To Be or Not to Be: Ingredients for Meaningful Choice in Games
Valkyria Chronicles is a game that embodies well designed choice.
Choice is often necessary for the deeper emotions of life. Choice are how people express themselves, design their lives, and make mistakes. It is through choices that we build our pasts and shape our present. Choices make life feel alive and real.
Choices can also appear in games, but for some reason, when many developers attempt to create meaningful choice in their games, they miss key components. Oftentimes poorly executed choices in games tend to feel empty, unimportant, or as though there really was no choice at all.
Luckily, when trying to design something like meaningful choice, we are not groping in the dark (as with some other design challenges). Meaningful choice is something that you and I experience every day in our real lives. What can life teach us about game design in this area?
What is meant by meaningful?
Let’s start be defining exactly what our goal here is. I am defining a “meaningful choice” as a choice that the player makes that they actually care about. They deeply considered the choice. They felt the weight of the choice. And after the choice was over, they remember it and feel either satisfaction or regret.
A choice is a reflection of the player. Interactivity is one of the most important aspects of games that sets them apart from all other media. By giving the player a choice, you give them a chance to express themselves and differentiate their gameplay. You give them the chance not just to tell a story, but to show them the meaning of the consequences of their own actions, not just a set of actions that was predetermined. This lifts games above all other forms of storytelling.
According to the Game Design Canvas, meaningful choice is build using the bricks of the game’s Punishment and Reward Systems. There are three essential components. Neglect any one of them and the choice is rendered meaningless. The three ingredients are awareness, consequence, and permanence.
First Ingredient of Choice: Awareness
This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised how many early developers (including myself in my first games) make this mistake. For a choice to be meaningful, the player must first be aware that they are even being presented with a choice. Failing to recognize a choice is not the fault of the player, it is the fault of the game and the developer.
Imagine if a player is walking down a hallway, past potted plants and windows, and enters the door that they see plainly stationed at the end. The game then narrates aloud, “And so you have chosen to enter the door, have you?”
What?
In this scenario, the player may have had the option to leave through the window instead of the door. But if they didn’t know, then they didn’t really have a choice. When players are presented with choices they aren’t made aware of, then they just blow by them. In a single run through, there is no difference between the scenario with a choice and the scenario with no choice.
The player must absolutely be made aware of the choice that is being presented to them. This can be done any number of ways. The developer can explicitly tell the player what their choices are, such as the case with Fable; the game’s UI tells the player they can destroy the barrels or leave them be. The game could draw their attention to other options, such as the mid-point in Valve’s Portal, where the player is decending into a firey pit but sees a safe ledge off to the side. The game’s systems themselves could also imply choice, such as with many competitive games. In Starcraft, the player always has the choice to create more energy-mining units or offensive units, presented to them via the buttons on their HUD.
Once they are aware of the choice, then they must also be somewhat aware of the results. This doesn’t mean telegraphing exactly what will happen and giving away the surprise, but it does mean giving some context to what the choice could mean. Without at least some awareness of the results, the choice is rendered meaningless.
Again, consider the same hallway example. Let’s say the narrator says, “And now you may choose to leave from the window or the door.” Which one would you choose?
If you only knew what I’ve told you here, chances are you would just pick randomly. It doesn’t really matter, because in this example you don’t know anything about this hallway, you don’t know anything about what’s outside, and you don’t know why you’re making this so-called “choice”. You need to have at least some idea so that you can weigh the options and make your decision.
Let’s give some context to that situation. Say that you are an outlaw being chased by the police. You hear the coming up the stairs behind you. You look outside the window and see that you’re on the second story. Now would you choose to go out the window or the door?
At this point you have some more context around the choice, and so you can begin to decide for yourself. Given how the game works, the window may be a faster escape route, but you might hurt yourself in the fall. The door may be safer, but you might not get out and down the stairs as quickly. The choice is up to you.
In addition to informing our game design decisions, there are some interesting real world consequences of this observation. Oftentimes in real life we tend to go through our days, our weeks, and our months as though we have no choice. Paul Graham, a silicon valley investor, noted once that many students, upon graduating college, don’t realize that they have the choice to start their own companies instead of getting a job. Because they are not aware of the choice, it is not a meaningful interaction to them. It is as though they have no choice at all.
Awareness of the choice, and limited awareness of the consequences are necessary. Which brings us to our next ingredient…
Second Ingredient of Choice: Consequence
You are playing a game and you are presented with a deadly choice. You can save the child and harm yourself, or your can let the child die and get away clean. What do you do?
Let’s say that you save the child. Your character’s life bar is cut down by half, or some other punishment. Then you go on to the next chapter and never see the child again. Big deal.
Let’s say you ignore the child. Your life bar is intact, and the game throws some melodramatic narration at you, “I will always regret that day…” You then move on to the next chapter and never think of the child. Again, big deal.
Meaningful choice? In both situations, don’t think so.
Does the player ignoring the child make that player an immoral person? In real life, it would. But in a game? No, definitely not. Why? Because there is no meaningful consequence.
Choices only carry weight when they have consequences attached to them. The thing about choice, about interactivity, about games as opposed to all other media is that you have the chance to change the outcome of the future. That is what choice actually is: an opportunity to change the future. But if the future is the same no matter what choice you make, then why even call it a choice at all?
In the saving the child example, the problem isn’t that the player isn’t aware of the choice; that is made perfectly clear beforehand. The problem is that after the choice has been made, there are no effects to cause the player to reflect on that choice. Other than maybe a few seconds of animation and narration, the game stays the same. If there were more consequence, the player would have taken the choice more seriously, perhaps even gone the other way.
As described, the child either dies or survives, and then the player goes on to another level. The child is never seen or referred to again. I have seen this in some games and shake my head; this is choice rendered useless by a lack of consequence. But what if it were different? Imagine if instead of never seeing the child again, you would run into him quite often. If the child was saved, then you would see him playing in the park. His mother would come and give you a thank you letter or help you on a later mission. He would wave to you in the game’s end credits. On the flip side, if the child dies, then you may walk by his grave later. You may ask his mother for help, but she can’t speak through the tears. At the game’s credits you might see tear-covered Polaroid pictures of him before he passed away.
That’s a pretty drastic difference, isn’t it? Trusting that the game would deliver consequence would certainly make you think twice about your choice.
Consequences are why choices are meaningful in real life. In Grand Theft Auto I might be given the choice of committing a robbery and I may do it, take the money, and move on. But in real life, there are much more dire consequences for a robbery. I would likely be caught, I could be hurt or attacked. I would have the police after me and could end up in jail. I could lose my job and access to my friends and family. Truly, that choice is fraught with many consequences, and those consequences give it its meaning.
Several years ago I played Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. Out of the lush cast of 30-something characters in that game, I only remember one. Boyd. He was a young man with green hair who had two brothers he loved dearly. He was a good fighter and had a snarky mouth on him, but that made him endearing. Over the past years, I have forgotten all the other characters.
Why do I remember Boyd? Because I let him die.
People die in games all the time. But not like Boyd. While in most games a certain character must be killed, Boyd did not. He died because I made a mistake in a tactical battle. The choice was there: survive the battle with Boyd alive, or let him perish. I wasn’t skilled enough, I made errors, and he fell.
But Boyd’s death did not go unnoticed by the game; the designers of Path of Radiance made sure I remembered it. Throughout the rest of the game, characters made comments in reference to Boyd. ”If Boyd were still here, he would want us to fight.” ”What would Boyd have said? I can still hear his voice…” ”I can’t give up! I can’t let my big brother Boyd down!”
Each of these comments tore me up inside. Each of them reminded me, “You, you, Brice, had the opportunity to keep Boyd alive. But you blew it. The choices you made resulted in this consequence.” Think of how easy it was for the developers to author a few text strings for each character that could have passed away! And yet to this day, years later, I still remember him more vividly than all the other characters in that game. That is the power of choice with consequence.
When presenting the player with choices, be sure that there are recurring consequences long after the choice has been made that remind the player of their decision. It’s up to the developer to decide if these consequences are aesthetic or gameplay related, but they should harken back to the past and tell the player, “You chose this path.”
Third Ingredient of Choice: Permanence
“But wait,” you ask. ”Why couldn’t you just restart the battle? Turn the game off and do it again, and keep Boyd alive!”
This suggestion brings us to the third ingredient of meaningful choice: permanence. A choice that can be easily undone means nothing.
We have already stated that the consequences of a choice are what give it meaning. Is the consequences are not there, then the meaning is not there. Thus it follows that if you can change or alter the consequences of a choice, you strip the choice of its weight.
Resident Evil, now a blockbuster franchise, began with a game that understood the ingredient of permanence. This is not an aspect of Resident Evil that is often talked about, but it was absolutely instrumental in its success. In the original game for the Playstation, you only had a limited number of saves. That’s right, the number of times that you could save your game at a checkpoint were scarce. Thus you would sometimes find a save point and decide to bypass it and truck on through.
Why on earth would they design the game like this? Many players who complained about it failed to realize its design meaning. The limited saves in Resident Evil made you take your choices seriously. When you were walking through the courtyard, you were terrified that if you went the wrong way, you would be killed. Left, or right? If you choose incorrectly, you will be sent back, far far back to a save long ago. This made the choice of left or right a choice of life or death. Not only of your character, but of your investment of time. It maintained the meaning of the game’s consequences.
If you could save as much as you wanted, then your choices would be meaningless. Open the wrong door and get beheaded by a zombie? No problem, just save back and don’t open the door. The choice is rendered meaningless. The heart-stopping tension is gone. Any mistake can be undone.
In the Path of Radiance example, they had a similar limited-saves strategy, though not as overt. You could only save the game in between battles, and battles could take almost two hours. When I lost Boyd, it was about an hour and a half into the battle. If I were to start over, I would have wasted an hour and a half. In this way the developers build some insurance into their choices.
It’s up to developers to decide how to inject permanence into their choices. You can limit the number of saves, or you can save the game automatically so they can’t go back. You could require a significant time investment before the choice is presented, which would discourage them from going back and doing it again. Whatever the method, the point is to make it more difficult for the player to undo the choice than to sit and be content with it.
A Recipe for Engagement
With these three ingredients, awareness, consequence, and permanence, we have the perfect concoction for meaningful choice in games. Meaningful choices reach into our hearts and make us feel sorrow, regret, thrill, or relaxation. These emotional are often difficult to reach in games. Choices provide the tools to let the player express themselves in a game, to feel the weight of the worlds we pull them into, and to think carefully about where they tread.
Comments
7 Responses to “To Be or Not to Be: Ingredients for Meaningful Choice in Games”Leave a comment, and if you'd like your own picture to show up next to your comments, go get a gravatar!
Great article, but I can’t agree entirely. First, I won’t play a game with limited saves. And two-hour battles, with no ability to save? Some of us have lives! Nothing is worse than a game that you can’t play for a brief period of time, that you can’t fit into a busy life.
I’ll always want to save a game before a choice. Part of that is because I frequently want to make a foolish choice – deliberately – just to see what the game developer will do to my character. Then I reload and continue. Hey, it’s a GAME, right? The point is to have fun.
Furthermore, I wonder about leaving a player regretting his choices. Do you really want the player regretting the bad choices he’s made in a game? How is that fun? Frankly, it’s too much like RL for me! I’ve made enough bad choices in my life; I certainly wouldn’t enjoy doing the same in a computer game!
The rest of your article is great. To my mind, The Witcher did choices very badly (though I still enjoyed the game). Your choices were meaningless, because they all turned out similarly (badly). And you had no reason to choose one over another, no way of finding the “best” solution, because there wasn’t one. There was nothing you could do to compromise or choose a third way. So, basically, you just flipped a coin and watched the inevitable disaster play out. That was supposed to be “gritty,” I guess, but it meant that our choices were arbitrary and meaningless.
And although I always want to be able to save a game, at any time, it certainly shouldn’t encourage constant reloads. I think of games with random loot in treasure chests, which encourage reloading over and over again to get the best items. That tends to ruin a game.
So what’s best? Make a game where both choices are viable and both choices are fun, but there are still real consequences. Make it an intelligent choice, not just flipping a coin randomly. Make it memorable in the ways you suggest. If a child dies, make it regrettable, but still not necessarily the “wrong” choice. A player can regret the consequences of a choice, but still feel that it was the right decision. (That way, you can get the emotional impact of making the choice, without making the player feel like an idiot or a loser.)
And often, a player will want to play an evil or amoral character. If the game permits such an approach, it should still be fun, but there must be realistic consequences, and the player should definitely not feel heroic for his dastardly deeds. The player must still enjoy the game, but his amoral character doesn’t have to prosper from such things. (And most players are NOT amoral, and so can be made to feel the weight of any evil decisions. They might even feel satisfied that their evil character did not personally profit from his actions.)
All in all, I loved your discussion of this topic. There needs to be a lot more thought given to the whole matter of choices in computer games. I think that game developers have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible. How do books and movies make us care about even minor characters? How do they tug at our heartstrings? Games can do this, too.
I commented in the other thread that I saved the kid without hesitation…. but to be honest I’m not sure if that was just because I didn’t realise there was another choice.
That was the big problem with Indigo Prophecy’s design… sometimes failure led to a different outcome, sometimes it led to instant game over. Which possibly meant that I didn’t want to risk not saving the kid because it would probably be a game over.
On the other hand maybe I saved him because at that point i was pretty involved in the game, and while I didn’t know the kid, I cared about the main character and wanted him to do something good.
FYI, if you do save the kid then it does come up later, in a small way. The cop has a guilty concience about not catching you and tells the detectives. I don’t know if it has an effect on the game, but it gets at least mentioned in the story (and slightly helps rationalise the detective’s choice not to turn you in later).
I played one of the Fire Emblem games on the GBA last year, and I quit half way through. After playing a battle that took about 2 hours (or 4-5 days in real-time on-train play) I suddenly lost about 3 main characters in one turn. Maybe i should have continued, but it seemed the game would be pretty impossible from that point without them (or at least games have trained me to think that). I couldn’t be bothered to replay the whole battle again. So I just stopped playing.
Indigo prophecy was interesting in that it tried to get away from the standards of game design, and seemed to try to make the consequences of your actions unclear. But because it still stuck with game-tropes like “game over” it totally didn’t work.
(it also of course suffered from losing the last 2 parts of the trilogy and having all that crammed into one sudden, nonsensical ending).
It’d be really interesting to go back and remake Indigo Prophecy with a little hindsight and experience.
So, a game is a series of interesting decisions then.
Indego Prophecy has a health bar. Not many people realize that. It’s called Metal Health. if it gets too low and then something bad happens it gives you a game over. There are many things throughout the game that raises and lowers the mental health meter. At later points you can turn on the news and the child will come up. It can either damage or raise your mental health. It may have minor concequences, but at the same time it is a relatively minor choice in the game. It’s only because a life is attached to it, do we think it’s important, but in this story it isn’t really.
great article. Making a game = understanding real life. people think we’re just playing or wasting time…
i too played fire emblem (gameboy ver.)
i did feel the pressure of not letting people die, and thus dearly regret any death
sometimes i would fight the entire 1+ hour battle again to save em
however the best save systems are those that dont let you go back, but let you redeem your errors later on (like an mmo).
sometimes i dont play a game entirely based on the save mechanism, like @WCG said we got our time/lives and too many games out there (hehe “choice”), so we arent gona play repetitive or grindy games (too much repetition = boring, total waste of time)
I think games like shining force have a good mechanic for loosing characters in a strategy game as compared to fire emblem, you lost gold to “revive” them, and a note was made in each characters bio of how often they fell.
This gave a consequence that was redeemable, and a measurable reward for keeping it from happening (a low “has died” count, and less loss of gold). The problem with this permanent death concept you describe is that everyone wants to experience the “best play through possible” and this can’t possibly be the play through that’s littered with irreversible mistakes. Mass Effect2 also had a mechanic towards the end for loosing characters. It didn’t work for me because it was optional (and avoidable). I think if you want to have a consiquence mechanic have a deep and irriversable impact it works best is if the alternative isn’t the lack of a consiquence, but instead an alternative consiquence – then the drama of loss could be retained within the storytelling without compromising a players feeling of experiencing the “best play through possible” – since they know through an unspoken trust with the game designers that whatever they are experiencing was one of the intended paths.
Lots of great comments that I didn’t get a chance to respond to! My apologies for that.
@WCG, I understand the frustration with things like auto-saves and 2 hour blocks of time without saves. I also am a retro-gamer and enjoy saving state so I can go back and explore all the possibilities. However the truth is that no matter what one’s preferences are, being able to save and go back and have deep emotional consequences are mutually exclusive. You can do one or the other, but to do both is impossible. This would even be true in real life. If you could go back in time, you wouldn’t get upset about tragedy in real life either.
@t_m, sorry to hear you lost your three characters. :-) Balancing difficulty with emotional attachment is a delicate design process.
@Andrey, yes, making a game where the consequences of choices are obvious, such as a better ending or no ending, are less compelling. The best choices are the ones that test the player’s character.
Thanks for the comments (so long ago) everyone!