Speaker 1: All right, this week we'll be talking about the illusion of choice in games. If you missed last week's episode on choice, as a designer it's important to think of choice not only in the context of narrative, but also in the context of play. So here we'll be talking about the illusion of choice in both. So what do we mean by the illusion of choice? Well, we simply mean any moment in a game where you, as a player, feel as though you're making a choice when, in reality, there's either no alternative option actually being presented or the consequences of that choice are negligible. Now it's really easy to hear something like that and say, Ugh, what a terrible thing. I hate it when they do that to me in games. But bear with me for a second, because the truth is, what you hate is when you notice that they're doing that to you in a game. I'd submit that 80% of the time, you aren't even aware of it when this happens. And honestly, using the illusion of choice is actually often a smart design decision. Because come on, no game can truly give you limitless freedom, and the more actual freedom a game gives you, the more content the developer has to create. The bigger the scope of the game gets, the more it'll cost to develop. Even the huge studios with the biggest budgets like Bioware can't give you all of the freedom you might like. So designers have to embrace the illusion of choice in order to provide that feeling of agency and that opportunity to make choices that's so compelling. Because games aren't about what really is, they're about what you perceive. If what mattered in games was what was really happening, we'd be talking about electrical impulses in math, not experiences. And the truth is, choice in games is about the act of choosing. In a game, as a player, where you have agency is not in the consequence of an action, but in deciding what to do. Whether it's a dialogue choice about the fate of the world, or a split-second decision to dodge left instead of right, it's a lot like life, actually. You have control over the choices you make, you use those to influence the consequences that result, but you don't actually have control over those consequences. Otherwise, we'd all just make the right thing happen all the time. As a designer, the decisions you set up should be compelling. The player should feel engaged by the moment of choice itself. The consequence, the result of that choice, is just the payoff. Of course, without that payoff, a decision can feel incomplete and flat, but the entire point of that payoff is to make the player feel like they have agency. If the choice itself doesn't feel consequential and isn't engaging to the player, then the payoff won't matter. So overall, the illusion of choice? Not a bad thing. So how is it best implemented? Well, let's talk about narrative first. The most common implementation is the tactic of creating short branches off the central narrative that eventually reconverge on that central narrative later. There are lots of names for this technique, but I usually hear beads on a string, because that's sort of how it looks when you diagram the choices out. So how do these beads on a string work? Well basically, your player will reach a choice in the narrative, let's say deciding who to side with in an argument. Depending on who the player sides with, the content they experience changes a bit for the next small interval of play. But then something happens, say the party is attacked, and everybody has to band together. The designers slip in one last piece of differing content where the arguing characters decide to make nice, and bang, you're back on the central storyline. And if the designers are really tricky, they'll put a nod or two down the road to that original decision you made. Just a differing line or two four hours later, something to acknowledge that the choice happened. And you'll feel like you made a decision. You'll feel like you weighed a moral choice, wrestled with which party member you liked more, or asked yourself who was right, and in doing so, you did something meaningful. In the grand arc of the game, it functionally changed almost nothing at all, but to you, it felt like it did. These divergence-convergence points come in all sorts of sizes. Some are ultra-small. For you Mass Effect fans, if you've played through any of those games more than once, you know that a lot of the dialogue options get the same result no matter what choice you pick. And some divergence-convergence points are ultra-large. Those of you who have played The Witcher 2 know what I'm talking about. There's a choice you make pretty near the beginning that causes a massive divergence, and then it converges pretty much never. It's basically two completely different stories from that point on. The longer the divergence, the more real choice you could say there is, but the more expensive it becomes to create as well. Perhaps the best example of maintaining the illusion of choice is found in Mass Effect, where to save on voice acting costs, NPC characters will often give you the same response no matter what you pick in the dialogue tree. But because all your available dialogue choices are so cleverly written, that single response they recorded makes sense no matter which line they're responding to. So often, as a player, you felt like you made a decision, and that they were responding to what you said or did, even though your choice really changed nothing. Because in the moment, you won't realize that all the other branches are the same. It's wonderfully done. This maintenance of the illusion of a living, responding world was a key part of the Mass Effect experience, and the only way they could possibly deliver that experience to the scale they wanted was to find all the places where, by clever design, they could offer that choice experience in a way that cost them little to create. Now, the same idea of illusory choice is often used in play itself. Say you're running around in a shooter game. You turn down one city street, but then you see soldiers ahead, rolling out razor wire across the road, and you think, hmm, I better go the other way. Illusion of choice, right there. You made a choice to go down a street that didn't fit the game flow or wasn't in the budget to fully create, and the designers could have made that road just a dead end, or thrown up an obnoxious invisible wall, but instead, they put something there that would subconsciously direct you away, something you would choose to avoid. Now, instead of thinking about the fact that you're being pushed down a linear path, you feel like you just made two consecutive decisions. Now, an even subtler example of this is visual highlighting. When navigating a game environment, we'll often head straight for whatever door is illuminated, or the incongruously textured part of the room, or whatever thing looks most like a road, and we'll do it without even thinking. These are subconscious triggers that draw us in, and because of that, we'll usually not realize how limited the space we're exploring in actually is. Often in games that use this sort of visual highlighting, the rest of the environment is actually pretty bare and uninteresting, but so many players will make a beeline for that lighted area, or that interesting texture, that very few people will ever notice how featureless the rest of the world is. In the moment, it feels like you're playing in a vibrant environment, and what's more, it feels like you're making a decision about where to go. Another example of this would be breadcrumbs, coins, or rewards that lead you down a certain route, as is placement of explosive barrels and shooters. We could probably do a whole episode about the techniques for leading a player through a physical space in a way that makes them think they're choosing where to go, but you get the idea. The feeling of making a choice, or having agency in a game, can often be substituted for the actual ability to make a choice, and feel just as satisfying. This isn't saying that there's not a lot we might do, especially in the narrative field, to make choices feel more consequential, but it's gotta happen in the context of limited or elusive choices, not by actually shouldering the cost of making a game that responds to whatever the player wants to do. Development costs are way too high as it is. The key is to create smarter, not just to create more. So next week, we'll be asking the question, how much agency do we need to feel like we have agency? And we'll try to unravel one of the continuous sticking points in the dialogue on meaningful choice. Hope to see you then. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe for more content like this.