Today I was catching up on some reading when I came across James Portnow’s opinion piece on the difference between Choices and Problems (The Problem of Choice). I disagree with the separation entirely and see the presentation of them as separate as a form of False Dilemma that is all too easy to fall into.
Choices are among the fundamental elements of game design, economics, behavioral psychology and computer science. In all of those fields, the concept of choice is defined roughly the same way: (from wikipedia) “Choice consists of the mental process of thinking involved with the process of judging the merits of multiple options and selecting one of them for action.”
Making a choice requires a mental formulation – the generation of some model for weighing the merits of each option. Merits are directly connected to goals, and one can often discern one’s goals through their choices. It is also said often in economics that “choice defines preference” but preference is a tricky thing to pin down.
What James appears to me to be discussing is the transparency of the game’s own reward model. When players align some of their goals with the game’s mechanical goals (as is generally the case when you wish to win), their merit models begin to look more like the game’s.
At this point it can be said that their merit model is far more mechanical than personal. However, this shift is highly personal in nature. Players are driven by a varying amount of drive for success (the Achiever Bartle type). Take three extreme examples on the same game:
- Player A wishes to win the game with the utmost ‘completion’, and so goes out and purchases a hint book which makes fully transparent all of the mechanical merits of each choice. The player then chooses each in accordance with the walkthrough and obtains the ultimate score or reward sought.
- Player B wishes to maintain the mystery of the game and avoids spoilers or hints from any source, wishing the game experience to be as personally driven as possible
- Player C has little to no interest in completing the game and instead explores the mechanical simulation but with different goals in mind than the main ’success’ goal of the game – for example seeing how big of an explosion one can make, or how silly one can die with ragdolls, or if the game story breaks if you try to kill everyone.
As is obvious, choices with merits that apply to more than one possible goal are evaluated differently by different people. My disagreement stems from the attempt to separate choices which are mechanical in nature to those which are personal in nature into two separate concepts. I think this is highly dangerous as it generally assumes a singular goal system. Where are goal systems most singular? In traditional story-driven single player games.
Goals and Endings
Let’s take a game like Bioshock. Instead of having a singular goal, there are multiple endings. Each ending is now an available goal. The problem with this is that while situations may change during the course of gameplay, long term goals and gameplay decisions of players rarely do. This means that each player selects the ending goal that they wish to achieve early in play and now all choices become False Choices.
This is especially true of the hintbook-user who starts by reading up on all the possible branches and endings and makes their selection at the beginning (see also Mass Effect sex scene). However even someone who is only cognizant of the fact that a game has multiple endings (read it on the back of the box – multiple endings is a feature list slick item), they will pre-construct likely ending goals in their mind, select one and then act accordingly.
This is the basis of role-playing. If you decide you want to play an evil character with a soft spot for cuddly looking things, then you will make your choices accordingly and you hope that the ending or rewards that you get respect some element of this decision (for example at least that you decided to be evil). The problem here is the ending – the concentration of goals on the game ending. Pen and paper roleplay works because it is often open-ended (if you’re not playing strictly from an adventure with an unimaginative GM, you don’t know that the game will contain roughly 40 hours of play time before you start playing it). The solutions here are to spread the goals out – achievements, chapter-based games, social systems, and economic systems.
The Myth of Purely Aesthetic Choices
So what about choices that aren’t attached to a goal mechanism? It turns out a rare few of these are purely choices without goals. Examples in the real world are common in non-essential purchases – what flavor of chips do you buy for yourself? what color of a particular shirt do you choose when one is offered in multiple colors? However they can quickly be turned into goal-based variations: what flavor of chips do you buy when you’re having guests over (maximize for utilitarian benefit), what does this shirt say about me? (does it further the goal of presenting myself to others the way that I wish to?).
In online games, even aesthetic choices become intertwined with social or economic goals. Let’s take a look at some examples:
- Choice of Color: This can be an economic merit judgment (based on rarity), and a social persona merit judgment. Example – a hardcore PvPer picking a pink colorset for its memorability and humor value. If one is in a guild, color coordination may be desired, limiting choice.
- Choice of Name: Economic factors are huge here (is the name already taken? am I willing to live with Legolasx345 or do I want something truly unique?), as well as roleplay and persona considerations (one trying to play an elf might want an elf-like name).
The name selection example is perhaps the best. Trademark and domain name selection for a company or product is based on a huge ‘problem’ equation of relative merits – Pronounce-ability, Length, International Meanings and Pronunciation, Logo/Glyph possibilities, Linguistic distance from similar trademarks, Search loading (what is currently found by that name through searches), Legal Availability (and cost to acquire), DNS Availability (and cost to acquire), Social network Availability, and Linguistic connection to the desired evoked emotions or symbols are just a few of the criteria. This creates a giant ‘problem’ equation, where the stakeholders balance the merits of each to be able to mechanically rate the possibilities – if the company is hiring a marketing firm or is a min/maxer in the player terms. A company who is like player B in the above example might just pick a name and hope for the best.
The Single Player Game
Ok, so digging further – let’s come up with the most pristinely pure-choice example we can come up with. The choice of aesthetics or actions within a purely single-player game that has no predictable affect on the outcome. I say purely single-player because these are a rarity today. Any game that is connected with online achievements, gamer scores, or leaderboards is no longer ‘purely’ single player in that the motivations for winning change. Increasingly with fraps, machinima, youtube, and other forms of shared media, even the most single player experience can become a social one, much like when a friend watches you while you play.
One obvious problem with these kinds of purely surface choices is that they are bad design! Presenting choices that have no measurable effect can easily disenfranchise the player.
On the opposite side, easily transparent mechanical goals also removes much of the fun of choosing. If every text option in a game like Fallout had next to it in parenthesis how many XP points you gain by selecting that option, much of the fun would be immediately drained from the game.
The Multi-player Game
When choices can be boiled down to merit equations based on a preset list of goals, they become less interesting. However, one simple way to stop this is to obscure the mechanics by introducing an external (unpredictable) factor. The classic examples of this are found in the birthing of games themselves: Go, Chess, etc. When one cannot easily predict what situation a choice will wind one up in, the choice becomes more difficult but also more meaningful. Life is mostly comprised of these choices.
Traditional games don’t have the issue of transparent choice mechanics or purely aesthetic choices, nor do connected games – only single player ‘movie’ games do – a problem we have invented for ourselves as game designers. Sometimes choice doesn’t matter in these games (when the game is purely linear and driven by twitch skill) – but this to me is a somewhat sad shallow concept of interactivity that doesn’t take full advantage of the medium.
Solutions
While I may disagree with the conclusion in Mr. Portnow’s piece – I agree with the prescription – we should be more cognizant of what we call choice in video games. And since I never like to just rant without providing some solutions (ok that’s not entirely true… a good rant is fun, too), here are ways I think we can improve the ‘choicyness’ of the single player game experience:
- More achievements and mini-goals, especially ones off the beaten path
- Shareable media awareness (best examples of this are shareable replays in racing games or the snapshot camera in Little Big Planet)
- Episodic game play (smaller, sooner goals)
- Condition-driven systems (instead of using a hidden character ‘alignment’ number, test for conditions present in the world that could indicate alignment)
- Better, more unpredictable AI (the more human ones’ opponents are, the harder the equations are)
- Adapting mechanics (less of Oblivion’s level adaption with reduces impact, more things like enemies having an increased chance of resistance to the tactic/ability you use more often)
- Random scenario changes (this works best in repeatable content, but things like Left 4 Dead’s slight changes in the level layout keep it from being just an equation)
- External stimuli changes (massively single player games, rendering of ghost player data into the game, using external factors to drive economies)
- Generally be more graceful with player ‘mistakes’, build in teaching mechanism to choice systems, allowing a player to get better
And finally, some things we need to do less of:
- Stop thinking of choice being between GOOD and EVIL
- Early-branch trees (e.g. good/evil, character class choices in System Shock 2 – each problem has multiple solutions, but only one generally valid based on your class)
- Using optimal-path scoring (i.e. leaderboards with only total points, time to completion, etc), instead score sections, allow mistakes
- Not planning for the meta-game goals and looking only at our own mechanics
I’ve read this article in its entirety, and I’d like to discuss some things, if you have the time.
I’m having a hard time figuring out why you disagree with James Portnow; is it because you don’t think the separation of problems and choices applies? Was it that his differentiation only took into account single player games such as RPGs and not multiplayer games? If the separation is a false one, how does it help us to think of them as the same?
You were also saying that figuring out the mechanics behind a personal choice turns it into a more mathematical one, was that right? (Sorry if I’m paraphrasing a lot here; I’m trying to understand the gist of the article.) This assumes that you’re going along with Sid Meier’s quote of games being ‘a series of meaningful choices’, and thus anything that undermines the meaning of these choices hurts the game.
You also mentioned that life consists of meaningful choices, which got me thinking: is the reason that games are often not taken seriously because their choices often lack meaning? Thus, if you subscribe to the idea that games are art (as I do), then the goal would be to include more meaningful choices in games. While I’m all for this, would making games more meaningful and unpredictable, i.e. more like life, make them more entertaining, increase their replay value, etc.? If handled correctly, then yes; but on the flip side, make games too much like life, and you risk alienating the player. Life isn’t fair, and so many factors are unknown, often leading us down dead ends. We’re trying to entertain players, not frustrate them.
Interactivity is indeed the strength of the games medium, and I’d have to say that the core of this article is how to include choices in games that take full advantage of this power of interactivity, thus making games more engaging. To do this, choices should matter and be meaningful.
I think his case for the separation is based on one being able to be turned into an optimization problem (‘problem’) and the other where you are unable to do this (‘choice’ – to take his words: “Choice appears when you are asked to decide between two things of equivalent or incomparable value. “). My disagreement stems only from the fact that this is a highly rare, and likely undesirable scenario – we constantly use internal goals and weighting models to ‘unbalance’ otherwise balanced choices. I argue that it does not require a conscious act of the game designer in tying the choice to game mechanics to have this effect. I think it’s a benefit to us to think of this as a long gradient – between transparent mechanics ‘problems’ and pure ‘choices’, the tags and concepts of his article still apply – but I feel there is real danger in trying to categorize one thing as a choice and one thing as a problem as absolutes, because there will be a tendency to mark as irrelevant ‘choices’ things that are relevant in a grander context (for example the social context I was describing). When evaluating and discussing games it’s important to study them ‘as they are played’ and not ‘as the design document states’, because sometimes the meta-game is larger than the game.
I do agree with Sid Meier’s elegant description of games, as well as most of the theory regarding ‘play loops’ and the choice element of the feedback loop (Raph Koster et al), and your paraphrase is effectively correct – though the math is often called ‘intuition’ and while we await the neuropsychologists to show us how it works, clinical psychology and behavioral studies can generate some very accurate models of the average across a sample.
Choices, balanced or otherwise – are fun. Notably they’re the least fun when they’re too unbalanced (too obvious, as Mr. Portnow points out), when they’re perfectly balanced (meaningless and uninteresting), or too wide/varied (too many options – see also: http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/0060005688). This also applies to real life.
I do believe that games are art (my two personal definitions of art are: “things that imitate life” and “communication”). Making games more life like should not alienate the player if done correctly. After all, what is more natural to a user than their native environment / ruleset? Everyone has more hours of experience with life than with games of any genre (gamer recluse jokes aside). The trick is not to make the game feel like it is arbitrary punishing (which life sometimes is) but rather part of the system. The other trick is to change our presentation if we are to try this. Making a game with unpredictable elements (random or otherwise – life isn’t ‘random’ if you look at chaos theory) has issues if you sell the game with features or achievements that compete one person’s game experience with anothers’ (achievements for time to finish, etc). Also I’m hugely not a fan of ‘replay value’, but that’s for another conversation.
I agree with your summary – we should not let choices become too transparent or too empty and make sure to study all the possible goals in the equation beyond those in our original design. We should not pursue the concept of ‘choice’ as a bulleted feature for the back of the box (“multiple endings allow you to play it over and over, different every time!”) all too eager to add it to our games without careful observation of play habits. I believe I share this peave with Mr. Portnow, and my article is stabbing at the same shrouded wrongs as his is – just with different semantics.
Now I get it. So rather than viewing problems and choices as the same thing, your view is to separate them into even more categories, not just two. Makes sense.
That link you provided was quite interesting. I read the summary of that book, which basically stated that people have too many choices nowadays, which ends up overwhelming people, leading them to make worse choices, not better. I, in fact, have seen this in real life when I worked at a fast food restaurant: customers, especially new ones, would be swamped with menu choices, which often slowed them down when they got flustered. Being a game designer in training, I immediately associated this phenomenon with games, and made a mental note to not bog players down with too many choices.
Delving a bit into psychology, I came to the conclusion that choices are often based on one’s personality. Also, our choices tend to reinforce our existing views. When playing Knights of the Old Republic, for example, I would rather play a Dark Jedi if my personality is a dark and somber one, and my choices in this game will reflect my negative views. If I were more optimistic, I might ally with the Light Side instead.
But you also mentioned that games should move farther away from pure good and pure evil, and I totally agree. It’s been done to death, and the world we live in is never so black and white. Other BioWare games have done a better job of conveying opposing world views without mentioning good or evil: in Jade Empire, you can be a follower of the Open Palm, and believe that spiritual strength lies in generosity. You could also follow the way of the Closed Fist, which states that inner strength and self-reliance are the highest goals. Likewise in Mass Effect, the player can be a Paragon (essentially a by-the-book hero), or a Renegade (a butt-kicking anti-hero). No mention of good or evil, and in my opinion, the games are made all the more interesting for that than, say, in Fable 2, where good and evil are clearly defined.
If done correctly, yes, games can be more like life, and enrich the player, who may find the power to deal with problems in his or her own life. The problem with life is that all too often, the factors influencing us are unseen and beyond our control.
There’s also something to be said about too much control, which both you and James have mentioned. Just because we can know exactly what response will cause that villager to become enamored of us in Fable 2 does not necessarily increase one’s sense of self-empowerment in that game.
As you said, arbitrary punishments are to be avoided. A teacher once told me to never disempower the user. Words to live by.
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