to be impactful in a game it must change some section of content in the player's gameplay experience. If no content is changed the player's choice has no real effect. In our running Doom example the player may find themselves unable to kill all of the enemies with their weapon selection, which effectively eliminates the rest of the content in the game. As an example of a game that fails to change content based on your choice we can look at the recent BattleTech game. In between missions there is dialogue between major NPC's and yourself, but every single dialogue choice leads to the same mission, with no changes in story, funds, equipment, or morale. This results in an RPG section of the game that feels tacked on and irrelevant because nothing you do will change the way the game progresses.

Adding impactful change to a game eats up development resources, which is why not everything that looks like a choice needs to end up being one. These "false choices" look like they may be important and game changing, but all of the options quickly lead back to a central gameplay path. This was first pointed out to me in the development commentary of Half-life 2. The player, while on the run from the combine, would be presented with two possible paths - up or down a staircase for example. Either choice initially seems valid, but one of them comes to a dead end just out of sight. 50% of the time the player will take the non-dead end choice, and without any way to go back they will never know that it forced them onto the same path, and so they think the level contains twice as much content as it actually does. If all of the choices are false the player will eventually notice that they run into dead ends half the time, but mixed in with true choice this can make a game feel much, much larger while requiring relatively little extra effort.

I hope you found this look at videogame choice educational and entertaining! Keep an eye out for false choice next time you're playing a game and see how game developers try and trick you into thinking there is more content hidden in a game than there actually is!