Choices and psychology

Today we're gonna talk about choices, a topic that's been largely discussed by game designers over the years and that is probably one of the most important aspects of good games, especially tabletop games.

Let's start by defining what makes a good choice. There are a lot of opinions on the topic but mostly everyone agrees that a well designed choice:

1. Has a meaningful impact on the game. Impact here means the consequences in the future state of the game 

2. Those consequences can be at least partially predicted while making the choice 

3. There isn't a clear dominant strategy that makes that decision obvious. This can be due to good balancing, hidden information, and computational complexity. 

These points are related to the fundamental elements of games. The first two are related to players' agency, while the last point provides the challenge to the game. Note that many games, especially videogames, can work without well designed choices as long as they can compensate in other ways those structural elements. For example a game with a time limit can also have a dominant strategy. In that case their challenge is identifying the right choice within the time limit. The same is true for games based on dexterity and reflexes.  

Games take place in the mind

A thing that’s often overlooked though, is that these 3 points don’t have to be real: it’s only important that players feel that way. This concept is often implemented in games with multiple narrative choices, where players are given the illusion to have an impact on the game but actually the game is designed to give the same outcome. The consequences of your choice are designed in a way that makes them seem coherent with your actions, independently of what you did. Other simpler games, like Uno, make you feel like you have an impact on the future of the game while often your choices are restricted and your impact unpredictable and short.

Other times players feel there isn’t a dominant strategy, but actually the game is simply designed to make every option appealing even though it’s not. Maybe something flashy, special, peculiar or fun can move players towards non optimal options without them knowing.

Be careful though: the opposite is also true. If players feel that a choice is obvious or hasn’t an impact, they can become very frustrated and lose interest quickly. For example, in multiplayer FPS, often players can feel as if sniping is a dominant strategy even when it’s not, because, even if it’s probably inconsistent, when you get sniped it seems unbeatable.

If a choice has an impact, it’s very important that players receive feedback as soon as possible to see the impact they iìhad in the game. Sometimes in board games that moment can be many turns later, but often something activates immediately to help visualize that future impact. If I put a card in my deck third from the top, I can immediately see the impact I had in the game even if the consequences will happen later. On the other hand, in many games the game state changes so much that you can lose track of your impact, even though it’s probably relevant in a butterfly effect that stretches throughout the game.

Non-choices

I wanna conclude today with something peculiar that happened to me while working on a board game. One of the players has to secretly place a hidden base under one of 9 cards in a 3x3 grid. 3 of these positions are obviously wrong for they are too close to the enemy, while others are in mirrored positions. I frequently received the feedback that the initial choice was too limited. I often explained that the initial choice didn’t need to be meaningful. The thing I cared about was simply that the secret base position was hidden from the other player and I thought that players would appreciate having this additional option. I thought about many things that could make the choice more impactful, then I opted for the simplest solution: if players don’t feel that the choice is meaningful and I don’t care if it’s meaningful, I can simply remove it and make it random instead. Although different from the things I talked about earlier, this is yet another demonstration that a choice is only as good as players perceive it to be good. In the end players were more happy without having the choice than when they had it. Paradoxically, they felt more constrained when they could choose that when they had absolutely no control over their starting position.

So this is another lesson for today: if your choice just doesn’t work, consider what purpose it serves and replace it with another element.

To design or not to design

That's all for today, hope you didn't regret your choice to read this article.

See you next week, when we'll all suck a little less.