What makes choices feel satisfying?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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Back with more thoughts! Tying in with what I said here, sometimes just having a choice at all is enough to feel satisfying to me. In choice games with world models, for instance, I like getting to decide which of the given locations to go to first, or which NPC to talk to first, etc. Being able to prioritize the options based on my own whims/interest just always feels good to me, even if the order in which they’re visited has no impact on the overall plot.

This kind of thing annoys me as well. If a game gives me two different dialogue options, say a “nice” one and a “mean” one, that primes me to expect that the choice matters—so if it turns out that the NPC will respond exactly the same way to both, it feels like the game is undermining itself. Being able to choose how I treat an NPC, but then not having it actually matter at all, feels incredibly pointless.

This contrasts with RaQ, to use that as an example again, where what happens based on each choice you make is different—while the overall story is always the same, and ultimately there’s no way to fail, there are multiple paths you can take through it, with different encounters, different interactions with Aubrey, and different consequences based on your different actions. And tying back to my first point, just being given those choices for how I handled the different situations was fun (same thing with the Lady Thalia games!).

Finally, connecting with Victor’s postmortem for Xanthippe’s Last Night With Socrates, and the ensuing discussion:

Again, it’s the fact that the player has a choice in these moments—that they can pick the option that feels best to them, choosing to some extent how they RP Xanthippe even while she remains an established character. Bringing the player into the experience, letting them co-create it. Or, as JJ says now that I’ve finished rereading that thread haha:

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This is an interesting grouping of questions! I think “what makes a choice game feel good” is probably too broad for me to tackle, becuase a choice game can be good in a LOT of ways, but I’ll take a swing at “what makes choices satisfying or meaningful [to me].”

(And I still feel the need to caveat: choices can be used as ONE source of player engagement, but there are MANY ways to make an engaging game, and I would say even a lot of great choice-based games don’t use “meaningful choices” as a main source of engagement. So it’s by no means a criticism if I say I don’t think a game has meaningful choices in it.)

Here’s 2 things that I think make choices kind of small “s” satisfying–

  1. anything the game shows me it remembers later, whether or not it’s “important.” From I said my favorite genre was romance, and later the books at my home are romance to more plot relevant.
  2. something that reinforces to me, “oh, the author GETS you” because there’s a choice that matches something I want to do. There’s a cute animal, I can pet it. There’s a polaroid of my kid, I can put it in my inventory and look at it later.

I would actually like, go feral to be offered what I see as a big “M” Meaningful choices, but they seem pretty rare . . . What I would see as a Meaningful choice:

  1. the weight of the choice is apparent to the player as it’s being made (no surprise reveal later “when you ate that croissant you were classing your character as a paladin”)
  2. the game in some way provides a sense of the reverberations of the choice, and the player understands that those consequences are BECAUSE of the choice. Most obviously the game can continue to play things out, but I think this is still possible (but difficult to accomplish) if one choice ends the game immediately.
  3. this may be idiosyncratic to me, but the choice has STAKES. skin in the game. the player loses something either way, and whatever they give up HURTS. So, for example, if there’s multiple endings but they pretty clearly run from “good” to “bad” and I can just try to accomplish the “best” one . . . that’s too simple! I want to be whipsawed by confusion! (think: am i going to execute my plan and sacrifice the last of my humanity, or am I going to spend the rest of my life knowing I had the chance for vengeance and was too weak to take it. am i gonna add this guy to the party because I need his help, or am I going to bring him to the justice his victims demand. AM I GOING TO TURN TO THE DARK SIDE. etc etc).

Now, of course, to riff on Jane Austen “I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women games with meaningful choices.” This is a pretty restrictive definition, the game-based examples that are coming the most to mind are like, Mass Effect and other video RPGs in that mode. Which, I get because it’s a huge amount of work to flesh out at least two options in a satisfying way, and probably not a great fit for hobbyist projects (although if someone makes the Mass Effect of IF . . . I will be here for that). I haven’t played Fallen London but the description by @sophia above sounds like what I’m thinking of.

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A hard question. It may be easier to start with choices that are considered canonically bad game design:

  1. Blind choices: when the player can’t possibly tell anything about the outcome before they make the choice. i.e. “There are two doors. Do you want to go left or right?” Clearly it’s as good as a coin toss.
  2. False choices: When each option leads to the same outcome. This can be ok if done sparingly and surreptitiously for dramatic effect.
  3. Obvious choices: When it’s abundantly clear which choice is the better/best one given the circumstances.

A meaningful and interesting choice should ideally involve a trade-off between the different ressources in the game.
Strategies to make choices more interesting:

  1. Time pressure (this is mostly irrelevant for IF).
  2. Risk vs. reward
  3. Short term vs. long term benefit
  4. Characterisation: Putting moral pressure on the player.
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Visual novel players often do exactly what @Aidrian does. Part of the reason is enjoying experimentation, part is that looking at the various options helps gauge both the narrative and gameplay significance of a particular moment. This is especially important in visual novels where the responses available are ambiguous or where the author has not (yet) fully earned the reader’s trust.

It’s a bit like how parser players may use X ME (EXAMINE ME) or try a common command in an uncommonly-described situation to find out how far the author can be trusted to give a robust experience and to find out how immersive the game world is. Or how they might alternate UNDO and a few different ways of tackling a potentially multi-solution situation, to see which of them has the most interesting (or only actually implemented) solution.

For me, a satisfying choice has to do five tasks:

1. Communicate what the choice is

If you’re going to have a character class selection, tell me that’s what happening - either directly or by making it clear the choice relates to this (for example by having the decision be about how the character does something, with the differences making sense for a subsequent class choice).

2. Communicate the option space

If the character needs to agree with something an NPC said, make the choices reflect this. (The choices could relate to how the character agrees, a choice to review/get opinions on what’s being agreed to before agreeing, or even a Turandot-style choice where the fact all options are functionally the same at many choices is part of the point).

3. Communicate what sort of choice it is

Is this a choice about which action will be taken? How it is taken? The difference between success or failure? A meditation on one of the deepest questions of our time? Or picking your character’s breakfast order? Players like to understand this and be rewarded for understanding the nature of the question.

4. Make sense in context

A failure I saw in some of the Episode stories I saw when I tried it out a couple of months ago was that there would be many points where either one or no choices made sense at that particular moment in context. One sensible choice can feel overly didatic, railroaded or unrealistic (if the sensible option is charged, it also causes resentment). No sensible choices (unless the cause makes sense in context) breaks immersion and trust in the author. A choice with 2+ sensible choices feels like a choice.

5. Make it feel like a good use of time and thought

Making a choice every other screen works a lot better if the work establishes itself as one where events change in the space of a few words. Parts of works where lots of time is spent establishing plotlines should have more sparse choices. The less time one is supposed to spend considering a choice, the more difference there needs to be between choices. Finally, in longer works, dramatic tension needs to rise and fall, which means that choices need to be more and less complex. Having excessively complex decisions all the time leads to decision fatigue and renders each decision less meaningful in feel, while insufficient thought required to choose reduces the feeling generated by the work. Linear IF can still have choices carrying weight through careful considerations of choice, consequence and variations.

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Choices that occasionally have a well-chosen button-click sound or visual nudge; “youpressedityay” acknowledgement. Not all the time but occasionally you want the hear the gold you just won go clinkety in your pocket. Same Pavlovian thing as Link opening a treasure chest doodle ee-dee doodle-EE :notes:

I do like immediate acknowledgement of a choice, but there’s that “Well, you’re a Sailor then! Welcome aboard! [paragraph break]You hornpipe your dinghy up the gangplank and set sail for adventure!” line.

Occasionally I like the reward of finding something hidden. Like a choice that doesn’t appear unless you hesitate a little longer than normal, or have to scroll down a little to find.

The Mass effect: Help the Villagers rebuildBurn the village to the ground

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I guess that would depend on the nature of said villagers. Burning a village of vampires to the ground might be the Best Choice.

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Either way it’s a “pet the dog/kick the dog” all-or-nothing binary good/evil choice.

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Choices also feel more satisfying when they have an immediate impact of some sort, even if the full effect comes much later. The famous Telltale Games “$Person will remember that” messages make it feel like you’re really doing something with your choice, even if behind the scenes it’s just nudging a certain variable up or down for much later.

Part of the satisfaction of clicking a button is seeing it do something, and messages like this let you see that right away to get that feeling.

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It obviously depends on the nature of the player. Which brings us to another aspect of interesting choices: they are interesting to their target audience. If your players are such goody-two-shoes they wouldn’t ever burn down one peaceful village, the choice becomes obvious. It may be more challenging for more…capable characters.

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Do you think choices can be more satisfying if the consequence of the choice to your stat is shown in the text? For example, pet the dog (gain +1 attraction from X) / kick the bog (lose 1 attraction from X)?
Because sometimes the choices may have nuance, and depending on the tone may not be clear with the intentions.

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That’s what I think the Telltale thing is good at, yeah. It gives you that immediate rush of “my choice did something!” even when you won’t see story repercussions for a long time if at all.

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For me as a player, I think that the important part is whether I feel like the game is hearing my responses, and what works well or doesn’t work well to communicate that is going to be very different for different games? So if you’re going for a very natural style then sticking very gamey “gain +1 attraction from X” can be really jarring, but if you have a more explicitly mechanical style then it can also be bad to have choices that do things without telling you what they do.

I’ve seen one person at least use the term “counterfactuality” for “how much is the player aware of the roads-not-taken?” which I don’t much like as a term but I’m not sure I have a better one.

But I think that’s the important part: is the game telling me that it understood what I was trying to say when I made that choice or chose that command, and can I tell whether the game’s internal state is changing because of my choices, or is it the part of the game state that’s only in my head that’s changing? Or both? I don’t necessarily care which (though some people do, very strongly, both ways) but if I think it’s changing the computer’s game state and then I find it’s only my mental game state then I’m going to be annoyed. Ditto if I think it’s my mental game state that’s changing and then I find that the computer’s state changed in ways that I wasn’t expecting and don’t like.

So I think it’s mostly about the contract you’re making with the player: “agency” requires buy-in and trust. If I can’t trust you, the author, to make it clear what I should expect and then have the skill to follow through on that, I’m not going to be as engaged. (though of course there are genres where not knowing what to expect is part of the fun, so…)

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It’s worth considering the difference between “satisfying” and “noticeable.”

You can go out of your way to make choices noticeable (and you can even call them “meaningful” because the audience is forced to notice them), but that doesn’t mean that they’ll be satisfying.

It reminds me of Josh Labelle’s post-mortem for Tavern Crawler, which talks about how he put extra effort into surfacing the game’s divergent paths (through stats, locked choices, notification text, and achievements at the end of the game).

Those choices were noticeable, but they were combined with other design components to make them satisfying.

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I think it’s best to give the choice if feasible, since this is an area where different players find that directly stating the stats involved has opposite effects on their experience (some find it helps, some find it hinders). Long Live The Queen gave the option to hide or show this according to preferences, with the indicators being distinctively marked as separate from the main text of the game (the game is fiddly enough that I always have it turned on). There are sometimes good narrative reasons to forcibly expose or hide the variable.

In particular, if the player character would definitely have that information, the player probably should be told the information to as strong a degree as the character has it, and if the player character would definitely not have that information and the player is supposed to only be sure of what the player character knows, hiding the information is better.

Even in the latter case, it’s important to show that choices change something, even if the IF is being deliberately cagey as to what exactly changed (e.g. a horror IF might not want to reveal that your choice just told the monster where you are and your character will glimpse it in 2 screens, but it will want to communicate that something happened that could plausibly be linked to the monster’s subsequent appearance, that the player can subsequently link back to having made that choice).

It’s usually better if the bare fact that the IF is changing is revealed to some extent in the writing, even if external cues such as variable indicators are going to be forcibly-employed.

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These are the words I’ve reached for several times recently but not found. Thanks for saying them.

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I think it’s a hard question to answer, broadly speaking, and I think that its usually a combination of factors. On the player side, I really liked how even the smallest of details were remembered later in “Our Life,” which did an excellent job of simulating growing up alongside another person. However, I think there’s also something to be said for “forced choice,” where nothing you do matters. For example, in “The Exile,” there are several times that the MC can choose actions that don’t ultimate effect the outcome in a meaningful way, because the point is finding meaning in trying, despite the futility. Which is what makes it a good tragedy, I think.

Interactive fiction is an artform in and of itself, and art tends to make a statement in some way. So if you offer a choice, it should be for a purpose, whether that’s to make a point, help flesh out the MC, or influence the story going forward. And if it has a purpose, it should fulfill that purpose.

I feel like you could use this in a game and have it matter from a meta standpoint. For example, there are absolutely people in real life who will treat you the same no matter how you speak to them. In that case, player input matters less in the sense that if effects the world state and more in that it effects your conceptualization of the character. If the NPC in question were such a person, I think it would be meaningful to have a meaningless choice. That being said, if the NPC is absolutely not like that, it would be nice to at least have some flavor text, even if there isn’t any long-term effect.

Absolutely. Changeling – a game I otherwise enjoy – hide the choice of romantic lead in a scene where Nora goes into the library and chooses a book about one of six types of supernatural creature, which corresponds to one of the LIs, all of whom you’ve met at this point. Except that (A) this is not clearly communicated that this is a choice of LIs and not, say, choosing which book to read first and (B) Nora, and by extension the player, has doesn’t know which LI is which supernatural creature, so you have to guess on an initial playthrough. It is a neat mechanic (I feel like maybe it’s kind of a fated thing, but I only got the route I wanted by chance and my mother was very frustrated that she couldn’t figure it out on her playthrough, LOL.)

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Now that this topic has been here for months, I feel okay about saying the following.

What makes choices feel satisfying is when they are accompanied by a satisfying ‘ding!’ sound.

-Wade

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I’ve been told it might help accessibility if I play a little sound every time an input is accepted. So this could solve two problems at once!

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Audio design is an underutilised aspect of forms of IF that employ audio. (Some choice engines, by design, cannot have audio). Having a different noise for different types of choice, or even a set of related sounds that may be heard on choices (randomly or pre-assigned in a way that means most/all players will hear multiple of the sounds) helps to keep the ears engaged and sometimes helps with immersion.

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I was thinking about accessibility for the blind with an IF dungeon crawler and if I were to create a battle menu, it would work like this…

The game would prompt with the text reader… “A goblin growls at you, ready to pounce!”. Press down, and you hear a “shing shing” of a bladed weapon, press down again, and you hear the sound of runes activating “dun, dun, duuunnn!”, press down, and you hear a “ruffling” in a bag, press down again and you hear the “patting” of foot steps fading away and the cycle repeats. Press enter to accept whatever sound you last heard. Instead of hearing text commands being read out “Attack Cast Inventory Run”, I figure it would be much more enjoyable to hear sound effects for equivalent actions. Plus, as you equip different weapons or grow in magic power, the sounds could change to reflect that.

An Idea For Navigating (click to expand)

I don’t know much about standards for blind accessible games, but I’ve been using a screen reader lately and it ain’t pretty. I have also thought of ways to navigate grid-based dungeons with an echolocation system that’s fully auditory. I’ve heard of games that use stereo sound, but I’m thinking of enabling a “look mode” where you push the direction of where you want to look and get a sound playing back if it’s a standard environment grid cell. A “bump” sound for a wall, water flowing, lava bubbling, a “growl” for a monster, etc. then followed by terse text descriptions for unique details. If you can see past the adjacent square, you can press in that direction again and “see” what’s further in that direction. There would be an intelligent system for identifying a “room” and letting the player know all the things that are noticeable in the area. I would hate to push forward and hear “the path is blocked by a wall”… and do that a thousand more times in a dungeon and you might not want to hear that phrase anymore.

I think audio can make “making choices” more satisfying as well.

Food for thought.

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