Sharing this because it resonates with several thoughts I've had in recent months: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMV4PIEIKY4 titled, "The Paradox of Choice -- Why More Is Less." It's over an hour long, but IMO well worth the time.

A terribly simplified summary would be: "good defaults are invaluable;" but at a deeper level, I wonder if this whole community might suffer from some of the pitfalls described here.

This has given me a lot to chew on. Thanks for the post!

It's a popular (and no doubt lucrative) tune for that particular breed of "expert" to be playing, I've noticed.

I violently strongly disagree. As might, perhaps, anyone who has actually lived through very tough times, with very little in terms of freedom of choice to be seen. Oh, the tyrrany of choice! Woe are we! :rolleyes: Gimme a break.

Anyway...

Tangential: I'm *still* not going to use Chrome, until it permits the vast - and vital! - freedom to which I am accustomed, thanks to Mozilla and those who in turn support it (and us). Regardless of what psychobabble Google trawls out.

:P

What freedom are you talking about? I don't follow...

Tejon,

Some thoughts on choice, mods and game design...

Mod Use: With so many mods to choose from, and so many of them being good but incompatible with each other, the mod-using community certainly behaves the way the lecturer describes. Extensive research to find the "best" mod, nagging doubts about the final choice, never reaching a state of "good enough..." "Shopping" for mods certainly mimics the experience of shopping in a market crowded with options. The saving grace for me is that this whole tinkering thing is a pleasant hobby for me, so I actually enjoy the large number of choices, the research, etc.

Game Design: I think this idea of limiting the number of choices is key. My favorite way to see it implemented is by making each decision the player has to make into a choice between comparable alternatives. By comparable, I don't mean similar, I mean that they can be compared: numbers that match up. So, should I choose the Thief birthsign or the Atronach birthsign? If I can look at the resulting numbers of each choice, I can meaningfully compare the two alternatives. A good question, then, is how many birthsigns is a good number to choose from? And how does one arrive at this number?

I believe a good rule of thumb is to use groups of choices in sevens and threes. An example:

Create a character:
Three menus: Attributes, Skills, Feats.
Seven attributes to make choices among. Limited number of points to spend.
Three groups of skills, each group having seven skills. The points you've spent in Attributes make your choices between skills meaningful.
No more than seven Feats become available to choose from dependent on the Attributes and Skills you have chosen.

Apparently two cups of coffee isn't enough for my brain to squeeze out anything more in-depth or even coherent than that. Suffice it to say, I agree: the concepts in this lecture are relevant to this community. Thanks for sharing.

gothemasticator

I mostly agree with lecturer, as he shows scientific studies. I have only two things that I don't agree.

"Freedom is choice."
I strongly disagree with this one. Freedom is ∞. Where choice is any limited numbers of choices. The paralyzing effect won't happen when customer already made his mind about something. Suddenly coming and asking for choices would be the most annoying thing ever.

"Choice is good."
No it is not. The studies show this too. I'm playing The Witcher and my first choice was my first regret. I think this will apply to rest of my gameplay. (I will derail here to games.) The consequences are reality of life, gaming is something else. I don't want to spend my time on choices and regrets. Give me a system that picking a choice can be done in real-time in players mind. Showing choices in designer's/writer's minds would kill it because then outcome-regret will be seen as a punishment from them. The consequence must be a result of my bad choice and my only.

Mods are about giving the freedom to do anything. The modability of the game will contribute to game's freedom. What would happen if Dark Messiah has a SDK? How Mount&Blade has became this successful?

I also believe in defaults. This is why Windows is Windows, why MAC is MAC and Linux is Linux. Different levels of compatibility and usability. A perfect system would be where compatibility wouldn't be a problem at all so all focus can be transfered to usability.

Stopped watching after he made the second joke about soccer. Allright, i watched the whole thing. The message is very profound, so thank you for sharing.

You might want to actually watch this. Some fun irony: I've lived in what the U.S. considers poverty my entire life; I've been reduced to couch-surfing on a couple of occasions; and I've lived without electricity or sewage. I'm intimately aware of what's wrong with too little choice, and that's not ignored here. Don't let anti-Google politics blind you, this lecturer is not their employee and he does not throw out a shallow one-answer agenda flog. Poverty is directly addressed, in fact. Too few is bad. It's just that too many is bad too; and the important thing here is a lot of empirical evidence of this, and strong arguments as to why.


Clean patterns like this are very, very attractive and sometimes you can get away with them, but be careful. A structure too clean can easily turn into a straight jacket which prevents you doing what's better because you're too busy doing what's consistent, and then the hobgoblins win. (I'm hardly immune to this, myself!)


He presents this as the prevailing dogma, and spends a lot of time arguing against it. So on this one you actually do agree.


Now, here there's an interesting point. There are two very, very different types of gamers: those who want games to mirror life, where decisions have consequences; and those who want exactly the opposite, where you can pretty much just do whatever and enjoy yourself without worries. And like most "there are two" comments, this is bull; really, we all harbor a bit of each preference, but sometimes we lean more strongly in one direction. And in the same way as the topic subject, you can't just peg the dial on one side or the other; you need to find a balance. Would Mount & Blade be fun if you had the option of an F-15? Probably. Would it stay fun for more than twenty minutes? Probably not.


Hehe... I browsed to this last night after checking up on the state of Smalltalk. Alan Kay very much agrees with you, and laments the fact that we got it right several times in the '60s. (He blames MS-DOS and C++. I hate them too, but it's not actually their fault. That's another subject entirely.)


Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure there's not a single soccer joke in there.

True. However, when I compare the character creation systems of Arcanum and Temple of Elemental Evil, I wish the latter were more like the former. TOEE is a D&D-based system, and, like most D&D-based systems, simply sprawls with options. Telling to me is that the ubiquitous advice for new players is to create a party based on a simple formula: warrior, rogue, offensive mage, healing cleric. What the players have figured out how to do is bring some categorical organization to an initial glut of options. Even so, the available lists of spells for your mage (or is wizard better?) is dizzying, as is the list of available feats for your warrior (or should he be a berserker? a wizard-killer?).

Arcanum's system, on the other hand, does indeed have a huge amount of choices, but they're organized better. The races are all quite distinct from each other (well, with the exception of half-elves). Once that choice is made, backgrounds become available to further customize. The tech and magic trees are huge, but essentially you make a choice between the two and then work primarily within that tree, and each tree is organized into colleges and ranks.

What's I love so much about Arcanum's system is that every time you make a choice you are presented with a menu of available options that is comfortably scaled.

More basically, I guess what I caution against is sprawling lists of options - or a system in which too many sets of choices are presented all at once. You end up with that grocery-aisle thousand-yard stare, hypnotized by the several dozen varieties of ranch dressing. Which one will taste best with my dual-weilding dwarven berserker?

A closer-to-home example: trying to customize the Oblivion XP .ini file is tough. I love that I have that much control, but it really is tough to hold all that info in the mind simultaneously when trying to create a balanced result. It would certainly make the mod easier to use (and perhaps "market") if there were a menu of various pre-set options, customized for different playstyles: battlemage, thief, fighter, etc. But you know all about customizable .ini files and juggling large lists of variables and interreleations, don't you?

gothemasticator

EDIT: Oblivion XP is not one of Tejon's mods. Hope I didn't seem to imply that it is.

gtm

Interesting.
The real problem with choice is that it usually isn't. A choice of 10 different colours of bad TV receiver is still a bad TV, not a choice.
If you are offered 50 channels of TV station but don't care for any of them, that isn't a choice.
One bad option? One hundred bad options? What's the difference?

Computer games are an excellent example. Every year that has gone by, out come fewer and fewer titles I'm interested in. Choice is diminished all the time, as I'm told I have MORE choice. I'm not stupid. (grin). Offering me 50 different things I don't want is not a choice, it's dismissive. By preference, offer me ten things I think good. Failing that, offer me one thing that's good. Don't tell me that the right to pick up any number of pieces of rubbish is 'choice'.

An interesting lecture that. I'm on the fence as to whether I agree or not with it, sweeping statements tend not to do justice to the complexity of any arguement that they are presented on, so it's a bit of both good and bad for me.



Actually, that is choice. It's just not a very appealing or wide range of choice, but you cannot deny that you are being presented with a choice (as above) as to which of the 50 TV stations to watch. You may not like any of them, and may not watch them, but that is simply one of the choices available, and the one you took. It's an example of how being able to choose does not make the choice a good thing. Is it not said that in war, one must choose the lesser of too weevils? In such circumstances, neither outcome you choose is particularily good, but it's all relative, and as with all choice, ultimately comes down to personal judgement. It could be argued that in such a case of a choice to be made between several undesirable things, that said ability to choose is good, but then it could also be seen as bad. Few arguments that are not based on absolutes can be unequivocal, simply because of their nature, and choice is among those that are not.

Personally, the 50 TV stations is an example of a 'good' choice - it's easy to see what is on offer, and easy to make up your mind. What makes lots of choice 'bad' is when it is presented poorly, with little information given on each of the choices, and how they differ. An informed choice is a 'good' choice to make, whereas "pick a hand" is not. I can't think of a situation in which you can get too much choice, so long as the choice is presented clearly and allows you to make an informed decision. Unfortunately, presenting a choice clearly is hard, and presenting it to a range of people is much more so, so it's very rarely seen in life.

Also infringing on the problem of choice is whether or not the person choosing knows what they want. Very few people do, which leads to lots of indecision, and the creation of the concept of being forced to make a bad choice (do you really want to watch TV, or is it just something that does what you really want (ie. is relaxing)?).

Back to how this concept of choice affects ES modding:

It can be argued that mod users have too much choice, simply because it makes it harder to find what you really want, because on a personal level Sturgeon's (2nd) Law shows that the vast majority of what is available is not what we want ('crud' is in the eye of the beholder, after all). Though SL is not fact, it's pretty good as an example of how things work out. On the other hand, if mod users didn't have the level of choice they do, they would be missing out on the arrays of alternatives to (almost) every type of mod on offer, and so may be 'made' to choose a mod that they would rather not have to use if their dream mod was on offer, but it's not, so they'll make do.

As for 'good defaults are invaluable', I can agree with this. It's hard to get good defaults, but unless you have them, people won't know the nature and level of choice that you are giving them. For instance, you could have a setting that makes actors more agressive, but without guidelines on the appropriate variable type and range of values for that variable, it would be pretty much useless, and without a 'baseline' that people can work off, very few would take the time to use it, since they'd essentially have to find the 'baseline' themselves, and then further tweak from there, which takes time, and they don't want to spend time doing that when they could be playing.

I've put in such settings with a default, but no guides as to appropriate alternatives, into EW and All Natural, and can see the lack of usage myself, because the only time I hear about them are "what are suitable values for ___?", and I can only reply "I don't know", because I haven't taken the time to find out myself. It's a bit unfair too, as finding suitable defaults might take me an hour, but then I can share them with the users, whereas if I leave things to the backflow of information, I might end up user 2000 user hours if 2000 users all try to do the same, which is really a waste of time.

So yes, choice is good - so long as you know what you're choosing, and what you want.

Bit of a ramble there, but I haven't posted anything substantial in ages, and it took my mind off the maths I'm supposed to be doing...

EDIT: I realise that I've used words with several meanings with their different meanings above. When I say choice, I can be referring to either the ability to make a decision to pick between several available options, the decision itself, or any of the options. There's probably a few others like that too, so it probably reads a bit confusing, and I've probably changed my stance as I wrote it, but hey. :shrug:

Ah yes, the illusion of choice. A great example is our supermarket shelves. If you've ever read the omnivore's dilemma, you'll know what I'm talking about. You see before you a vast array of items, all different colors shapes and sizes, and yet it's mostly made of the same things, wheat, corn, soy, sugar, and fat.

What is a miracle is the incredible variety of raw fruits and vegetables. Did you know that there are over 7500 cultivars of apples alone?

In games, I like being able to make choices. I also occasionally like not making choices. Compare morrowind to halo for example. Both are amazing games. One has an extreme amount of choice, the other has very very little choice, and yet they are both some of the greatest games ever made.

I think what really matters is the quality of gameplay, the story, and all the little things added up that truly makes the difference between a fun experience and something that you'll never play again. How much freedom you allow the player is a matter of preference and what you feel is right for the mod.

Oh boy, I've done my share of Settings That Never Get Used. nGCD is rife with them. I'm not sure whether they hurt anything, though, because I did spend a crazy amount of time working out solid defaults for them; so if they sit there untouched, no harm is done. And I try to lay out my (long) .ini files such that the most common things people will want to adjust are near the top (and are preferably booleans), and the more advanced but well-explored tweaks (usually floating-point) are at the bottom. I also try to break the really long ones into categories, and do this on a smaller scale within each section, particularly the "booleans at the top" rule so it's easy to shut off entire features. I think with such careful presentation, chopping the decision-space into manageable chunks, the paralysis issue at least can be mostly avoided (and IIRC, Schwartz recommends Google do something similar with search results near the end of th lecture).

On the subject of "what choice means," I've got a personal guideline based on making up a narrower definition of that word and a couple of others. I think of a choice as being something you're allowed to do, and a decision as being something you're forced to do, and I try to keep the terms mutually exclusive when I'm thinking about how to present options. An option can be either a choice or a decision, or sometimes neither. Covering the last point first, an option which is neither a choice nor a decision is probably a compatibility patch: if you also use Mod X, set this option to 1 to prevent your computer exploding. These have zero impact because you've already made the choice to use Mod X (though if you didn't know about Mod X, learning about it can create a decision of its own).

Then, when designing my options, I try to make them choices whenever possible. Decisions are frequently necessary, but when they aren't, they should be avoided. To be a choice, an option must have a universally acceptable default (except for "compatibility mode" cases) and must make this fact clear. However, beyond the assertion "it's safe to ignore this," I think choices can be otherwise poorly documented without hurting anything; see paragraph 1. The numbers that you exposed just because you could, despite seeing no good reason to adjust them, are still a fun toy for other hackers; you just need to put up a bunch of signs saying "nothing to see here unless you enjoy exploring the guts of things" to make it clear that there are no relevant decisions to be made. Perhaps others will discover interesting uses for those options, and they'll probably share them, but that amounts to a new well-documented default so there's still no harm done.

When there's no way to make a default which doesn't spark discontent from a noticeable number of people, you're left with a decision. The first decision is yours, as the designer: provide the option, or just let that vocal minority be unhappy? Modding is by its nature a social endeavor, so even though we're ostensibly "doing this for ourselves and sharing," actively deciding to slam doors in faces is not a pleasant thought for most of us. But the fact is, sometimes it's the right thing to do; after all, in most cases there are other options at the "pick a mod" scale, and a big neon sign saying "this one's not for you" can tremendously simplify that decision for the user while removing the necessity for everyone who uses your mod to make a decision about the option. (There are also purely practical cases for saying no, such as "great idea but I'd basically have to code two separate mods to achieve that.") Whether to simply leave an option out is, by the way, an incredibly subjective decision. Your available development time, your available tech support time, how much you like higher download numbers (be honest, we all do!), how much you personally care about the option regardless of user popularity, and countless other factors are involved. There's no applicable formula, and no measure of whether you got it right. It's exactly the sort of decision you don't want to force on the user!

Sometimes it's a nearly 50-50 split with no technical barriers and you're quite certain that both 50's will enjoy everything else about your mod. The final failure mode for decision ablation is brutal, rigorous documentation. If everyone's got to deal with this option, make damn sure they know every permutation so they can decide with confidence. Include profiling suggestions: if you like X, pick Y. If you can't just make it a boolean, provide a chart of what you expect to be the most commonly desired settings. Decisions are burdensome; minimize that burden. If you find yourself unable to properly document an option, chances are you've misjudged its gravity and can demote it to a choice or non-option.

I expect a review of my various .ini files will reveal that I've frequently failed to practice what I preach. But it's worth noting that although this is the first time I've clearly articulated all this, it's been pretty stable in my mind for a while now. None of this was sparked or solidified by the Schwartz lecture, which is why I opened this thread by saying that the lecture resonated with stuff I'd already been thinking. Perhaps it's just the tip of a much differently shaped iceberg; perhaps it's an attractive but meritless philosophical dead end; but independently arriving at similar conclusions is usually a positive sign.

Side note: this is all about configuration, stuff you do before you start playing. During gameplay, decisions are frequently more fun than choices. (Blind decisions are still usually bad.)

Choice eh? OK, try this choice:-
You can have any one of ten beautiful cars. Nice upholstery. No wheels or engines; and you can't get spare parts for them.
Am I giving you meaningful choice or just mocking?

If you aren't actually (for whatever reason) interested in the 'choice' it's no choice at all.

I wouldn't quite agree. The 50 tv stations thing has a lot of 'dead choices'- options straight-up made redundant by others. If what you're looking for is to be informed, you're going to get a straight-up better result from picking BBC News than ITV. I'd say the more important thing in choice is that all the choices you're presented with are equally good- in many situations you won't be able to properly assess the range you've been given without experience, and in games often the only way to take that into account is to start again. See also: 3rd Edition D&D, where there were entire classes that turned out to be really awful, but until you knew your way around the system you couldn't evaluate them properly, even though all the information was clearly presented to you at the point of choice. You might only play a Samurai once, but that still means you're stuck with an awful, unfun character until they die (which thankfully will be soon).

It's even more of an issue as in many situations if you make a poor choice to begin with you're not going to gain experience of what a good choice is like and still not really be able to differentiate the two. In an RPG you have other characters with other choices around for some of your options, but as a PC in a videogame you have plenty of options you'll never see NPCs exercise and if you choose poorly you'll never know what the others were like. And in a real-world example, if you only buy tabloids you'll probably never realise that the news they're reporting is horribly inaccurate because you have no point of comparison.