We tend to forget about some of the inherent binaries present in all games. For instance, in any given game, player actions can be thought of in terms of a dichotomy written into the very foundation of the game: you are either allowed to perform an action, or you are not. Thanks to the limitations of coding, it’s unavoidable that players will run into situations in which the game says “no, you are not allowed to do this.”

It’s a source of frustration for players and developers alike—how can players have as much freedom as possible within the programming limitations of games?

There’s actually a fairly simple principle that games can follow: a game should never say no to a reasonable request from a player. Simple in theory, yes, but is this even realistically possible? Read on to see why I think this is an achievable and important goal.

In the world of videogames, what can be considered a reasonable request? In essence, a reasonable request is any action that a player wants to perform that has some sort of implied possibility given the context of the game itself.

For instance, consider the recent Uncharted 2, which can, in many ways, be considered a fairly linear, scripted experience. In it, the game’s rules are fairly clear in terms of what the player is and is not allowed to do. Certain doors cannot be opened, and with no reason for players to try to make use of them, trying to open them would be an unreasonable request.

At the same time, there are a few surfaces throughout the game that Drake cannot climb on, and no good reason is provided by the game for their uselessness. A certain ledge is simply not to Drake’s liking, and therefore he will refuse to grab on.

This is where things get sticky, separating acceptable game limitations from developmental problems or laziness. In a linear game where rules tend to be defined quite clearly, any instance of the game breaking its own rules takes players down the path of frustration – a path that’s not always easy to get off of. Sure, there are valid reasons to break such rules, such as keeping players on the correct path, but the result is that certain game elements feel broken.

Games that have a more open, non-linear design can be more challenging for both players and developers in terms of establishing and following the game’s design rules. With so many more things that a player can do, how is he expected to glean what is and is not acceptable, and how is a developer expected to program for every reasonable player request?

Bethesda’s Fallout 3 is a great example of both the successes and failures of designing a game around player requests. In nearly all cases, players are given the opportunity to explore anything that they can see. Most doors actually lead somewhere, and most set pieces can be interacted with. When the player says, “I want to go there,” or “I want to use this,” the game is normally happy to oblige.

But when this design does err, it tends to be more egregious than the failures of more linear experiences. Nothing was more disappointing than exploring the city of Washington D.C. in Fallout 3 only to have many of my exploratory efforts thwarted for various reasons, the worst of which being an invisible wall accompanied by a message simply stating “You can’t go this way.” Well, why the hell not?

It’s easy to understand the extreme frustration that a situation such as this can bring about. Fallout 3 is, at its core, a game about exploration; nearly all elements of that game, from the environmental design to the quest design, beg the player to explore. So free exploration is a reasonable request based on the game’s design, and the refusal to let the player do this is a rather serious problem – one that led some players to give up on Fallout 3 altogether.

The solution, as suggested above, is to ensure that games never say no to a reasonable request from a player. It’s a simple concept with no easy method of implementation. The time needed to program for every possible situation would be astronomical, not to mention the incredible number of bugs that this sort of freedom would bring about.

There are two basic ways that a game can avoid pissing players off with constant denials of their humble requests.

The first is one that I mention with more than a little hesitation: the removal of the player’s freedom. On paper, it sounds like a cop out for the developer and a poor play experience for the gamer. However, scaling back on a game’s freedom isn’t always a bad thing…if the freedom isn’t given to the player at all.

The Silent Hill series has always had a somewhat silly approach to doors. There are plenty of doors in each entry in the series, and only a select few of them can be opened, with the others offering explanations that leave something to be desired. Doors jam, and locks are broken. Despite that fire axe in your hands, you won’t be passing through.

However, despite how ridiculous the explanations are, the player is never once deceived into believing that these doors serve any other purpose. There’s no reason to go beyond them; while the shortest path between A and B in Fallout 3 may be blocked by an inexplicable barrier, there’s no expectation set up by the Silent Hill games that all doors should be traversable.

Now, if a game like Fallout 3 were to greatly reduce the number of buildings that could be explored for its next installment, the backlash would be massive. Here, we do expect a certain amount of freedom simply because it has been given to us in the past.

But for those games that get to make a first impression, or those that haven’t offered great freedom in the past, limiting freedom and letting players know what the rules are is almost always going to provide a better experience than attempting to give players the freedom to do what they want, but having to tell them “no” at every turn.

The second method is to give as much freedom to the player as possible and hope for the best. This is more applicable when considering where a player can go, as it’s impossible to give a player complete freedom in regards to action: Batman can’t launch three batarangs while performing a flying kick just because your overeager mind wills it.

But Oblivion did a pretty fair job of giving you a world where anything that you saw was truly reachable. Sure, you still had a map with boundaries, slopes that were too steep to climb, and other restrictive boundaries, but it rarely felt cheap, as if the game was simply pulling a Gandalf at Khazad-dûm.

This, of course, isn’t something that’s easy to pull off. Hours and hours of planning and good design must go into the creation of an open world that doesn’t feel overly limiting and isn’t a horrible mess of bugs. Freedom is a fine art, and its successful implementation isn’t something that can be approached with a pedestrian resolve.

Do it right, though, and you have a game that will stick with players. New situations will arise that consistently surprise and awe the player, leading to exclamations of “Did that really just happen?” We all know the feeling of wonderment that games can give us, and the easiest way to achieve that is to give players freedom and allow them to do things that they couldn’t have imagined were possible.

I don’t know that we will ever see games that give us true freedom: the sort of unrestricted badassery that allows us to do nothing short of everything. Still, it’s worthwhile to look not only at what games allow us to do, but what they don’t allow us to do, criticizing each category equally. By levying more demands at the games that we play, we can encourage the sorts of experiences that say “yes” to the player far more than they say “no.”