Player choice

What this element is

Player choice is the opportunity players have to shape their own experience through a series of decisions — some of which carry what Flanagan and Nissenbaum call a "moral valence". In practice it covers how much freedom the game grants, how it treats mistakes, and which options are on the table at all.

Why it carries values

Designers decide how much freedom to give, how to handle errors, and what to leave out — and those decisions come straight from their ideas about what is best for learning, safety, ethics and the culture they want the game to embody. Where exploration, self-discovery and growth are the priorities, designers throw open the doors to mistakes and multiple storylines. Where safety, obedience and accuracy take precedence, they limit choices, reward strict compliance and strip away distractions — even when that conflicts with what many consider good game design. Money and technology push on these judgments too.

Patterns from practice

Allowing mistakes

Letting players fail can create the productive frustration that drives learning. The medical training games include "a range of typical wrong choices" (P1) so users can make, face, and remember the consequences of errors. In one South Pacific scenario, ventilating a wheezing child seems sensible by Australian instincts but is wrong in the local measles context — and letting players make exactly that mistake is how they learn. These aren't trivial errors: fail to apply a tourniquet in time and the virtual patient dies. Mistakes teach clinical judgment and responsibility.

The space game treats error as part of scientific exploration. An initial foolproof tether killed any sense of danger, so it became two carabiners, mimicking real life — unclip both and you drift away. But the team tried "not to have... significant consequences for failure that are immediate and irrevocable" (P6), while preserving the feeling that "any little mistake I made could build up into a massive, life-threatening problem" (P6). Allowing some errors and not others is a deliberate balance between encouraging experimentation and respecting the seriousness of the setting.

The learner-driver game sits at the strict end. The team constantly debated "how much do we allow students to go over white lines? And how soon do we tell them?" (P4). Their answer: stop the scenario the moment rules are broken — "as soon as you hit another car, you fail. So it stops the game right at the collision. You do not see any damage" (P4). There are "absolutely no rewards for breaking the rules or experimenting" (P4); the only enjoyable path is driving safely. Swift failure embodies a clear priority — safety above all, in a domain where real experimentation kills "hundreds of young people a year" (P4).

Creating a safe space

Choice can also mean the choice not to participate. The workshop facilitator recognises that people have "different and complicated relationships with the concept of play" (P3), so their approach is "very delicate" (P3): participation is entirely voluntary, including the option to observe or leave, and sharing activities let players decide how much to disclose. The agricultural games researcher makes the same commitment for emergent play — mechanics that "create huge amounts of variety and user interaction and user stories" (P5) are welcome because "it's a safe space to do so" (P5). These designs value consent, accessibility and experimentation without real-world risk.

Limiting distractions

Sometimes choices must go. The learner-driver team used a featureless skid pan to cut external distractions, and removed the horn after students used it to disrupt class — training over momentary amusement. The early childhood assessment games keep the background deliberately boring, because clickable extras would "inject variability into a game that needs to be the same for every kid in order to measure how they do" (P9). Not normal game design — but here fairness means every child gets the same test.

Focusing resources

Constraints force choices about where agency is worth paying for. The learner-driver game cut player characters and car customisation — the hood just changes colour randomly — sacrificing features that promoted "exploration and creativity and expression" (P4) to spend more on safety and compliance. The conservation studio weighed spending "time implementing features so that people can go against the intent of the project" against "polishing the core path... to make that core message more effective" (P7). Testing a game for aid workers revealed "too many options for the level of game literacy that many of the players had" (P7), so they chose to "strip back or simplify" (P7) — cutting choice not just for budget, but because clarity and behaviour change mattered more than maximum agency. Context does the same work: the youth social services game "has to be fun, but it doesn't have to be too much fun, because they're going to be playing it in class... it just has to be more fun than a lesson" (P10), and its dialogue trees deliberately block responses inappropriate for a classroom.

Technology driving design

Sometimes the technology sets the menu. The space game was built around a body-tracking plugin the studio had developed, so player choice centres on grabbing, pulling and orienting — gestures in harmony with astronauts floating in space. The physiotherapy game grew out of a balance board, so choice lives in weight distribution and controlled movement, making the therapeutic objective tangible and fun.

Questions to ask your team

1. Which mistakes are we allowing, which are we blocking — and does that split match what's genuinely dangerous versus what's genuinely instructive?
2. When a player fails, what do they see? Does the feedback teach, punish, or accidentally entertain?
3. Can players opt out, observe, or control how much they disclose? Who might feel unsafe with the choices we're offering?
4. Which options exist only to be misused? (Think of the horn.) What would a bored teenager do with our game in a classroom?
5. Are we cutting player agency for a defensible reason — measurement, safety, player literacy — or just because it's cheaper? Can we say which, out loud?
6. Is our technology dictating the choice palette? If so, does that palette still serve the learning objective?
7. If we gave players more freedom, would the game's core message get stronger or weaker?