In a Gamasutra opinion piece today, CEO and creative director of Divide by Zero Games James Portnow offered his thoughts on one of the less conspicuous – but no less daunting – impediments to the maturation of the gaming medium.

Explaining that basic decision-making comprises one of the chief fundaments of design, he further distills the overarching category into the distinct domains of ‘choice’ and ‘problem’, and suggests that a failure to differentiate between the two has thus far curtailed the artistic evolution of games in general.

A problem, he writes, consists in a scenario with an unequivocally correct or otherwise preferable outcome.  Borrowing from Blizzard’s ludicrously-popular MMO, he provides the following example:

‘in World of Warcraft deciding what gear to wear is a problem and not a choice. Why? Because for any given objective in World of Warcraft there is a set of gear that will best facilitate accomplishing that objective.’

By contrast, a choice encompasses a range of options which either are equally desirable, or admit of no meaningful comparison to one another:

‘Choosing between an apple and an orange is a choice. Choosing between friends or lovers, choosing between roses and lilies, choosing between anything that’s six to one half dozen — these are choices.’

Neither species of decision, he stresses further, is necessarily better than the other, but he feels that the tendency to confound the two has become a very real obstacle to games’ development.  Pointing to the critically-acclaimed Bioshock and Mass Effect, he argues that many of the ‘choices’ with which each confronts the player have in all reality been chained to the game mechanics themselves, and thereby reduced merely to problems:

‘how many times have you been offered a choice to be nice to an old man or to ignore him and had the reward for being nice to him be X experience (or ammo or money) and the reward for ignoring him be Y experience (where Y is less then X, and often zero)?

‘This decision is a problem and it’s pretty automatic, you simply ask yourself “Do I want that experience, or would I rather spend my time doing other things?” Helping the old man never even enters into the equation.’

And that gaming so consistently falls short of a more genuine representation of the ‘human condition’, he feels, has barred it from the hallowed halls in which society has enshrined literature and cinema:

‘In order to become an art we have to be able to address “the human experience”. There are a whole range of human experiences that are better expressed through choices then[sic] through problems. If we want to move this medium forward we have to be able to distinguish between the two and choose the one that is appropriate for the experience we are trying to craft.’

His insightful article can be found in its entirety at Gamasutra, with a more entertaining presentation of his idea available at YouTube for those who live in abject terror of the written word.

Source: Gamasutra