[MUD-Dev2] Player Choice - How Much is Too Much?

[John Buehler]

Cruise writes:

> While taking away all the player's choice means it's no longer a game,
> limiting them to a certain degree is pretty much the point of making
> game rules. We should and, I'd say, must, tell the players how to play
> the game.

The only argument you'll get from me on that is the potential for
misinterpreting 'tell'.  I doubt you're after a "do this" and "do that"
mindset.  I would guess that a notion of 'inviting' is actually more
appropriate than 'telling'.  Perhaps 'tempting', even.  For the achievers:
'daring'.

> Looking at the world around us it becomes patently obvious that people
> don't make choices that will be best for them.

Don't get me started.

> The important caveat, of course, is that players hate to feel like
> their choices are being deliberately limited - the old "invisible wall"
> at the edge of a game area, for example, when a chasm would achieve the
> same effect but not feel forced. I suspect this is what most people
> object to - not the removal of choices, but the obviousness with which
> they are removed (such as a "nerf" in MMOG's - having the previous
> performance to compare to, any such limitation will be obvious).

I'm reminded of a bit of wisdom dropped on this list years ago that
designers should never give anything to players that they are going to take
away.  That is perhaps the easiest way to get players thinking that a
certain thing would be fun to do that's not actually in the game.  Giving it
to a player tell him that it is fun.  Taking it away means that the player
now *knows* that it was fun and they can no longer reach it.

The invisible wall is the same deal.  If player expectations are guided into
the belief that characters can go everywhere and do everything that the
player sees, then when the character hits an invisible wall, the player will
feel that some entertainment that could have been obtained on the other side
of the wall is unavailable.  They got their hopes up and the designer dashed
them.

So I would claim that it's not an issue of removal so much as an overall
pattern of designers walking players into dead ends in the structure of
their entertainment.  Imagine if there was a den of progressively more
difficult monsters, and a group is fighting their way to the climax of the
encounter when they enter a cavernous room and...

They find a couple of standard NPC merchants.

JB