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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5185779" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's almost impossible for a video game with current technology to provide meaningful choices to a player, because a video game is very limited in its ability to imagine new meaningful scenarios in responce to player choice.  A skilled video game maker can provide the illusion of meaningful choice, while still basically moving the player along a predefined path, but this is not the same thing as actually giving the player meaningful choices.  A video game maker can perhaps accomodate a few meaningful choices by essentially creating two, three, or four parallel games each resulting from a particular meaninful decision, but there is a limit to how much the video game maker can do this because content creation is so expensive in a video game (relative to the cost in a PnP game).  Consider for example how expensive dialogue is to create in a video game, compared to the cost of dialogue creation in a PnP game.  A human GM can cheaply spin off believable dialogue and in that one seen provide many more meaningful 'dialogue choices' than any video game is currently capable of providing.So generally speaking, a video game maker gets more 'bang for his buck' by providing a single story line with nearly 4 times the content of any one story line in a game that has 4 meaningful choices resulting in separate stories.For these reasons, you simply shouldn't be looking to video games for a model of how to offer meaningful choices to a player.  Video games almost inherently can't offer meaningful choices to a player.There is another thing that bothers me in this is, and that is that a sandbox doesn't necessarily provide meaningful choices to the player either.  Sandboxes can provide meaningful choices, but they can also simply provide non-linearity, which isn't necessarily the same thing.  If I must do A and B before I do C, a non-linear design lets me do either A or B first.  But simply having the option to go left and then go right, or go right and then go left, isn't necessarily a meaningful choice in itself.  In order for the choice to be meaningful, going to B first must meaningful impact the story in A (and C!), and vica versa.   Many sandboxes are simply isolated and disconnected events without any great meaning.  Computer sandboxes to the extent that they remain pure sandboxes and not sanboxes 'on the side' of a larger plot are in fact frequently like this.  The sand box elements in many computer games are often little more than hamster wheels to turn in between scenes in the main plot.   Now, I'm not saying that necessarily bad design, but it shouldn't be your inspiration for providing meaningful choices.</blockquote>

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