gameslol

“Freedom”, “open worlds” and “endless possibilities” are commonly heard buzzwords in gaming. The Peter Molyneux playbook of hype relies entirely on painting a picture of a world in which you can do anything. 

But sometimes having too much choice can be bad. Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink, and more recently Outliers) often talks about a study which tested whether offering more choice in a store would lead to more people buying a product, i.e. making a choice.

[Researchers] wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs. But [the researchers] found the opposite to be true. 30% of those who stopped by the 6 choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3% of those who stopped by the bigger [24 choice] booth bought anything… If you are given too many choices… than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed.

Another psychological experiment often cited by Gladwell measured people’s happiness with choices they’ve made. It turned out that people were actually less satisfied with choices they make if they were selected from a larger set of options. The more alternatives are presented to us, the more we worry about whether we made the right choice, and the more likely we are to have regrets.

Of course, in a game maybe you do actually want players to have countless choices so that they can experiment, explore and discover. On the other hand, you clearly want to avoid making players too uncomfortable or, even worse, paralyzing them with choice.

Have you ever been paralyzed by a game? I’m currently playing EVE Online for the first time and I’m feeling nearly overwhelmed by all the options available. My experience with starting EVE basically reminds me a lot of this Penny Arcade cartoon. There’s immediately so much to do that I don’t know where to start.

But it’s also possible to become overwhelmed within a smaller individual component of a game. On my second mission in EVE I discovered that my lasers had no charge anymore, so I had to go into the market (a fairly complex interface complete with historical price graphs and everything) and was faced with having to choose from dozens of different charges. Probably any of them would have sufficed, but the number of choices available was making me really unsure, and for quite a while took me out of the flow. I’d have liked if that game funneled me through a narrower possibility space before unleashing me into the open world. 

Maybe someone could repeat the aforementioned jam experiment but with an RPG character creation screen. Players so often — and in my view, rightfully — complain about having to decide important stats and properties for their character before the game has even started yet. Choosing from ten races, thirteen signs, 21 classes, and distributing points along 21 skills is asking a lot from players who generally just want to start playing (those are the starting choices of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which isn’t even a super hardcore RPG).

I’m wondering what the differences are between choosing from a set of very similar choices, or choosing from a set of dramatically different ones. Malcolm Gladwell likes to talk about the bazillion types of spaghetti sauce that exist today. What’s the difference between the rich & meaty and the chunky garden Ragú spaghetti sauce? The consequences of such a choice are unclear and it can be tough to make a decision (unless you don’t care or switch to George W. Bush Decider Mode). On the other hand, it’s a lot easier and more meaningful choosing between spaghetti sauce or mayonnaise. You can clearly do other things with the mayo than with the sauce. Wait, why am I talking about condiments?

Anyway, keeping that in mind, I quite like the notion of phasing the decision making process. For instance, in an RPG you can select a basic class (e.g. knight/wizard/thief) at the start and then gradually define more aspects of your character over time. Some games allow you to evolve your character class (that’s just a link to a random example) and pass it through various transformations. This allows you to make a choice between a small set of dramatically different options at the beginning and then gradually refine that choice over time.  

Similarly, while I know that the whole point of EVE is that it’s really hardcore, as a player I’d have been more comfortable with having to choose from maybe three distinctly different types of charges, decide which one is right for my ship, and then have the option later to install a wide variety of mods to tweak the stats of the charge. Or even simpler, if EVE gave me a ship at the start that doesn’t support 90% of the available charges, which just causes them to be greyed out in the menus.

As a side note, choice (or at least, the way choices are presented) can also be an issue from a usability point of view. Usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen say that presenting no more than seven options in a list at a time is optimal. People can easily keep up to seven things in memory, but beyond that and you have to spend a lot more time scanning back and forth.

There’s a good post about the paradox of choice at Presentation Zen. Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote a book about it, which I haven’t read, but it may be interesting. He suggests that more choices actually lead to less happiness, and if we substitute happiness with the word “fun”, maybe the same is true for games. I don’t think it’s far out to say that sometimes reducing the number of options can actually lead to more focused and elegant gameplay.

Image is (c) copyright Penny Arcade.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.