examining consequences both have a lot of value but , for game designers and players , it is crucial that the experience supplied by each is clearly defined . Games about choice encourage players to reflect upon what they are doing as they do it ; about thinking through your actions as you commit . Games about consequences , instead , force players to realize the effects of an action ex post facto . In this sense , games about choice and games about consequences mainly differ by when they get the player to consider the action that causes the result . Choice makes you think pre-emptively , while consequences work in retrospect having seen the results . These can both be interesting , but they have different effects and thus require different approaches to game design . If priority is given to choice itself , engagement is found in giving the player a number of different vectors to weigh their choice on without reducing it to a calculation . If the focus relies otherwise on consequences , on revealing to the player the effects of their actions , the designer needs to consider what statement is made through that reveal . Simply thwarting players or showing that actions resulted negatively does not necessarily mean anything . Rather , designers have to figure out the chain of causality linking the player ’ s initial action , the results they plan to show , and what that change exemplifies about the narrative .
Most interesting in either case is the expectation of consequence that motivates players to continue making choices . The existence of consequence is one of the core characteristics of all games , but video games differ significantly in their use of consequence in various respects . Not only is the range of consequence unprecedented in any other game ; as dynamic rule-bound systems , they can also temporarily withhold clear gameplay information about consequence , and thus have 207