hook your player with an early choice

how to make choices seem like they matter? make one matter, a lot, a little after the choice is made, early in your game

1. Write a choice where people will -feel- something when making it. For example, performing a good deed on behalf of someone else, where most players are likely to pick that option due to the character being presented as deserving of our help.

2. Ideally, have this choice lead to a follow up choice of -how- we help. So not just intervening on behalf of a character experiencing rudeness for example, but -how- we intervene, in a way that lets us A) express personality and B) make the choice linger more emphatically in the player’s memory

3. Have the encounter end however suits you best — it’s fine to have some variation here — but hold off on delivering a full resolution to the situation in that instant in time. A ticking clock such as other characters or yourself having to be somewhere, or another event interrupting this one, can work well if handled believably.

4. Have within 5-10 minutes of narrative content an outcome to that situation (and if non-narrative gameplay would mean this occurs over an hour later, err on the side of earlier so the player doesn’t not forget)

5. Deliver the true consequence to the above: that, for example, our helping or means of helping has made things -worse- somehow, or that the status quo we believed earlier was not the case, in a way that will make the player feel troubled in future about how “easy” your game’s moral questions are to solve. If we intervened against a rude parent, maybe the kid has things worse now. If we recommended a particular plea for a client, maybe they got a huge sentence thrown at them by a judge.

6. This only works if the player cares about the character, the nature of our intervention, and the consequence — meaning you need to skilfully execute all three in a way that doesn’t just rely on the gaminess of it all, but the kind of narrative appeal that would have worked well in any medium even if it had been linear.

I recommend this exercise early in my game writing workshops, and even build a soft version of this directly in to the conversation format in the 101 Branching Dialogue class. I did a version of this in my very first game writing gig for No Man’s Sky and practice variants to this day.

The first line I wrote for No Man's Sky

The rationale for all this? You bootstrap a sense of time, memory, characters independently doing things off-screen, a morality and consequence closer to the real world sense of such things, and therefore all-in-all, a greater sense of your game’s intelligence when it comes to presenting reality and human beings. It is sort of like a twist, although rather than a recontextualisation of the past events, it’s revealing that the player’s -will- and -intent- does not 1:1 automatically translate to reality. Even then, it can be combined with a twist: perhaps the person you assisted was actually not worthy of that help or even actively malicious, and this now entangles you in future.

Of course, there are plenty of ways of doing the above, and it doesn’t always have to be so rapid — but don’t forget, players rarely finish games, and often won’t even make it past the first hour. Here, you are blazing out of the gate with something that shows players your game is properly playing with the player — not just giving the player a power fantasy or ignoring them, but giving an actual game of “opposition” in a sense of human agency. It could have a big impact on the actual branching of the game if you want, but it’s not necessary for the effect to be large, because that’s the entire point.

Your goal is to get the player’s experience to vary, to wow and awe them, NOT just to impress yourself with your own plot variations and branching paths for the sake of branching. And to practice doing this economically, early, and in relation to a character we are made to care about early, is itself a demonstration of so many other skills that it seems to me a practice worth taking time over.

For more on players and branching, see also: