[MUD-Dev2] Risk vs Reward [was: Value]

[Mike Rozak]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:16:52 +0000, "cruise" <cruise at casual-tempest.net>
said:
> Thus spake Sean Howard...
> > I prefer "interesting choices". Meaningful implies something that I just
> > don't think is true for all games. I mean, if I select the flower
> > wallpaper over the polkadot wallpaper, that's not even meaningful to
> > myself. I don't really care, so I'll just select one until such time that
> > I might care (ie I get tired of wallpaper A or it suddenly becomes an
> > eyesore next to my neon green couch). However, the choice is interesting
> > because the options are quite different. I'm not choosing between three
> > barely different granite patterns. The options have been selected by the
> > designer (or the player through mods) to be different enough that the
> > decision is not dominated or confusing or insignificant.
> > 
> > I wouldn't call it meaningful, though I guess you could say that if a
> > choice were interesting, that would be meaningful. I just prefer a
> > different implication other than it means something to the player, because
> > that's not always true - I mean, if you can play through Mortal Kombat by
> > just jump kicking in a corner, does that make all the other available
> > options to you meaningful?
> 
> Well, there's the challenge of the game design, and one of the reasons I 
> like the use of "meaningful." Different things have different meaning to 
> different people. A lot of people use the auto-generation feature for 
> their characters in CoH, for example, because the look isn't meaningful 
> to them, whereas I can spend hours agonising over the choices.

In my writeup, I used the term "weak" and "strong" choices to indicate
choices that could easily be undone. Walking a short distance is almost
always a weak choice because it's easy to walk back to the same place you
started. Selecting which university you wish to attend is usually a strong
choice because it's not easy to suddenly switch to another university.

The issue of undo-ability is slightly different than how meaningful the
choice is to the player.

Mike Rozak
http://www.mxac.com.au