Sid Meier is quoted as saying that a game is a "series of interesting choices." But what is an interesting choice, and is interesting good enough?
The best choices are never impersonal. A personal choice is one that different people would make differently, but which you would make the same way next time - unless you've changed personally in the interim.
When a choice is purely strategic, it ceases to be a work of art concerned with exploring its player's humanity. This doesn't mean a choice can't have a right answer and a wrong one; it's more about the attitude of the player, as cultivated by this game as well as their environment.
Making the 'wrong' choice for personal reasons may behighly meaningful, but a player's willingness to engage with choices as personal choices, rather than strategic ones, can be eroded if they learn that choosing personally might cause them harm.
If there is a right choice that rewards the player and a wrong choice that causes the player harm, they are being punished by the game for expressing themselves.
Do some games train players not to make personal choices?
Quote from: Play Anything, p165Once the material conditions of an object or scenario are clearly understood, the permutations of all interactions--all the[..] real affordances the thing might allow--represent the perspectives or experiences possible in relation to it.
To make choices, the material conditions must be understood.
Quote from: Play Anything, p171-172advocates of user-centred design often proclaim the design value of visibility.[..]
But user-centered design's idea of visibility asks nothing of the user.[..]
When [playing], we want to cajole limitations into visibility, but not simply to coerce them into doing our bidding.[..]
Fun requires visibility, but not in the way that user-centered design does.