Life is full of decisions. We make them everyday, with varying effect on our lives. There are big decisions (“Should I buy Krispy Kremes?”), small, trivial decisions (“Bar or 016 lecture?”), and those hidden decisions that masquerade as small decisions and ultimately have some huge impact on your life (not necessarily positive: “I’m going to buy WoW”). There are also those innocent decisions that we end up regretting later. Like when you lend a DVD to someone whom you assume is reliable by virtue of position, and over a year later still don’t have it back. But that’s neither here nor there, and I’m definitely not bitter or trying to drop hints or anything. So…
How does all this relate to games? Well obviously games are full of decisions, and similarly they can manifest themselves in various different ways and with varying degrees of magnitude and impact. However, I’m not really interested in analysing all the different ways decisions can be made within a game system, or giving examples of the various different decisions that a player can make. Rather I am interested in examining the fundamental limitations of in-game decision making employed in the vast majority of games. Still wondering how the introduction relates? Well to be honest it’s a pretty shocking introduction, but hopefully I can use some of the examples to highlight some vast differences between real-life decisions and in-game decisions (just in case they’re not obvious enough already…).
There are a variety of categories of decisions that can generally be made by a player within a game system. Although I’m not qualified to make any such categorisations, for the purposes of this post I’m going to. Firstly there are general player decisions (or choices as I will refer to them) that involve trivial issues such as “Should I equip the mace or the sword”, “Will I drive on the road (and contend with traffic) or the footpath, killing hundreds of civilians and possibly getting held up by an inconveniently placed street lamp”. By trivial I am not implying that this category of choices is unimportant, but rather that it ultimately won’t affect the outcome of the game, or the player’s progression along the critical path. These choices impact on the player’s experience of the game, but generally leave the game system completely untouched so to speak. The category of decision that I’m interested involves those decisions that a player can make (and often must make) that directly impact on the game system, generally by altering the critical path followed by the player, or fundamentally changing the way the player progresses down that critical path.
Suddenly we are working with a much smaller pool of decisions. In my experience, albeit limited, there are very few games that implement such decisions with much effectiveness. Think of Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. This game opened up many previously unavailable choices to the player: race, gender, light-sabre type and colour (Kyle Katarn is … offline). These decisions have absolutely no bearing on the game itself, only the player’s experience of the game. However, the game also provides a single decision to the player towards the end of the game – whether to go to the dark side or follow the way of the light. This decision then results in the player progressing down one of two separate paths towards the end of the game, depending what choice they made. So essentially we have ONE main decision, resulting in one of TWO endings. This is only slightly more involved than the majority of games that offer no such decisions, resulting in one ending (this is not to say that most games offer no decisions, but rather that said decisions will not actually alter the course of the game).
Unlike in the real world, decisions in a game are by necessity strictly bound to a predetermined action. Although from a player’s perspective a game might provide some decisions to make it appear new and exciting, it is very rare to find a game that provides a truly unique experience each time it’s played. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but if the technology was available for a more dynamic decision system in games, I’m sure it would become widely adopted, and be a huge success. In the majority of games, a set of actions will generally produce a certain result. Reproduce those actions, and you’re guaranteed to reproduce the results. Obviously this is not always the case in the real world. Consequently, such elements of decision making as uncertainty and risk generally only exist within a game system in a limited facet; the uncertainty associated with certain decisions can diminish with a player’s familiarity with the system.
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