Breaking Rules of Player Choice for Emotional Impact
The biggest difference between games and passive media storytelling is the fact that players make interactive choices. They can do certain things, use certain items in their inventory, or not. A lot of good game design rules have been written on how to create proper player choices in games. However, I believe that designers sometimes should break these rules to create emotional impact on the player and tell a serious narrative. The talk will present three rules that should be broken sometimes, present my reasoning how this will improve the emotional impact, and give examples from games where this was executed in a good and bad way.