If you’ve ever read an old “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, then you know how unpredictable they can be. It isn’t enough to know that your decision will have an effect – you need to have some inkling of what that effect will be. Second, the player needs to be able to predict what the consequences will be, at least to some extent. Once I realized that nothing I did really mattered, I began to lose interest in the games entirely. In my personal experience, I initially believed that my decisions would have an effect on the plot going forward. However, due to the episodic nature of the games they couldn’t actually allow players to veer away from the plotline that they were trying to tell. These games are very narrative-focused, and appear to give players control over the narrative. I believe this is what turned a lot of players off about the “Telltale” style of games. If you know that everything is going to turn out exactly the same no matter what, then the decision doesn’t really matter. First, your decisions need to have consequences (or at least, you need to think they will). When I think about interesting decisions in games, there are a few things that jump to mind. Today I want to take a look at what makes a decision “interesting”, and how you can design interesting decisions into your games. The choices you make in a real-time strategy game are going to be very different from those in a turn-based RPG, but it is still important to make sure those decisions are interesting. While this doesn’t necessarily hold true for all types of games – many rhythm games, for example, are simply about executing a pre-determined set of actions without requiring players to make interesting choices – it is a good mindset to have when designing a wide variety of games. Whether it is the choice of whether to shield or grab, or the decision about which set of armor to wear, the choices you make help define the games and the gaming experience. In fact, it is the ability to make choices that is the core of what separates a game from a less interactive form of media, such as a book or a film. Sid Meier, the designer behind the incredibly popular and influential Civilization series, once described games as “a series of interesting decisions”.
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