Suppose your computer games, in addition to the long difficult path to your level’s goal, also had little side-paths that you could use—directly in the game, as corridors—that would bypass all the enemies and take you straight to the goal, offering along the way all the items and experience that you could have gotten the hard way. And this corridor is always visible, out of the corner of your eye.
Even if you resolutely refused to take the easy path through the game, knowing that it would cheat you of the very experience that you paid money in order to buy—wouldn’t that always-visible corridor, make the game that much less fun? Knowing, for every alien you shot, and every decision you made, that there was always an easier path?
This exact phenomenon happens in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you can get around almost every obstacle in the game by using the ventilation system. The frustration that results is apparent in this video essay/analysis: it undermines all of the otherwise well-designed systems in the game in spite of not actually interfering with the player’s ability to engage with them.
I wonder if, alongside the “loss of rejected options” proposition, a reason that extra choices impact us is the mental bandwidth they take up. If the satisfaction we derive from a choice is (to a first-order approximation) proportional to our intellectual and emotional investment in the option we select, then having more options leaves less to invest as soon as the options go from being free to having any cost at all. As an economic analogy, a committee seeking to design a new product or building must choose between an initial set of designs. The more designs there are, the more resources must go into the selection procedure, and if the committee’s budget is fixed, then this will remove resources that could have improved the product further down the line.
This exact phenomenon happens in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you can get around almost every obstacle in the game by using the ventilation system. The frustration that results is apparent in this video essay/analysis: it undermines all of the otherwise well-designed systems in the game in spite of not actually interfering with the player’s ability to engage with them.
I wonder if, alongside the “loss of rejected options” proposition, a reason that extra choices impact us is the mental bandwidth they take up. If the satisfaction we derive from a choice is (to a first-order approximation) proportional to our intellectual and emotional investment in the option we select, then having more options leaves less to invest as soon as the options go from being free to having any cost at all. As an economic analogy, a committee seeking to design a new product or building must choose between an initial set of designs. The more designs there are, the more resources must go into the selection procedure, and if the committee’s budget is fixed, then this will remove resources that could have improved the product further down the line.