Choices in games are extremely important to make the player feel in control and to avoid frustration. The only problem is that choice design is hard, making sure your game works for each of your players choices is a lot more work. I’m sure that every successful designer has been through the ‘Let’s make the player’s decide for themselves!’ phase and had an important lesson learnt. I may not be successful (yet?) but I’ve had a similar experience in a previous project where our client wanted a game centred around player choice and interpretation.
Making sure that your game design works with multiple choices and furthermore making sure that your choices cater to your entire audience can be daunting. For our garden project we didn’t really account for player choice but there are still choices to be made during play. To test the player’s memory on a certain topic they are prompted with short multiple choice quizzes. This type of choice is really basic, you are provided with a question and you choose the one that you think is correct. It’s based off of facts and if you get the answer wrong you are taken to the corresponding mini game so that it can refresh your memory about the question you got wrong. You can’t really blame anyone but yourself if you get the answer wrong in this case which definitely lightens the load.
On the other hand we have our mini games and how they handle fail states. As an educational game we need to make sure that the player can fail and learn through their mistakes so we need to make sure the choices reflect the logic that we are basing them off. As an example our Debugging mini game is about protecting your plants by removing any insects that are dangerous. Not many people know, but ladybugs are not dangerous to plants, in fact they actually eat the insects that are dangerous to plants because they are carnivores. Our mini game rewards the player for removing all the pests, but it will fail the player if they remove all of the ladybugs and prompt them with a reminder about how ladybugs are not pests.
As mentioned before this sort of choice design is based off of factual information, so as long as we explain the facts and the gameplay reflects the facts, it is not as daunting. But when we start to look at games that give the player choices that can be considered controversial, we can see the difficulties of choice design. Games like Postal 2 and the Grand Theft Auto series which give the player the option to do some questionable acts makes you wonder what message the designers really intended. Every game can be interpreted differently and all designers should be aware of the possible implications that their game can convey.
Caleb Middlebrook 