Player Choice

The venerable Sid Meyer says that a game is a series of interesting choices. What makes a choice interesting? It has to be non-obvious. All alternatives need to be viable, but not necessarily optimal. It has to be possible for the player to see the results of the choice. If you make a choice, but cannot tell if you made the right or the wrong one, you may as well make a random choice. And the choice has to be significant. If the result of the choice has no real impact on the game, then the player will not care for it.

I think that there is a lot of merit to this, even though I don't believe that all entertainment in games comes from choices, as many arguably successful games rely on fast reactions, hand-eye coordination and timing to make their core gameplay fun and interesting. There are, however, a lot of elements in games that would not fare so well if they were only considered from that perspective. As an example, in order to open certain doors in God of War, the player needs to mash a button repeatedly for a period of time. This is not a feature that is unique to God of War, but plagues many games. Personally, I'm at a loss to explain how this can be appealing to anyone. The first choice you, as the player, make is if you want to open the door, or leave it be. This is not much of a choice, since there is little reason why you would not want to open the door, as you have to go through it in order to advance to the next area. As the player don't really have a choice, the choice isn't very interesting. After deciding to open the door, the player has to decide if he or she wants to continue mashing the button or not, again, given that the player wants to open the door, there are again few viable options. If you stop mashing, the door closes and you have to start over again.

How could you make this feature more interesting, putting interesting choices in it? First of all, ask yourself if it is really necessary. The overall effect of the door is to prevent the player from leaving the current room before all enemies are eliminated. That can be achieved by keeping the door locked while there are still enemies, for instance by letting the last enemy drop the key. Another alternative is to have an infinite number of enemies, and have the player drive them back enough to give him- or herself time to open the door (using an animation that takes time instead of the button mashing), and the ability to abort if the situation prevents a completion.