a series of personal choices

[droqen]

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?

[droqen]

Once 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.

[droqen]

advocates 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.