Choice Design: Who, What, Where, When, Why?
Posted: Sun Feb 24, 2019 12:31 am
Visual novels are distinguished from kinetic novels by the fact that you can choose more than one path through them. That means good choice design is pretty key to the genre.
My experiences with interactive fiction have suggested the following about good choices:
- They matter. (Something significantly different happens as a consequence of having chosen that way.)
- They illuminate character. (A different person, in the same situation, would have chosen another option.)
- They're difficult. (The choice requires significant deliberation: there is no obvious correct answer.)
- There aren't too many of them. (The player is not required to remember every single thing they have ever done, nor do constant choices stall the narrative.)
- They're fair. (The player does not feel punished arbitrarily when they make an "incorrect" choice.)
- They're realistic. (They do not rely on "meta" knowledge the player "ought" not to have: they make sense in-universe as well as out-of-universe.)
... But it's one thing to state those goals, and quite another to actually achieve them.
How can this be done in practice? Are there any techniques to be taught, or is this just something you have to learn the hard way?
To go back to the classic five questions:
Who should make choices?
What should they be about?
When should those choices occur?
Where should they lead?
Why should they exist in the first place?
My experiences with interactive fiction have suggested the following about good choices:
- They matter. (Something significantly different happens as a consequence of having chosen that way.)
- They illuminate character. (A different person, in the same situation, would have chosen another option.)
- They're difficult. (The choice requires significant deliberation: there is no obvious correct answer.)
- There aren't too many of them. (The player is not required to remember every single thing they have ever done, nor do constant choices stall the narrative.)
- They're fair. (The player does not feel punished arbitrarily when they make an "incorrect" choice.)
- They're realistic. (They do not rely on "meta" knowledge the player "ought" not to have: they make sense in-universe as well as out-of-universe.)
... But it's one thing to state those goals, and quite another to actually achieve them.
How can this be done in practice? Are there any techniques to be taught, or is this just something you have to learn the hard way?
To go back to the classic five questions:
Who should make choices?
What should they be about?
When should those choices occur?
Where should they lead?
Why should they exist in the first place?