Negative Possibility Space - When Exploration Lets Players Down - Extra Credits

All right, so last time we talked about how much agency is necessary to feel as though as a player your actions have meaning. But there's another design concept that greatly plays into how we feel about choice and agency in games that we haven't discussed yet. So today's topic is negative possibility space. Negative possibility space is the vacuum you as a designer leave behind when you do something that creates an expectation in the player. You better fill it or the player is going to be disappointed. You ever had that thing happen where you come across a mountain or a high ledge or the like in a game and you do all sorts of crazy things to get up there. You time your double jumps perfectly. You find a little bit of geometry sticking out that you can stand on. You do one last heroic leap and you make it and there's nothing up there. You're disappointed. By putting that piece of level geometry in there and giving you the tools to reach it, the designers created an expectation. You saw that ledge and that foothold and it said to you, "You can get up here if

you're awesome." And so of course you said, "Challenge accepted." And naturally you expected some acknowledgement of your awesomeness when you finally did it. If there'd just been a treasure chest up there, even if its contents weren't that powerful, or if an achievement had popped up when you got up there, or something, you'd feel satisfied and awesome. You'd feel like you just experienced a piece of content that most people didn't because they weren't as clever or observant or nimble as you. Instead, you're standing on an empty ledge and feeling like a chump for doing all that work for nothing. Negative possibility space is something good level designers are very careful about. Good level designers will make sure to reward the player's expectations and always fill out all their negative possibility space with at least a tiny nod to the player however they can. They'll take careful note of where that negative possibility space is found in play tests and then fill it out, rewarding anybody who is so engaged with a game that they got somewhere or did something that even the level designer didn't know about when they were first building the stage. You don't believe me? Here's one of the most famous examples in gaming. But negative possibility space isn't exclusive to level design. It happens in all aspects of game design, including the narrative.

And here's where it ties back to choice. We talked before about the moment of choice being paramount, about how narrative choices are the place where the player has agency, not the resulting consequences of those choices. And this is true. If the moment of choice in the game is irrelevant to the player, it's going to be very tough to get them to engage with whatever consequences you have result. But that said, it's still possible to create negative possibility space by offering such choice moments. Previously, we talked about the illusion of choice. And often when we see that illusion shattered in games with narrative choices, it's because they failed to fill in the negative possibility space left by your choices. If a response to your choice is ham-handed, if it's clear that the result was going to be the same no matter what you picked, then the expectation hasn't been met. Your player has encountered that negative possibility space and has been left disappointed and disillusioned. Now, there are lots of ways around this. Look at The Walking Dead. Telltale's designers would generally pick a few sweeping choices early in each chapter and make the consequences of those choices abundantly clear from the get-go in order to establish the idea that your choices mattered, which led you as a player to assume that any decision you made would have an impact, even if many

of them didn't. On top of that, when the player was making a narrative decision, the designers would often have small messages pop up, like, "Clementine will remember this." Thus, fulfilling that expectation, filling that negative possibility space in the player's mind, even if the choice being made really did nothing other than make that message appear on screen. And often, we don't really need much to fill that space. In so many games from Mass Effect to Fallout 3, many of our choices are acknowledged by a single line of dialogue down the road. It's the narrative equivalent of the treasure chest in that hard-to-reach spot. All we really need to be satisfied is the acknowledgement that we did something and that our actions matter. Without that one line of dialogue referencing the decision we made, we feel ripped off. We feel like we've been suckered into doing something meaningless, like the designers don't care. But with just that little tip of the hat to what we did, all of a sudden, it all feels right and the illusion's maintained. And as a designer, whether it be a designer of narrative, systems, mechanics, levels, any type of designer at all, you should try to understand the negative possibility space your design decisions inadvertently create. Too many designers

build for the screen rather than for the player sitting in front of it. You need to understand the ramifications of your design. You need to understand the expectations you create in your player and ask yourself how you can address those expectations. Once you understand those expectations, then you can play with them. You can set up moments where the player thinks, "Oh, no way they'd ever put something there in case I did this." And then when it happens, when you've anticipated it and rewarded it, the player will be floored. Those will be the moments they remember. Papers, Please had a few of those moments for me. This is one of those design ideas that really good designers always seem to have a solid handle on. Once you understand your negative possibility space, it'll not only allow for more solid design, but also for those wild innovations and flights of fancy that make us all take notice. So, as we conclude this series on choice, I hope this helps to fill out the other side of the fulcrum, consequence, and get you to think about the player expectations you create as you design. I'll see you next week.