Choices, part 4

(Back to TOC)

25 June 2008

by Mike Rozak

Discuss on www.mXac.net/forums

Before you read this article, you should familiarize yourself with Choices, part 3.

Computer games (and gameplay) require choice. Player's choices must have consequences. This article discusses consequences.

The consequences of a choice can be categorized in two ways:

• Positive, neutral, and negative consequences - Players can percieve the consequences of their choices as a range from positive to negative. How positive/negative a consequence is depends on what the player is trying to achieve with the choice - the player's goals.
  
  To complicate matters, a player's perception of the positiveness of a choice may be at odds with the consequence's real positive/negative effects. For example: When smoking was first introduced to Europe, Europeans thought that smoking had beneficial health effects even though it was really killing them.
  
  
• Expected or unexpected consequences - There are four types of expectation:
  
  
  
  • Expected and happened - The player expected the consequence, and the consequence happened as expected. For example: If a player pressed "w" to walk forward, they expect their character to move forward.
    
    
  • Expected but didn't happen - The player expected a consequence, but it didn't happen. For example: The "w" key doesn't actually move the player forward; maybe there's an invisible barrier?
    
    
  • Unexpected with feedback - A consequence happens that the player didn't expect, but they soon (or eventually) learn about the unexpected effect of their action. For example: The player presses "w", walks on a trap, and gets feedback two seconds later when a 16-ton weight falls on their character.
    
    
  • Unexpected without feedback - A consequence happens, but the player never learns that it's associated with one of their actions. Or, the player makes the connection too late in the game to use this knowledge again. For example: Walking on a patch of ground happens to annoy the local garden gnome who decides to never show himself to the player. The player never sees the garden gnome, never learns he has upset the garden gnome, and never knows the garden gnome exists.

Thus, for every choice a player makes, a designer can create a table of the consequences. This table for "walking forward" might be:

	Expected and happened	Expected but didn't happen	Unexpected with feedback	Unexpected without feedback
Positive	Character moved forward, which aids in completeing the goal, "Walk towards the castle."
Neutral	The grass is flattened where the player walks.			The garden-gnome is annoyed by the player walking on the grass, and never talks to the player.
Negative		The character was blocked after a few steps by an invisible wall.	A 16-ton weight drops on the character's head.

Why is this table useful? (Here are some random bullet points that explain "why".)

• Choices with too many different consequences are confusing for the players. Choices with too few consequences aren't interesting. For example: Walking that causes twenty different consequences is too confusing. Walking with only one consequence, moving the character, is boring.
  
  
• "Expected and happened" consequences are necessary so that players feel like they are in control. If most consequences are "expected and happened", however, players will become bored and stop playing.
  
  
• "Expected but didn't happen" consequences cause frustration. However, without any hiccups, players will find the game too predictable, and boring.
  
  
• "Unexpected with feedback" consequences surprise the player. A few surprises add to the fun, but too many surprises and the player will feel like they're not in control.
  
  
• "Unexpected without feedback" consequences are usually pointless since players never find out about the consequences. A random number generator would be less work, yet still perceived the same by the player. (There are exceptions to this. See below.)
  
  It's amazing how many games never provide feedback to players about important consequences, so players never knows the consequences happened! Players only find out that they made an important choice by reading the game's walkthrough and learning that if they hadn't walked over the grass, the garden gnome would have appeared and changed the course of the game.
  
  One place where "unexpected without feedback" works is customizing the gameplay experience to the player's personality. If a game learns that the player's favorite color is purple (though some choices in a personality test), and uses that information to make all magic items purple and the game more fun for the player, it doesn't matter if the player knows that his choices had consequence.
  
  
• If the "positive" effects far outweigh the "negative" effects then players will find the experience too easy and give up.
  
  
• If the "negative" effects far outweigh the "positive" effects then players will find the experience too difficult and give up.
  
  
• "Neutral" effects are mostly pointless because the player won't care. There are some important expections, as discussed later.
  
  Some minor neutral effects can be used to enhance realism; Walk through the grass and the grass gets trampled down, for example. Trampled grass has no effect on gameplay, other than to improve immersion.
  
  
• Too many negative "Unexpected with feedback" consequences (not counterbalanced by positive "Unexpected with feedback") will cause players to become paranoid, dread all unexpected consequences, and lean towards making only safe choices. For example: In real-life, people don't like to see police cars parked by the side of the road because they mean speading tickets, and speading tickets are always bad. If police cars occasionally stopped people for driving well (not speeding), and gave the drivers a free toaster as reward, police cars wouldn't be dreaded.
  
  
• Conversely, if postive "Unexpected with feedback" consequences outweigh the negative ones, players will be encouraged to explore.
  
  
• Most importantly, stating the obvious in "table format" hints at the different types of effects for consequences! (See below.)

Creating a table of different consequences hints at the different types of effects for consequences. Some of them are:

• Consequences can enable or disable other choices, or work towards enabling/disabling another choice. This is the standard resource allocation game. Players can make choices that increase and/or decreases resources. When a resource reaches a certain value, players can make a choice to use the resource, enabling them to make more choices.
  
  This is the most prevelent type of effect in games, so common that games that rely only on this effect (resource allocation) are considered boring.
  
  
• Consequences can inform players about choices they didn't know they had. (Or, consequences can lie to players and "inform" them that they can't make certain choices.)
  
  
• Consequences can inform (or lie to) players about what to expect. For example: A consequence of walking on a trap and having a 16-ton weight unexpectedly falling on their character is that players know to expect the weight to fall the next time they walk there (which might be a useful combat tactic). Or, more cleverly, as a consequence of reading the "Keep out! Signed, the garden gnome." sign, players will learn about the garden gnome being upset by their walking over his grass, turning "Unexpected without feedback" into "Expected".
  
  
• Consequences can change other consequences from "positive" to "neutral" or "negative", or vice versa. The most obvious use is to give the player a new goal, so players know of the change. Sometimes the "rules" of the game will change, a favorite effect of games like "Magic! The gathering".
  
  
• Consequences can change the player's perception of whether a consequence is "positive", "neutral", or "negative". The consequence of reading the health warning on the back of a pack of cigarettes is learning that smoking isn't actually healthy, contrary to the "Smoking is healthy" message implied by healthy actors smoking in cigarette ads.
  
  
• Consequences can change other consequences from "positive" to "negative" without actually informing the player that the rules have changed!
  
  
• Other types of effects exist independent of the table, such as affecting the player's emotional state, affecting other players, or affecting the real-life relationship between players.