Gasp! Scary!

Now that Halloween is safely tucked behind us, we can get on with the true nightmare season: Christmas. To that end, I'm going to talk about scary games! Specifically, I'm going to design a scary game using some basic principles and techniques that we'll discuss.

First thing first, my pet theory about scary games is that they operate on a steady diet of information imbalance. However, even if you don't buy that line, the techniques included here are used frequently and pretty well tested.

Alright, from that perspective, let's talk about what makes a game scary!

Normally, people talk about setting, monster, hero. I personally feel that's not really a very good way to approach game design, but let's hit on some of the basics.

Dark and foggy, you can hear the monsters long before you can see them. Who knows where they'll jump out from! 

This is a classic example of a very basic philosophy, and one followed by every kind of scary game. Even non-scary games have scary enemies by having them follow these rules even in pretty friendly, brightly-lit surroundings (for example, the hands that reach out from the ground and drag Link back to the dungeon entrance).

I view this as a kind of information imbalance. The setting says that we're in danger, but doesn't give us any precise timing or magnitude. In an action game like Half Life 2, rooms/areas are generally self-contained. When you approach one, you understand that you're likely to face a certain kind of conflict and with a certain difficulty. You can often see enemies before they see you, and, of course, abuse of quicksaves and replays give you even more solid information about the enemy.

On the other hand, a proper horror game tells you that you're in danger... but never tells you how much danger, how soon. The sound of a gently hooting monkey tells you that one of those damn cryomonkeys is around here somewhere, but it's a very tense time hunting for it. The bank of large windows tells you that zombie dogs or birds are likely to burst through, but not when, nor how many. Rooms and areas frequently have no role in delineating challenges - challenges frequently start halfway through a room, or when you're just about to switch rooms.

In other words, the beating heart of the "dark, foggy, hear-em-before-you-see-em" setting is the setting telling you that there are enemies around... but not telling you when or where or how many. This isn't some exact science. If you can hear an enemy in the darkness, you can usually tell how many there are, and perhaps even a vague idea of where they are. If you step into a graveyard, you can be assured that they'll come up from the graves, so you know where they are... but not when, nor how many.

This is the art of giving the player just enough information to feel threatened, but not enough information to actually do anything concrete about it. The best the player can do is hug the walls, creep along, and keep their guard up.

Trapped and powerless, you fight overwhelming odds.

We talk about this when considering setting/hero design, but in honesty this is a mix-up. This conflates a movie setting design concern and a game setting design concern, even though they are actually two different concerns both served by a similar design principle.

In a movie, isolating a weak hero is a matter of making sense. If a killer started stalking me, I'd just pop over to the police station. So you have to explain why the hero doesn't do that. There are more ways to do it than simple isolation. Fight Club has some very scary moments where it becomes obvious that the police are in on it, and Terminator has some scary moments where it becomes obvious the police can't help. Neither features isolation as such, but they both solve the same basic problem: they both deny the hero the chance to get out of the situation.

In a game, that's not quite as pressing. Instead, the focus is on the level of power the hero has over his surroundings, rather than whether the hero can get out of trouble. Protagonists in video games are extremely active, aggressive, "solution-focused" individuals because that's the nature of playing a video game. Therefore, the setting is less about trapping them and more about depowering them.

Scary game heroes tend to move around a lot. In fact, movement is often the primary method a horror game player expresses himself. A game like Battlefield and a scary game might both feature moving, shooting, collecting stuff... but which elements are expressive will be different. A player in Battlefield expresses himself by how he shoots and strafes and takes cover. A player in Resident Evil expresses himself in how he moves from location to location, desperately gathering tiny bits of strength.

This is one reason why the "safe zone" plays radically different roles in games and movies. In movies, the safe zone exists so that the monster can eventually break in and make things horrifying. In games, the safe zone is a part of the player's ability to express himself. If you remove or damage the safe zone, the player loses the anchor of their expressive play. Moving from place to place matters far less if all places are equally unsafe!

Anyway, the game side of the design - helping the player express himself in how he travels - means that scary games need to have a very nuanced travel system. You can travel within a room - for example, skirting around the other side of a kitchen island, or sticking to the top of a rafter so the milling zombies won't get you. In that case, travel is tactical. You're choosing a path based on how well you can keep up your guard and whether there's any loot to be had over there.

You can travel between rooms - walking through gateways, opening doors, etc. This is strategic play, where you are deciding whether the timing for that room is right, or whether to hold off and explore other, safer areas and gather more power first, or maybe whether to return to your safe room... just in case.

You can also travel between zones, such as changing from the house to the back yard, or from the factory to the underground labyrinth. The biggest difference between zones is the chunking factor. Each zone essentially resets your strategic options, since you have to rediscover the safe rooms, map out the connectivity, and judge each room for safety all over again. Backtracking is typically not scary unless the zone has significantly changed since the last time you explored it... because you've already explored it. You've already done the sweaty-palms risk analysis.

As to my pet "information imbalance" theory, exploration of the areas is about gathering what information you can and trying to plot a safest possible course through it. There are many times where you'd prefer to tackle a dangerous room over one that looks safe, just because you can clearly see all the dangers in the dangerous room and the safe room has some information still hidden away.

Winning or losing? It's always losing.

In most scary games, a big part of the game is the idea that fighting an enemy is always a loss. Even if you win, you've expended valuable resources. This leads to radically optimizing your playthrough. For example, mastering the melee weapon so you can kill the minor enemies without losing any resources (although with a risk of getting injured).

One of the fundamental principles you'll always hear bandied about is that you need to have a powerless hero. However, I don't believe that to be true for a video game. A movie, sure. But in a video game, rather than the power level of the hero, the dynamics of conflict are more important.

Basically, a scary game's fights are always losses. There is no way to win a fight such that you come out of the other end better than you went in. Even boss fights - the reward isn't more power. It's just an open door. This is in direct opposition to action games, where the enemies drop ammo and health and experience points.

You gain power by scrounging and scavenging from your surroundings. You spend power on the enemies you fight. That's the scary game dynamic. The core of this is the tension - not knowing whether you'll be able to scrounge up enough to get past the enemies.

Risk, pressure, and regret.

A common line of thinking is that there's got to be risk in order to be scary. There's certainly some of that, yeah. But you need to be clear about whether you're talking about pass/fail risk (dying, failing the mission), story risk (can you defeat the oogie-boogie man?), or attrition risk (can you keep things from getting worse?).

The scariest games are scary because of attrition risk leading to pass/fail risk. A game where you have to restart the mission if you're noticed isn't going to be scary, it's going to be a mechanical aptitude test where you replay the mission over and over.

Instead, what's scary is when things get worse. If the player has unlimited save/load capability, this attrition needs to be quite slow so that he doesn't feel any given conflict went badly enough to make him reload. If the player doesn't have much save/load capability, it doesn't have to be as slow.

Things getting worse include mostly losing health, ammo, and maybe sanity points. It is possible to add in a lot of other "getting worse" factors if your game is going to be unusual, but in general attrition simply makes the next wave of enemies feel more dangerous because you are closer to being unable to deal with them.

Of course, the balance here is quite difficult. What one player may find a grueling last-ditch effort to squeak by a zombie using your last bullet, another player might be able to cruise by with just their fists. Nothing says this clearer than Thief, where getting in melee combat was supposed to be a knuckle-biting "you will die!" experience... but some players are good enough they can just gut everyone they see.

Because this is so hard to balance, a lot of designers lean heavily on story beats. They introduce "story risk" like "the house is on fire! Run!" Story risk will resolve the same way for every player, so it's a known level of pressure. Of course, that known level of pressure is much, much lower than the pressure of a properly balanced attrition situation.

Often, the story beats are also used to 'reset' the attrition-based power level, essentially capping how absurdly overpowered a skilled player can get. Another big limit is inventory management, which keeps really skilled players from collecting a massive stockpile of resources.

Some story beats feature a choice where you can do either A or B. We still stick with this idea as if it were actually a tense situation, but 99% of the time it's pretty boring. In order to make it tense, you have to do two things.

1) You have to make the choice actually hard. Not simply the same choice over and over again. IE, not "good vs evil" or any other 'A vs B' that repeats. Instead, each decision must exercise a different kind of choice. Good vs evil. Honor vs glory. Love vs good. Health vs authority. Whatever you can come up with.

2) The choice has to matter a lot, for a long time. The player has to regret that they didn't make the opposite choice. That way, when the next choice comes along, they are more crippled by it.

Screwing with the player's expression: the mastery of pacing.

The player expresses himself by how he travels in the game. This is where a player's delicate sense of risk, pressure, skill, and reward come together to express the player's personality. It is the paintbrush with which the player paints.

Therefore, it's also a major part of the scary.

Enemies are scary, sure. Especially when there is no way to win, just ways to lose less badly. But enemies are adrenaline-scary, not the kind of creeping, continual terror you feel when properly put into a scary situation.

You can get that by screwing with the player's primary means of expression. How do you screw with the player's travelling? Well, you can do it by brute force or with incentives.

A brute force example is when you can't travel freely. The floor collapses from beneath you. Enemies block your path out. You can't move over to where the enemies are, but they can still strike at you. You can also do it with some level of subtlety - fires you take damage from if you get too close, water that slows you to a crawl, ladders that leave you exposed while you climb...

Incentives are when there's no fundamental issue with the level, but their choices are suddenly much more difficult. For example, if you hear a cryokinetic monkey hooting, you'll want to hunt it down without exposing yourself to potential blasts. If there's a monster hunting you down, you'll want to run perfectly without getting caught. If there's an ammo cache on the other end of the room, you'll want to go there even though it's a wide open space...

Both brute force and incentive systems require a sense of pacing. If every floor falls out from under you, you're going to start treating it as a system-level rule and incorporating it into your basic play. So enough time has to pass between floors falling out from under you that you aren't worried about that particular problem any more.

Scary Challenges

A lot of scary games revolve around "how do I do this thing" puzzles. The most famous are Resident-Evil-style "puzzles" like "find the octagonal handle for the cupboard inside the demon statue's left foot, then gather up some slug resin so you can combine it with a banana and glue it into the cupboard so you can open the cupboard and get a triangular key".

These puzzles are derided as being very silly, but their opacity is on purpose. If you had a challenge where you knew the solution and were making concrete progress towards it, you're not going to be as tense. You know where the end is, you can measure your exact progress... not as tense.

These puzzles are everywhere, but usually they aren't quite so silly. For example, having to swing a catwalk around so you can cross a gap is the same kind of puzzle. It's not completely opaque, but you have to figure out that it's even possible.

These challenges are most brutal when you add time pressure in. For example, having to figure out how to rotate some statues while a boss monster continually chases you around. These will frequently result in death, so carefully play test them for balance.

NPCs

There's a lot of talk about NPCs and their role in horror games. Some scary games extensively feature NPCs in both major and minor roles. In others, you never talk to a single living soul.

One of the problems with NPCs is that they are generally reassuring. If there's someone to help you, then you have a safety net. This is why, in general, NPCs in horror games are either evil or burdensome.

Putting aside evil NPCs, burdensome NPCs are a mixed bag.

Having something to protect is very powerful... but you have to want to protect it! Frequently, burdensome NPCs are just plain annoying, to the point where you start to hate them.

You could theoretically fix this by making the NPCs much more intelligent (AI-wise), but this would fundamentally be making them less burdensome, and it would take a lot of effort.

Two easier solutions are to make the NPC remote, or to make the player choose to take them. If the NPC is remote, you can simply hook triggers into the game world. If X time passes, they get injured. If you collect Y prisms, they give you a better gun. Remote NPCs don't have any AI worth speaking of, and basically serve to put a human face on in-game challenges.

Making the player choose to take NPCs requires an adaptive/open world, since the player might choose differently at any given moment. A player that chooses to do something will generally be a lot more accepting of the difficulties involved than a player who is simply forced to do it. Choosing to do an escort mission is a lot more acceptable than being forced to... even if the player is eventually more or less forced to choose to do an escort mission. The act of opting in is powerful, even if there's really no way to opt out.

Fumbles and bad controls.

A lot of scary games have very bad controls. The reason for this is fourfold.

Firstly, very bad controls are a source of weakness, making the hero less capable of dealing with the enemies. Since dealing with the enemies is always supposed to be a losing proposition, bad controls cement the deal.

Secondly, bad controls are equalizers. Very skilled players shine with responsive, tight controls. While skilled players will still be better than unskilled players with clumsy controls, the difference will not be as large.

Thirdly, bad controls respond very aggressively to player panic. If a player is scared, their ability to use your shitty control scheme drops much faster than if your control scheme was really great. Therefore, if the player is scared, they will get even more scared because now they are shit.

Fourthly, it radically increases the pressure by making it harder to gather and react to information. Awkward cameras and controls don't just make combat harder - they make it slower and more difficult to gather and react to all sorts of information, including things like room layout, hidden items, NPC interaction, inventory management...

How is all that information imbalance?

I've explained a few of the above things as being based on information imbalance, but others I've left unexplained. And, of course, my pet theory is just my pet theory, so I didn't want it to intrude much.

Some of the things above - such as equalizing skill between players - aren't based on information imbalance. I don't think information imbalance is every little thing that could ever be scary. But I do feel that information imbalance is fundamentally scary, or least very high-pressure.

For example, when you are playing poker, there's a desperate push to read your opponent's faces, to count cards, to control your own expressions. The pressure of playing poker, even just with free chips, is tangible. And it's all thanks to the information imbalance. The high-level play of poker is almost entirely about gaining the edge in information.

There are a lot of different kinds of information imbalance. Let's mention some of them.

Information gaps are when you are given some information, but there are gaps. These gaps create pressure. For example, if you hear a hooting cryomonkey, you know that there is one... but not exactly where, or when you'll run into him. If you look into a room and see a cupboard, you know you can open it and there might be stuff inside. But you don't know how much stuff, or whether there's going to be a trap along the way.

The gaps create pressure not just to fill them in, but also to nullify them completely. If you hear a monkey hooting, you can try to fill in the gaps by hunting down the monkey on your own terms... or by skirting the area and blitzing through, trying to make it so that the encounter never happens at all. Similarly, if you suspect there is a trap in a room, you might try to navigate such that it will trigger when you are in the perfect position to weather it, rather than stumbling in as the designers intend.

Information scavenging is a primary method to try to fill in gaps or decide to go around. This involves skirting the edge of the situation looking for insights before approaching. It's valuable both as tension and as pacing.

Information delays are when you have information, but either too far in advance or not far enough in advance to be comfortable with it. This isn't the same as information gaps, because you have more or less complete information. An easy example of this is when monsters burst through a window. Yeah, you can see them. You know what they are, where they are. But can you act on that information rapidly enough?

You can go the other way, too. If you know right away that the final boss of the factory is Glouberk and he's in the manager's office, there can be a lot of pressure as the knowledge builds. You discover fragments of information that make Glouberk more menacing. You see the manager's office window from the factory floor and it's covered in goop... there's no surprise - eventually, you walk in and fight Glouberk. But even though there's no surprise, the delay is uncomfortably long, long enough for the pressure to keep building up. This only really works if you can keep flicking the player with reminders and additional bits of pressure - otherwise, they'll forget all about it pretty quick.

Bleed control is when you are the information source, and you are trying to limit how much you reveal, or perhaps even distribute misinformation. It also may involve trying to goad others into revealing more than they want to.

Chance is when you know roughly how likely something is, but you don't know how the dice will land. For example, you can release a chandelier and it'll crush anyone beneath it. You decide to use it on a heavyweight enemy in the room... but it's difficult to line up. There's not really any missing information, here. There's just a chance you'll hit them, and a chance you won't.

Chance is a bit iffy, because it adds a lot of chaos into what is typically a very carefully balanced experience. However, if you're making a less carefully balanced game, chance can play a very good role. Just remember: this is about having all the information and choosing to gamble, not about randomly getting screwed over.

Information pressure is when you have information, but if you don't act on it, it will either lose value or things will get worse. Pressure doesn't necessarily mean time pressure, although that is the most common.

Information swamping is when you have too much information and the challenge is to figure out which bits matter.

Other

So, if we take the information imbalance thing as a solid idea, can we come up with any other game mechanics that might be scary and aren't on that list?

Well, the format of modern scary games is such that some obvious mechanics aren't used. Chance, information pressure, and information swamping are all not very common in scary games, because scary games are fundamentally tightly scripted.

If we move to an unscripted scary game, we can radically amp up the roles these things play. For example, the game could revolve around high-stakes betting. It's a very popular subgenre in anime these days, sometimes revolving around a specific game (mahjong) or a random assortment of anything-goes high-stakes betting.

We could set our game in a town or school. Something high-pressure has happened - the town has been flung into a new dimension, your school grades depend on bids, etc. The result is an open-world game where all the NPCs have challenges you can accept.

In order to make it scary, we don't have to make it foggy, and we don't have to make traveling our primary mechanic. Instead, we can create the feeling of pressure through the less commonly used mechanics.

A big part of making it scary is to make the world wear down on your resources, and make the resources only gainable through betting. So there is a heavy attrition as the world gets more and more difficult to deal with. NPCs change as time goes on - the things they can provide, the things they are willing to do, the gambles they offer. The fear is, on the surface, because of the human flaws of these people who don't always cooperate to survive. At a deeper, mechanical level, the fear is because of the need to constantly make dangerous gambles to survive another day.

So the core play is deciding which gambles to take in which order. The resources you gain from gambles might be resources required to survive the world's attrition, but sometimes can be used to make other gambles easier or clearer. For example, if you win an easy gamble with someone for the right to have them cooperate with you, then you'll have an easier time with a poker game because they are signalling you while looking at your opponent's hands.

The game is about taking risks. To a lesser extent, it is about gathering enough information about any given risk to know what the risk actually is. Also, whether to expend valuable resources on making the risk less dangerous.

The game is about an information flood. You have to figure out which of the townsfolk are offering what kinds of deals, and glean out which gambles are worth taking and in what order.

The game is about information pressure. If you don't take a gamble soon, it's going to change as things get worse. David won't always be offering a simple high-low card pull wagering his help vs a can of beans. Maybe the gambles he offers will get more dangerous. Maybe less.

And of course, the game is about how the NPCs react to the grinding attrition of the world. This will vary not just by NPC, but by the various things you might do to help them (probably in gambles). For example, it may be that losing a gamble will allow an NPC to survive another day...

That game could be pretty scary.

It could also be tense but not scary if you allow for saving/loading or make the world's attrition level too low or make the NPCs too cooperative.

Balanced Choices

In my last post I glossed over an area because it would have taken a whole essay to explain. An anonymous poster immediately noticed.

So here's the essay.

The anonymous poster... ugh, I hate anonymic, so we'll call him "Herbert". Herbert says

"Not enough deeply disturbing dilemmas, I think. I want to choose the light side but it will mean sacrificing something very important. Usually it's sacrificing a tempting weapon or maybe a nice sum of money."

Okay, this is the "balanced choices" theory of design. This is the same theory of design that KotOR and friends use. But they are starting to discover its limits, and you can clearly see this in Mass Effect. It's not a very good way to design things, although it is useful for another reason.

As you read this essay, please consider the difference in choices between Mass Effect and a KotOR game. I think you will see that they have followed the same logical path I am outlining here.

Let me explain what I'm talking about. In fantastabulous detail, yes.

First we have to point out that we're not talking about a skill challenge. A choice of this nature should never be about choosing the option with greater utility. These choices don't train up a skill (like jumping, shooting, or placing plumbing) and they don't happen often enough to form a complex "terrain" of choices. Furthermore, they are heavily warped by the player's play style and current situation, so any "balancing" you do between the options is going to be totally ruined by what the player brings to the table.

It is possible to make the choice between a long-term gain and a short-term gain, in which case it could really tax the player's skill at analyzing these sorts of things. But frankly, you'll only choose the short-term option if you're doing badly, and it will always feel like you've failed, like you've had to ask for help. It will make you weaker in the long run, too, so that's a nasty positive feedback loop. No, not a good situation.

These kinds of choices are not useful as skill challenges. They are, instead, offered mostly as expressive choices. Allowing the player to choose between a gun and a sword is a very effective choice, even if they are the same, utility wise. Hell, even if one is a bit better or worse.

This is because most players have a strong preference on that front: I'll always take the gun. While it's not a "challenging choice" - the answer is obvious - it does allow me to express myself and start on a path I prefer. Of course, if the game continues to offer me the choice between sword and gun over and over for the rest of the game, they don't count. I've already expressed myself on that front, and unless something has significantly changed the utility of one or the other, I'll just go the same way over and over again.

Self expression is the only thing these sorts of "A or B or C" choices are useful for. But, once you've self-expressed a particular sentiment, there is only a little value in expressing it again unless something big has changed.

Now, to get back to Herbert. Herbert says he wants his preferred side (light side, same as me) to be balanced against a tempting equivalent on the other option (guns and money). Let's quickly examine why this is not a good way to think, although the same end result may be reached from other lines of thought from time to time.

Let's remove the flavor for just a moment. Instead of light side, we'll just make it a "power point". Which it is: you get a point or two of light side for choosing the light side path.

Those points are very personal and long-term statistical improvements. They are very valuable and keep their value forever. Choosing a gun or money, on the other hand, is a short-to-medium-term benefit that will go away as you cycle through various equipment over time. (Actually, money is usually completely worthless in KotOR games, but let's skip that fact.)

This means that, without the flavor, we're talking about that old bugaboo we mentioned, long term choice vs short term choice. Unless we have decided that the points are worthless, choosing for short term is going to feel like failure. It's admitting that we need outside help instead of being self-sufficient with our steadily growing point-power.

Now, adding the flavor back in, choosing light side is emphasized even more.

It may make us feel good that we're "sacrificing" for the sake of our light side choice, but the fact is quite the opposite and, as before, it's not usually an actual choice. It's usually asking us to re-express the same thing we've expressed before: yeah, we're STILL light side.

We could, instead, reverse the flavor. This is probably what Herbert was trying to get at. The idea that we choose flavor or reward.

I think that flavor is, essentially, a long-term reward. No matter how long the game goes on, the fact that we saved that child will never be "replaced" by a "better" act of good. They are cumulative, unlike which gun you equip. So flavor is a long-term reward.

Choosing guns over flavor is, therefore, admitting that you need help bad enough that you're willing to give up on the cool shit in the game to get a boost.

This works in both directions, of course - light side and dark side flavors are equally long-term and valuable. So it's not simply that bad guys get more stuff. In order to get the cool "I burned all their faces off" sequence, you have to sacrifice stuff, too.

You could make it long-term reward versus long-term reward. For example, strictly a flavor choice between light side and dark side (perhaps with a small amount of random statistical crap tossed in so that the player feels like they're affecting their game). But these flavor choices have a dominant side, just like offering me a gun or a sword. I'll always choose the gun and, similarly, I'll always choose light side. It's not a choice except for the very first time.

You can choose between, say, light side flavor and light side points - two tangentially related long-term choices. Except that most players will probably choose in favor of one or the other and always choose that way, just like I'll keep choosing light side after I've starting choosing light side. There may be a little bit of waffling, but I think you'll find it trends towards choosing flavor, because flavor keeps it's value even after the game has ended, so it is longer-term than points. I know I would feel like I was failing if I chose points over flavor. Unless, obviously, the flavor was not enticing to me. Players don't feel bad about not choosing something they find has no merit.

...

What I'm saying here is that the idea of a scripted choice that is internally balanced is not very good. A player will generally make his choice the first time he sees such a choice, and then continue going that direction forever. If offered choices between long-term and shorter-term rewards, he'll trend towards the long-term rewards. And flavor is a much longer-term reward than any balanced gameplay reward.

The problem is that these choices are always going to be inherently shallow. Compare them to non-shallow gameplay. Non-shallow gameplay iterates rapidly and involves training up your skills. These kinds of scripted choices do not iterate rapidly - they barely iterate at ALL - and they don't involve any kind of skill. So they are not skill challenges.

As ways of allowing the player to express himself, they are good to some extent, but tend to become very repetitive. Even if I have always chosen light side, the scripted choice is always between light side, neutral, and blatant dark side, rather than being chosen to challenge my sense of light side.

Therefore, it is necessary to create a method of extremely long-term options that never ask the same question twice.

That is what I outlined in my last post.

...

Sigh, I'm trying to figure out how I should have written that first half. It's not very good. Oh, well, does everyone understand what I'm saying? Agree? Disagree?

Choices Again

So, Brenda Brathwaite posted on choice frequency.

I've posted on this subject before - although my essay is now lost to the winds of fickle hosting services, so I can only reference a tangential post.

Basically, I agree. I thought I would explain my theory on the matter, since the original essay is gone. GONE! Sob...

I don't think it's simple frequency. I think that the choices also have to (A) be actual choices, (B) change the game state in a significant way, and (C) be partially reversible or repeatable. "Meaningful", yes, but I define that a bit more complexly.

For example, if you're on a map, choosing whether to move left or right at any given moment is a meaningful, frequent choice. Moving one way brings you closer to some goals and further from others, moving another way does the opposite. Reversing your path is usually possible, but takes time.

Similarly, if you're playing poker, you're faced with numerous opportunities to make very meaningful choices. Bidding, just as a most obvious aspect. Bids can't be taken back, but every hand, you get to try again. There certainly are "make or break" hands of poker, but they're very unusual.

As a final example, you have games like Rock Band. It may feel a bit odd to say that a song beat is a "choice", and I think "choice" is probably a bad term. I... really hate the word "choppertunity"... but I think it's better than "choice". Maybe "option"?

Anyway, Rock Band sends these notes sliding down the neck towards you, and you hit them. You're not making "meaningful choices" between hitting the notes and letting them slide by. It's a skill test. But, fundamentally, I think that the basic play properties are the same as choosing which direction to go on a map. Frequent, repeatable opportunities that change the state of the world.

As an example of how not to do frequent choices, you can see modern dialog trees. You know, a kid says, "hey mithter, you got anything to eat?" and let you choose between "KILL HIM NOW!" and "Give him your life savings!" twenty times an hour.

Not only are these choices not frequent enough, they aren't even really choices. Nobody is constantly wavering between dark and light. These are paths that they choose at the beginning and stay with for the whole game. So the "choices" really aren't choices at all.

So, yes, I agree with Braithwaite, and I guess I don't have much to add.

...

Um. Have a nice day, I guess?

Limited Choice, but Big Choices

There's a lot to be said about the power of limiting choice. It's very popular to give the players as much choice as you can. That's good in some ways, but bad in some ways. The more choice players have, the less control over the flow of the game the developer has. Especially in persistent world games, this can lead to player malaise and a general feeling of not going anywhere.

There are two popular methods of giving better control: 1) Restricted actions, unrestricted space. This gives the illusion of unlimited choice without any of the actual ramifications. I hate this solution because it produces painfully bland play with zero agency. 2) Quests. Basically, optional direction and restriction that a player takes on to temporarily add some spice to his otherwise humdrum slaughter of vorpal bunnies and blue slimes. Quests typically have very transient results, so they're also very shallow and zero-agency.

I think that it might be more interesting to approach this problem from the other direction. Instead of giving a player more freedom and then trying to compensate by reducing their agency, how about giving a player less freedom and more agency?

For example, a player normally makes a character. Picks a race, a hair color, stats, whatever. Instead, what if we presented the player with his choice of three characters. These characters are generated mostly randomly, but are created with ties to game events (questy-type-things). For example, you might get an elven archer, but the elven archer starts off well-known as the defender of a small village somewhere, and therefore has very different opportunities and NPC reactions near that area. Maybe another choice is a cybernetic commando who is known for the fact that he survived the first encounter with the Strekhakh aliens.

While the player has limited choices, the choices are actually more meaningful - have more agency - than the standard "race, stats, class" crap that players normally go through. It ties the player to the world proper.

Similarly, revamping quests to provide agency rather than distraction might be possible. Quests would need to be generated based on an algorithm rather than painstakingly scripted in, and they would need to have a long-term result based on the performance of the player in the quest.

The player is "linked in" to the quest network by the character he's chosen. A character who lived through the Strekhakh attack will (at least initially) have quests related to that (either the aliens or his performance during the invasion). The elf defender will probably have quests related to defending and coddling the town.

This quest-based mentality allows you to control how the game progresses by simply controlling the number, type, and importance of result from any given type of quest. If you want the Strekhakhs to be dangerous, than the best result of a quest is simply to keep them at bay.

Quest results could also compile into greater outcomes as well: if fifty people defeat Strekhakhs locally and grab random alien artifacts and stuff, the game itself can say "The Strekhakhs are being pushed back!" - not as a result from an individual quest, but from the overall quests.

The same thing is true of characters. If you want the game to revolve around Strekhakhs, offer more characters whose pasts involve the Strekhakhs. You can even introduce special plots by offering characters that have extremely strange backgrounds and therefore get very unusual quests and information.

The downside is that this kind of game would require a very robust method of creating and distributing quests. NPCs are the standard, but the NPCs would have to be able to refer players to other NPCs and so forth, which could get difficult. There are other options, they all have tradeoffs.

Anyhow, I think that limiting choice is probably a better choice than unlimiting choice. What do you think?

Choosing Choices

Three.

Well, okay, there's no magic number. But I like the number three. That's how many choices I try to give whenever players hit a non-skill-based moment.

There's a lot of these moments in a lot of different games. Choosing whether to take a left or a right in a dungeon. Choosing whether to save someone or rob them. Choosing whether to buy a sword or a bow. Choosing what building to build, what party members to take, and so on.

What I mean by "non-skill-based" is kind of iffy. After all, there's skill in equipping your party or building a building or even choosing left from right. But it's not the primary play skill. Whereas the primary play skill needs to be deep and diverse, secondary choices are usually less about skill and more about personal preferences. If there is a best choice, then why offer the others?

These choices are very important to a player's sense of agency - his sense that his choices affect the game world. The going idea is that a player should be able to do as many different things as he wants. This leads to games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can run around and go just about anywhere whenever you want. Of course, this has side effects that you may not like.

First: Because you are offering such a wide ability to choose, you are essentially turning that facet of the game into a primary play skill. In GTA, knowing where things were and how to navigate the map was an important play skill, unlike in most other games, where navigating the map is simply a way to get a breather between today's plot event and tomorrow's plot event.

Second: For various reasons, navigating space/plot in a freeform manner generally results in an extremely shallow set of results. The typical response to this is to seed the map with random fun stuff that has little to do with long-term play. A nifty weapon, a fun comment, a shiny car. These things reward players who decide to participate in the shallow (but broad) play you give them without actually requiring complex long-term play changes.

Third: Has high development cost.

(See? Three choices of poison. I like three.)

Taking the "cheap" way out, and giving them only a few choices, is generally a more effective way to actually give players agency. A good example of this is a game where you can choose out of three approaches to any given problem (typically, stealth, fighting, and magic/ranged/social). In this case, even though the end results are essentially the same (beat the level), the ability to choose an approach gives the player a lot of agency.

Of course, the "cheap" way comes with its share of problems.

First: Insufficient options. A lot of times, the choices you offer will simply not appeal to a player. This is especially true of dialogue trees. Trying to provide choices to please everyone is a bit like trying to lift a couch with a toothpick. Even if you're incredibly skilled, the method is simply not suitable.

By making options "in-game" rather than "breaking the fourth wall", you can reduce this problem hugely. For example, offering weapons in-game and letting the player choose which weapon he wants is much better than asking him whether he wants to be stealthy or brutal.

Second: "Gilded Cage" issues. When a player is made to choose from too few artificial choices or artificially restricted in some way, it really steals away the agency and can be very irritating. This is especially true of dialogue trees. Every drawback is especially true of dialogue trees. :P

Some games try to provide a huge number of options while either making them all equate to the same few choices or while making the vast majority of the options so obviously unappetizing that nobody would choose them. This works pretty well for live games like tabletops where there are no such things as saves or second play-throughs, especially because if they do choose some wacky thing, you can always make stuff up. But this is difficult to do with a computer game, since players will often try everything and quickly figure out that you're offering meaningless choices.

You can reduce this, to some extent, by using the same "in-game" techniques explained above.

Third: Exponential growth. Given two or three distinct choices that have different results, you quickly run into The Branching Tree of Doom. There are effectively three ways to keep this from getting ridiculous. You can have choices have numerical rather than plot results. You can have choices lead to different paths that always go to the same endpoint. And/or you can have some kind of algorithm for determining outcomes based on any given choice, which minimizes scripting by adding ridiculous amounts of engine programming.

Anyhow... that's basically it.

Ahhh... I said I was going to link it up to social games and MMORPGs but, you know what? I'll have to do it in a different essay. This one's already too long.