What makes a choice carry depth is that there’s something major at stake. As I explained in an earlier post, the selection of plans is a fundamental part of gameplay. “What ammo should I use?”, “What path should I take?”, “Should I sneak or just attack?”. Most games feature these sort of choices all the time. When this is crystal clear, the player has a choice on their hands. Basically, the player understands that are at least two distinct plans for them to make, and they need to chose one of them. A choice then arises when it becomes clear to the player that there are two or more separate ways in which they can progress. The player must have a robust mental model where they understand how the various aspects of the world work, and what abilities they can use to affect it. The cornerstone of this is the player’s access to affordances. In order for a choice to be made, the player need to understand that they are making one. Letting your simulated party members starve to death very rarely give rise to the same strong feelings as a scene in a game like The Walking Dead. When these things work well it can have a tremendous impact – but more often that’s not the case. For instance, in a simulation game focused on survival you might not have enough food for all your party members and have to make a decision on who lives and dies. Simulation is another game genre that does this, but manages to add a bit more philosophical depth to the choices. Super Mario derives this choice purely from the functioning of its basic mechanics.
It also feels like an ingrained part of the play experience instead of something that is an obviously designed situation. The choice might lack the ethical implications from the previous one, but the choice itself is way more interesting. And in contrast to the explicit choice, it is unclear just what the options are. Instead the choice is implicitly stated through the use of the game’s mechanics. However there is no explicit prompt that asks the player what direction they want to go in.
This is a choice very much in the same vein as the one from above. The player could avoid the incoming bullet by going down, or they could do it by going up.
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