v1.1: Pizzapatch, and presenting choice fairly

It seems to me that in a game defined by choices, you need to play fair in how you present them. But what does that really mean?

Well, for people to make meaningful choices, they need to have some idea of the consequences of the choice. Otherwise, you might as well be giving people a die, and asking them to choose which number they'd like to roll.

At the same time, if something is a "game" (which this is, however lightly), then there has to be a level of uncertainty and surprise. Otherwise there would be no point playing - we could strip it all back and just say You're in a shop; which items do you buy? Okay, you bought them. Bye!

So if choices need to be meaningfully predictable but also a game-ly chaotic, how do you handle it? For the purposes of this post, let's say there are two types of choice in choice-based games. Exterior choices and interior choices. Exterior choices affect the state of the world around you, they change what happens, they change the 'plot'. Interior choices (I've also heard them called 'flavour choices') are choices that allow the player to create their sense of who they/their character is in the game. Almost all choices are a balance of exterior and interior, but pure interior exists (the 'jaded' dialogue options in Breath of the Wild do nothing to the game), as does pure exterior (picking a map). 

I'd like to suggest that randomness is far more acceptable in exterior choices than interior. Exterior choices involve interaction with the world, and as we all know you can't control the world. So yeah, if you take on the bully in a game and the bully overpowers you, that's your own lookout. You gambled with the world and lost (and often, losing is part of the fun. See all the gruesome deaths thought up in the Fighting Fantasy book series.)

But an interior choice is deeply personal - you are deciding who you are. In that regard, pulling the rug out from under a player feels dicey...

Eggs, Milk was intended to be a pretty light experience, both to make and to play, so it's heavy on interior choices. They don't affect the world, and so we don't have to worry writing loads of permanent changes into that world. So the unpredictability comes from discovering exactly why you buy what you buy. Each choice comes with a sense of the thoughts someone might think as they're picking up the food: stinginess, greed, a wish to live right. So you decide what you pick, and the game (me) rubs some colour in around your character. Colour you might not expect.

And I think that's mostly okay - there's some play between picking food because of a sense of who you are, and discovering a slightly modified sense of who that character is. But there's one instance where the dissonance is too great: the pizza choice.

In the Frozen Aisle, I presented the choice just as: a cheap pizza, meant to reflect almost everyone's attraction to cheap, easy, dirty things. But on the other side of the choice, revealed it was an (unbranded):

...and it's meant to make fun of the term 'meat feast', right? Meat Feast is a ludicrous piece of marketing assonance which has somehow made its way into culture. But I got feedback from someone I know who is vegan, who'd picked tofu earlier in the game (and I had made sure to cater for most diets in all passages), and then gone for something dirty - and had been forced into grabbing a flipping meat feast pizza at the last aisle.

Bit of a facepalmer, that one. Especially since I've been vegan before and hope to do so again. 

Lesson learned: when presenting an interior choice, on a matter of personal ethics, be very clear about how that choice is going to add depth to the player-character.

(and yes, I think you can break this rule on purpose, around a game where an uncertain sense of who you are is The Point. But not in a shopping sim.)

So we have our first patch. The pizza choice now telegraphs its meatiness. And our first taste of feedback. The learning continues.

~James