Level Design Workshop: The Illusion of Choice

[Music] all right hello everyone my name is Jim Brown from Epic Games I have been fortunate enough to have been in this industry for about 20 years now but I actually got into doing this I came into the industry with a background in biology and behavioral science and I wanted to share a little bit of that with you today to show how you can use that in level design because I want to talk about choice theory and when someone sits down to play a video game they are very much at our mercy they are constrained by our rules they're locked into the path of the world that we build and they're limited by the controls that we set up for them but we never want them to actually feel that way if we're doing our jobs well then the player will

always feel like they're the one who's actually in control we want to give them the illusion of choice so that they can continue to have a great time and by understanding how people actually make choices we have a much better chance of maintaining that illusion now how we choose is of course this huge topic and there's no way I can cover it all in 30 minutes so I wanted to kind of give you three introductory concepts the paradox availability and sunk costs and I'm going to talk about each one individually there's kind of in a general context before moving on to showing you how you can use them in terms of level design so starting with the paradox this is Temple Grandin she is a behavioral scientist who developed this special chute for funneling herds of cattle into the slaughterhouse when I was the cows moved into this chute they are understandably uncooperative and

scared and then the chute gets narrow and turns and gets narrow in turns and narrow in turns and it keeps doing that until the cows have no choices left the only thing that they can do is funnel for calmly in a single-file line and dr. granny was able to develop this by studying her own mind because she suffers from autism a disease which makes it very easy for her to become overwhelmed by even the most simplest of everyday choices through her research she was able to show that we could actually be happier with less choice and her lives and that concept has become known as the paradox of choice we know that choice is essential to player autonomy but new research is showing that that's only true up to a certain point beyond that threshold the vast number of choices that were faced with can actually be overwhelming your brain starts to panic you feel like

things are spinning out of control and this is why it's so important that we maintain that illusion of choice too much actual choice and we can actually break our players flow state which makes the game in their eyes less fun or interesting and I found it curious Wired magazine did a review of fallout 4 call out to Joel he's gonna be a lot in this talk today and they said and I quote released from your pod the swirl of emotions and questions threatened to overwhelm right when you need to remain focused you have no idea where to begin and it's a stark introduction to just how vast and open this world is but despite the near future of your situation the seamless introduction of mechanics and systems has you feeling prepared to face whatever you might discover in this case Bethesda is

purposefully using the paradox of choice to evoke an emotional state and the player and it works because it's all an illusion the elements of the game unfold logically new environments new controls are seamlessly introduced and the actual game elements themselves never break that players flow state and this shows you that once you know about things like the paradox you use them as a tool to your advantage next concept is something that's called the availability heuristic which basically means that the more familiar something is to you the more you are likely to believe it or to like it and this is as much this is do as much to our biology as it is psychology if you think of your brain as this crazy complicated web of billions of neurons and if you want to get a thought from one end of that web to the other those

neurons will actually start to form little shortcuts little hops little skips that form to help us make decisions quickly something that happens to you more often creates more of these shortcuts and therefore becomes more and more available to your memory it's the name this means that as a designer you are much more likely to implement a design that meshes with your own personal experiences instead of one that's better or more meaningful for your players even when you are purposely trying not to do that how many shooters have you played where you end up in an air-conditioning duct how many RPGs have you played where you end up exploring the sewers beneath the city these aren't great original experiences and we all know that yet we keep building them after a lifetime of playing them over and over they are familiar to us so our brains shortcut to

referencing them as fun experiences because familiarity breeds liking the effects of availability heuristic can be incredibly subtle you probably don't even realize that they're affecting you like they do every day at one point we wanted to update our classic Unreal Tournament logo it was a little bit too old-school we wanted to give it a more modern and fresh design we found a couple that we liked and then we realized that the new logos had been designed by someone who had been playing a heck of a lot of quake now the availability heuristic doesn't just affect you it affects your players as well and it makes them make choices that are much more vivid in their memory now vivid choices can stand out in a number of different ways they can stand out physically like in this image your eyes are drawn to the bright doorways and you're very likely to miss the

actual exits the doors that are on the right hand side the event choices can also stand out emotionally in BioShock did you harvest the Little Sisters or did you save them according to the statistics the vast majority of players actually save the Little Sisters at least on their first playthrough because saving children has a vivid emotional poll but vivid choices can also stand out simply because they are present I know a ton of people who actually thought that the settlement quest and fallout were the main storyline in the main point of the game because they're always there in your quest log they're always there they're always present right at the very top so they feel like they're more important when we fall victim to the effects of the availability heuristic we're actually succumbing to fake choices and the effects of this will start to creep in to all of your levels and take away feelings of autonomy and

choice from your from your players the other factor that dramatically influences player choice is the concept of sunk costs this is the fallout dude he's giving you that one last chance to finally finalized and change your appearance but usually once you've made a decision like this you are going to stick with it it doesn't matter that the pote the path that you chose is too difficult it doesn't matter that you can easily turn around go back and make another choice there is a cost that is associated with making a decision and once we make that choice our brains are immediately invested in the outcome this is a big part of what drives free-to-play games once you've put time and money into setting up a base for yourself you're gonna keep rebuilding that base even if making a new base is clearly the better option you're more

likely to keep rebuilding your old one because you've already sunk your efforts into that original decision now as usual this is due in large part to our biology what you want is actually a different part of your brain then it comes from a different part of your brain then what you like you can control what you want like right now you could say I want to go sit outside in the Sun but you can't control what you like you can't suddenly decide to like the taste of broccoli if you don't already do that and because what you like is unconscious that means it'll always take priority over what you want so once our players start down a path a bad path whether they want to or not they are going to continue because they're already invested in that initial decision and your brain actually robs

you of that choice to turn back so there's three quick principles that explain how issues and now I want to show you some examples of how that can influence three different types of level design linear open world and of course multiplayer my bread and butter linear games generally considered to be the absolute bane of level design because we are putting the player on Rails and this is probably the best known image that explains how most people feel these days about linear levels but II won em six the doom map on the Left here was actually a completely linear level just like the other one but it was disguised you were given a colored keys that you had to collect and you had to backtrack and we refilled those spaces with different types of encounters occasionally we gave you a different type of shortcut the real difference between these two

levels is that the doom map maintains player autonomy now when people talk about choices they very often confuse the concepts of agency and autonomy agency is our capacity to choose to do whatever we want whenever we want autonomy on the other hand is our capacity to make an informed decision it's less about choice and more just your brain agreeing to go with the flow because you've decided that that's the best option autonomy means that you endorse the path that you're on even if that path is completely linear and nothing highlights this better than speedruns these players are on an extremely linear and unforgiving path but they still feel like they're the ones who are in control at all times

now remember that no matter how open or how linear a level actually is the player is always on a path from A to B that's basic game theory I give you a starting point and a goal and you move along the path to that goal and it's totally fine if there's only one path to get to that goal as long as the player has the autonomy to feel like it's the path that they chose now that's not new but there are a couple of problems that with the way that we typically try and do that sort of thing because of the availability heuristic our players are already going to have a built-in set of expectations about what's coming so to get around that we throw things at them we we try and distract them with oh look here's something right - you said look over here bright or colorful or hey here's an interesting encounter to distract you for a while I'll give you a side quest to do over here but every time you do that you're more and more

likely to actually push them past that line of paradox where they end up feeling lost or overwhelmed and at that point there's this special part of your brain that kicks in that is 100% devoted to filtering out all distractions the only thing that it wants to do is get from A to B so you put all this together you have your brain pushing you forward overwhelmed by distractions that it is desperately trying to ignore but refusing to stop because the sunk cost principle means that you're already invested in reaching that destination basically this is no longer a fun experience so rather than overwhelm the player with all these distractions I'm proposing that we could try and use something called the peek end rule to focus them when you look back on something that's happened to you your brain looks at how

you felt at the very peak of that experience and at the very end and over time those two points and only those two points become the brain's reference for our overall emotional experience stress boredom frustration and millions all of those have no effect on your long-term memory if they're far enough removed from the peak and the end points so if you can focus on making just those two points the most vivid for your player again remember back to availability heuristic they become the most available to their memory and then you can focus your design in a way that maximizes the enjoy ability of that level even if it's completely linear this is one of the reasons that people can suffer for hours through extremely difficult levels in blood-borne and still come away feeling like they had a great experience on the complete

opposite end of the spectrum we have open world designs which probably seem like they offer more choice to the Flair than any other type of level but even with an open sandbox the players choices still have to happen within the constraints of the games rules and systems and I look back personally on completing the thieves guild quests in Skyrim and certainly oblivion as some of my all-time favorite moments in gaming another shout out but I guarantee that if you did the Thieves Guild - then you and I followed the exact same quests and we had the exact same outcome you made the decision to start that question but you had no choice in the order or the outcome of this specific quests involved in that chain you did have good autonomy along the way and that gave you

the illusion of choice your Thieves Guild experience probably felt a lot more unique and special than it actually was people also feel the same way about MMOs they go in feeling like they have almost completely unlimited choices and unlimited options but in the end it - is all an illusion there is a huge sunk cost that goes into setting up a character and bringing that character all the way to max level there's really only one right path to get them all the way there and get all the necessary gear that you want so guilds go in and they practice their raids over and over until there's really no choice left and it's just a performance where everyone has to be in the exact right place at the exact right time and do the exact right thing in hopes of getting the exact right gear now I'm not saying that there's no

choice in these levels obviously there is but open-world doesn't necessarily mean more choice for the player and it doesn't necessarily mean better choice for the player when we give someone the option to go left right left right over and over and over and over that's not choice as much of this just simple decision-making that's the kind of thing exactly the kind of thing that leads to players feeling overwhelmed real choices and I say that in big air quotes are meaningful where the player has autonomy and feels responsible for the outcome whether that outcome is good or bad which brings me to player where players arguably have higher levels of autonomy than in any other type of design because in multiplayer choices really matter they have this butterfly effect that impacts everyone else's choices in the

server as well in this constant loop of cause and effect multiplayer experiences are social and more people means more information and information is the currency of choice with more information you can make better choices and that's what makes those decisions actually feel more meaningful but of course the multiplayer designer still has influence over player choice and the goal is to make sure that the impact that influencer doesn't take away from player autonomy even very simple changes in architecture can affect how players make choices in a map here's a shot that has two different versions of the same map and the left and image players almost always chose to take the left-hand path the visuals visuals unintentionally were

funneling them in that direction by removing that door frame as we did in the right hand image we opened up lines of sight and got a much better distribution of players across the entire map because players were able to make that choice without our influence and without us actually adding in more packing options because pathing decisions and multiplayer maps shouldn't be complicated if you look at the most popular map in virtually any multiplayer game you'll start to notice a pattern they leave very little path choice to the players this is dust and counter-strike you spawn in you can choose a or b it's one of two options if you look at virtually any intersection in the entire you have two maybe three choices and direction to go even MOBAs this is summoners rift League of Legends do you have to or in this case three real lanes

to go down and those paths are very very distinct and very very obvious last one Gears of War gridlock was our most popular map it had exactly one path players ran down it till they ran into each other and started shooting each other in the face these complex choice field games are actually most successful when they respect the paradox and actually remove choice by reducing the overall cognitive load on the player it allows them to focus on what they perceive as the most important choices increasing autonomy and overall happiness so how can you use this information to give put meaningful choice and autonomy in your own Maps following my magic formula I have exactly three tips for you starting with design without intent now I'm not just

spouting that as like weird philosophy that's actually there is actually a technical term that is used by architects and engineers called design with intent that means employing a strategic design to purposefully influence someone's behavior when you go to Disneyland the pathways in the architecture are purposefully designed to reduce traffic jams and help guide you with landmarks through the park which is pretty cool when you go to Vegas the casinos are designed to purposefully disorient you and make you lose track of time which isn't quite so cool we guide our players with color and light and architecture and usually we're really good about doing that around key landmarks but everything that we build has an impact and we're very inconsistent about when we actually pay attention to that we have more influence

than we intend to simply because sloppy in the example here one choice has been highlighted by default and that means that players are significantly more likely to select it even if they only do so by accident now advertisers use a lot of similar techniques there's a list of them here and have time to go into all of them they are important so take the time to look them up if you care about this stuff but if your goal is autonomy these techniques are all flawed they work because they activate that subconscious decision-making part of your brain these techniques all actually reduce player autonomy by abusing the effects of the availability heuristic and there's some cost principle to make players do things against their rational will so when I say that we should design without intent I'm not saying that we should be haphazard or sloppy I'm saying that we

should give our players options instead of influences so they can make their own choices and find their own meaning in the outcome next avoid training decisions if you stack decisions too closely together the players brain will fall into the trap the sunk cost principle the dominoes start to fall and they can't turn back and the effects of this are cumulative so the effort in making every new decision in a chain becomes increasingly more difficult and eventually as I've already said the brain shuts down that illusion fades away and players feel less autonomy The Witcher does really interesting thing with this where I've actually seen reviews that people say there's too much for you to do there's too many moral dilemmas there's too many ways for narrative to play out now I don't necessarily agree with that but I can

see why someone might feel that way because it's always human nature to wonder about the path that you didn't take over and over over and over until you start to believe that no matter what you choose you've chosen incorrect quí or the other path is better or that you're missing out on something and so regardless of how you feel about the volume of choice in The Witcher they did do one thing very very well they spread out the important choices so that by the time you get from one to the next you can feel the impact of your choice and see it's actual effects on your player on the world and on the story this helps the players brain differentiate there's peak and end points of the experience so there is a better chance that they'll find meaning and autonomy in the outcome lastly let your players make second

order decisions now second order decisions are rules or strategies that people use to avoid getting frustrated by their own indecision for example I personally have a set of rules that I always follow when I'm gaming whenever I'm given the option I always choose ranged attack over melee when I walk into a new area I always go right first I don't have to think about it I just go and that's the whole point when I reach a fork in the road deciding which way to go has become a second-order decision because it falls behind my initial rule to always go right now Assassin's Creed handles us very well by offering this huge web of interconnected activities you can decide as the player to do everything in just one single neighborhood or you can follow a single quest line across neighborhood borders

or you can focus on just a single type of activity or you can just do things randomly as they happen when you're walking down the street there are hundreds and hundreds of potential activities in a game like this but the player decides when to approach each one and how to group them so they don't have to think about them all at the same time this maintains that illusion that the world ism possibly large their unlimited amount of activities and that there's more choice in the outcome than there actually is if you allow them to use second-order decisions the player is applying their own individual biases so your influence from the availability heuristic has less effect and it allows each person to find their own golden path through the level which means that they'll find their own memorable peak and end points and construct meaning from that experience now all of this of

course barely scratches the surface of how this impacts game theory and choice and a million other related topics that I don't have time to go into today so I would strongly encourage you to look some of this stuff up and read up on it and see how you can use that knowledge to improve your level designs thank you for your time [Music] you