Because I primarily play visual novels and RPGs, I developed some preferences for what makes for satisfying choices that seem different from what most people in this community would have.
There are at least two kinds of choices I really like:
Motivational Alignment
I’m copping this from Sam Kabo Ashwell’s wonderful article, “A Bestiary of Player Agency”, where he discusses different forms of how players get into the game and feel like they’re doing something to the game.
He describes one form of player agency as “grasp”, which has a kind of “monkey” thought process to it: “if you see a cool thing, you want to pick it up, turn it around in your hands, twist the twistable bits, bite it.” Essentially, it’s a sophisticated form of interaction and this can create some really interesting scenarios when the player is enmeshed with the worldbuilding and story:
When the rules you’re grasping line up nicely with the narrative – when the player’s gameplay motivations are congruent with the player-character’s fictional motivations – you’ve got motivational alignment, immersion. You don’t have to choose whether to do the gameplay-rewarded thing or the Good Roleplaying thing: they’re one and the same. That’s powerful magic. That’s the feeling of a grating, rattly bike gear finally slipping into place, suddenly making power easy. That’s agency in a big way.
I view choices as helping me align my motivations with the player-character. Ashwell later talks about how this can devolve into power fantasies, but I don’t think it’s necessarily about giving power to players. Games could help you understand a certain issue better by making your motivations align to the game’s conceit (as opposed to lawnmowing everyone in Skyrim or something).
In Caligula Effect 2, your party members can talk to you about the social issues they’re experiencing. One character experiences gender dysphoria, despite being given the chance to simulate what it means to be a different gender of their own.
They then ask if you’re going to treat them differently if they are of a different gender than what you think. You can say to them that “gender doesn’t matter” or “I don’t care if you’re a guy or a girl”. These choices are wrong: you’re supposed to say, “I don’t actually know.”
I found this choice satisfying because it’s about making the player honest about the complications of personal and identity issues. It’s making me realize that it’s better to acknowledge this is a difficult issue and not to use plattitudes to avoid answering the responsibility.
In that sense, I think of choices like this as the game guiding me as much as me guiding the game. It’s a symbiotic relationship, like a teacher-student dynamic where both parties are learning from each other. I felt like I was having a dialog with the game as a person thinking about these issues. The game tests me about the choices I am making and letting me know how I do need to think about what I say. I always remember that scene because it definitely impacted me on how I talk about these issues with other people.
Altering Scenarios
In Japanese visual novels, choices often lead to new branches that lead to different scenarios from what you’ve already seen and you’re often set up to receive it because the choices you’ve made are building up to that revelatory moment. In Fullmetal Daemon Muramasa, the choices are doing a few interesting things, but the one I want to focus on is how the choices harmonizes with the structure of the game.
Each route depicts an ideological take on the main theme of the game, the Law of Balance. In Japanese, the term is something like the mutually assured destruction of good and evil: you have to slay as many demons as you do with buddhas. All choices align the player character with the opposite ideology found in that route they’re gunning for. For example, the Hero Route (justice as an ideal) makes you agree with the ideology of the Nemesis Route (revenge fantasies) and the latter gets shut down. You are always antagonistic toward the game and these choices create new scenarios/routes that open up the game’s setting a lot more.
There are more conventional visual novels where choices simply mean getting closer to a character. Just learning about someone often means delving into the aspect of the setting the character is a part of and no one else is. This is a classic, timeless approach that opens up new possibilities.
But I also just like choices that go beyond their utilitarian purposes: they tell us something about the player character(s) and the implications of their actions. In Tokyo Necro, there are only two sets of choices in the whole game and they decide the destinies of the two protagonists – whoever is alive or dead has grave implications on how the story will turn out. Simple choices like this create so much effect on the scenario and I find them pretty satisfying as a result.
So yeah, I like choices that are often provoking the player to consider their motivations to align better with the game and explore the thematic consequences of the setting and characters. The former wants the player to roleplay/guide the characters in the game to make better choices, the latter allows the speculation of new worlds, ideologies, and higher concepts.
I don’t really care if I made decisions in that sense. It’s fun to decide how I look or make the game remember what I did or didn’t do, but satisfying choices always meant to me deepening my interaction with the game and its possibilities.
)
cheerleader 
no one said anything when I posted it so I felt weird…