Choices vs Consequences - What Player Decisions Mean in Games - Extra Credits

A long time ago, we talked about the difference between choices and calculations in the game. This week, we're going to continue that discussion by talking about the difference between exploring choices and exploring consequences. Over the past few years, we've seen more and more developers talk about how they feature choice in their games. And I don't just mean the choice of how you play that any game gives you. Do you jump over that pit? Do you not jump over that We are talking about moral choice, choice to influence the storyline, or choice in narrative character development. I love that more games are pushing this. It's an area that we really hadn't explored enough in the last 20 years. Now, not every game needs to have this type of choice, not by a long shot, but it's always good when we as an industry try to expand the range of what we can do. But, here's the thing. A lot of these games that say they're about choice aren't really about choice at all. What they are about is consequences. Examining choice and examining consequences both have a lot of value, of course, but as game designers and as players, it's important that we understand which our experience is about. Games about choice are about

making you reflect on what you're about to do as you do it, about thinking it through as you go in. Games about consequences instead are about making you realize the impact of something you did. Now, Heavy Rain, for all of its faults, had a scene where you're confronted with the choice to either cut off your finger to get more information about how to save your son or to refuse to do so. This is something players have to sit down and evaluate when they go to make the choice. It's not a calculation because there are no numbers here, no definitive right or wrong, but there are a lot of factors to consider and choose between. Do you cut off your finger because you owe it to your son? Do you not do so because you might bleed out or get infected and die? Do you take the saw into your own hands because you can't rightly say that one of your fingers is worth more than someone's life? Or do you refuse because screw you, nobody's going to tell me what to do? These are all things the player weighs before they press the button. And because that's the case, it's clearly a choice. On the other hand, consider the first 30 minutes of Chrono Trigger. Oh, and uh spoilers, I guess, for the first half hour of Whatever. If you haven't played Chrono Trigger, just trust me, go play it. Anyway, remember how in the first 30 minutes of Chrono Trigger you

can take a series of minor actions while you're at the Millennial Fair, such as helping a girl find her cat or nicking an old man's lunch? Actions that seem like arbitrary mini quests or even just pointless interactive elements in the game world to make it feel more alive. Remember also how these actions are brought up at your trial later to help determine your guilt or innocence? That is a perfect example of consequence-based play. You do technically have a choice of what to do with these actions, but they aren't things that you really think about going in. They aren't things that you ponder or stop and weigh your options over. In fact, for many of them you have nothing to ponder or weigh them against. They're just little mini games or side quests that you can engage in. It's only after their consequences are revealed that you're given a reason to think about them. The results give context to your actions and make you reflect on them. Were you a jerk for stealing that man's lunch? How come you didn't even think about it at the time? Did you do it just cuz it looked like an item you could pick up? What does that say about you and or Chrono? So, to recap, games about choice and games about consequence mainly differ by when they get the player to think about the action that causes the ultimate result. Choice makes

you think before you take the action. Consequence makes you think about it later when you see the action's result. Now, these can both be interesting, but they have different effects and they require different approaches to design. If the focus is on the choice itself, the engagement is found in giving the player a number of different vectors to weigh their choice on without reducing it to a calculation. What's most interesting here is what we find out about ourselves by finding out what we actually value most highly. And you may say that you'd make any sacrifice to save a child, but when it comes down to it, what would you really do? Choices engage us by forcing us to see nuances that we may not have previously considered. The choice we talked about in one of our earliest episodes about erasing the Geth in Mass Effect 2 highlights this. It strips away the black and white and doesn't give us any emotional distance from the decision. The choice is no longer some abstract hypothetical where it's easy to talk in absolutes. Now, it's specific and messy and real and immediate. It's brilliant. If, on the other hand, the focus is on consequences, on revealing to the player the effects of their actions, then, as a designer, you really have to think through what statement you're making

with that reveal. A simply thwarting the player or showing that things they did had bad results doesn't necessarily mean anything. Instead, you have to really figure out the chain of causality that runs from the player taking the initial action to the results you plan to show them and what that chain says about the world. You also have to think about how the player feels about this result. You often want an emotional reaction, but you don't want to completely repel them from the experience. If you aren't careful, the player may feel that your stupid game is cheating them by delivering an outcome they didn't like or intend, an outcome they may feel like they didn't really have any control over. If you can pull it off, though, you can really get the player to ponder actions that they otherwise have simply taken without thinking and cause them to question some of the assumptions they may walk through this world with. The Witcher series sometimes does this to great effect, and it's pretty much the entire premise of Spec Ops: The Line, which I'm never going to stop saying you guys should really play. And, of course, the distinction between choice and consequence can get quite blurry, and I'm not by any means saying that a player can't have some moments that are about choice and other moments that are about understanding consequence, but it's an important distinction for both

players and designers to understand, and it's a distinction that I think we, as an industry, have glossed over far too often. See you next week.