The Power of Invisible Choices

Okay, so video game stories are unique 
because you get to make decisions.

Like, whether or not you 
should mock this preacher.

GERALT: “How many people’s lives have 
you saved? From bruxae? From leshens?”

PREACHER: “That has no bearing—“
GERALT: “Asked you a question. How many?”

Those choices might cause an immediate reaction…

GERALT: “There’s something to think about, folks”.

Or, in some cases, the game might

remember your decision and issue some 
kind of consequence later down the line.

GUARD 1: “Geralt of Rivia. Witcher”.
GUARD 2: “You stand accused of offending

religious sentiment. We’ve orders 
to take you in for interrogation”

Now, these sorts of choices have 
historically been associated with RPGs,

interactive fiction, and… whatever we’re 
calling these Telltale-style games.

And I think that’s partly because 
of their lineage that stretches

back to improvisational tabletop games, and 
branching Choose Your Own Adventure books.

But I think it’s also just an interface thing. 
These are games where your primary mode of

interaction is to pick options from a menu - 
like a dialogue tree or a list of next moves.

So making choices about the 
narrative is a perfectly natural fit.

But what if your game doesn’t have that? 
What if it’s a shooter, or survival horror,

or an action game? How do you let players 
make choices in those sorts of games?

Well, one way to do it can be seen in 
Bioshock. This is a first-person shooter,

but it features an infamous moral choice: 
each time you meet a Little Sister,

you need to decide whether to save her - or 
harvest her lifeblood for magic super-juice.

And, in these moments, the game slows 
down, takes away your normal controls,

and just slaps a big ol’ pair of button prompts 
on screen. Press X to harvest. Press Y to rescue.

LITTLE SISTER: “No, no! No no!”

So that’s one way to do it. Just kinda 
borrow the interaction systems of these

more suitable genres - whether that’s 
button prompts. A list of options.

Or a dialogue wheel. I’m going 
to call these “explicit choices”.

But there’s actually another way to do it.

Let’s look at another shooter - 
this time, Spec Ops: The Line.

Here, we come across two men, 
strung up by their hands - with

snipers aiming at their bodies. 
And you have to make a decision.

WALKER: “I get it, we’re meant to choose”

But this time, there are 
no button prompts and there's no menu.

Instead, you decide which person Walker will 
shoot… by literally, just shooting them.

*Gunfire*

So that’s a very different way to do it. Instead 
of leaning on the systems of a different genre,

Spec Ops lets players express their intent by 
using the basic tools they use elsewhere in

the game. This is a game about shooting 
- and so you make choices by shooting.

I call this, you guessed 
it, an, “invisible choice”.

And I think these, rare beasts have some 
incredibly exciting advantages. And so, in this

video I’m going to share four key reasons why you 
should think about making your choices… disappear.

Okay. Advantage number one - invisible 
choices can make the options ambiguous.

So in Bioshock Infinite, you’re told to 
throw a ball at an interracial couple. But

did you know you can actually throw it at the 
racist announcer inste… oh, right, it says it

right there on the screen. That kinda spoiled 
it, didn’t it? That’s what happens when your

input system demands you list every 
possible action the player can take.

Back to that choice in Spec Ops, though, and 
while the guy on the radio asks you to shoot

one of the two men… you can also decide to 
shoot the ropes that they’re being hung with.

Or refuse to make a choice at all. 
Or fire at the snipers instead.

Because the choice is invisible, the game can 
hide additional options that are only found if

enterprising players really think about the 
situation and the tools at their disposal.

Spec Ops is actually full of these things. 
Later, an angry mob of civilians descends

on Walker and you’re encouraged to shoot 
them - but you can also fire into the air,

or just do a non-lethal melee 
attack to diffuse the situation.

There’s also a memorable one in Far Cry 4 - 
Pagan Min asks you to wait for his return,

giving you a chance to escape from his fortress.

But if you actually just wait for his 
return, you’ll unlock a secret ending.

These hidden options can make players 
feel smart. And it makes the game feel

less like a rigid sequence of choices - and 
more like an organic and believable world.

Advantage two. The choices don’t have to be equal.

So back to Bioshock for a second - when it 
comes to rescuing or harvesting a Little Sister,

the choice is equal. I mean, sure, 
the consequences are different.

And one might make you feel bad. But the 
physical act of making the choice is identical:

press one button on your controller, or the other.

But then consider a game like Undertale. 
Here, you can choose whether to kill all the

monsters and bosses in the game - or 
spare them. But it’s far from equal,

and it’s - usually - a lot harder to save the 
creatures than it is to simply wipe them out.

So that means you need to put in 
effort if you want the better outcome.

And you might decide to make a certain choice… 
simply because it would be too difficult,

or cost too many resources, to do the other thing.

Like, there’s a bit in Deus Ex: Human Revolution 
where your pilot Faridah is pinned down by enemies

and it’s possible to save her - as long as you are 
able to defeat a bunch of baddies in record time.

It’s not a moral choice whether she lives 
or dies - it’s a test of your skill.

Also, picking immoral and selfish choices 
from a menu can make you feel pretty

icky - but it’s even worse when you have to 
physically carry out those actions yourself.

When you slowly, manually, personally steal 
from this elderly couple in This War of Mine…

it makes you, the player, feel even 
more complicit in these awful actions.

Okay! That was a bummer. Uh, 
advantage three! Fine-grain choices.

So, when we think about more explicit choices, 
we usually think about quite significant decision

points. Picking between the lives of two 
characters. Or the fate of an entire town.

Or, uh, what to have for breakfast.

But when a game is tracking invisible choices, 
it can build up a massive, and highly detailed

databank of everything the player is doing - and 
use all of that to shape the rest of the game.

This can lead to a game feeling 
very personalised - like how the

Orks in Shadow of War can recall the 
precise nature of your previous run-in.

Or how the characters in Hades discuss 
the exact details of your most recent run.

HYPNOS: “Daw, one of those Wretched Louts 
just killed you dead that last time,

those mean old slappy guys? Maybe try 
killing them beforehand, I don’t know!”

It means the game can comment on tiny 
things like where you’ve been - which

is why JC Denton gets chewed out for 
entering the women’s bathroom in Deus Ex.

Or how long you take to do something - waste 
too much time before rescuing your pals in

Mass Effect 2, and you’ll find the Normandy 
crew has been reduced to a gooey grey paste.

This makes you think about the effects of every 
action you perform - and not just the big,

obvious choices. So, in Dishonored, for example, 
every time you kill an enemy you’re adding to the

chaos meter - which can change the outcome of 
the narrative, shift how characters see you,

and add more rats to the world. And so because 
every combat encounter has the opportunity

to change the future, you end up playing 
in a more deliberate and thoughtful way.

Same goes for Metal Gear Solid V, and 
how the enemies adapt to your play style

by popping on helmets or 
installing more floodlights.

And finally, advantage four. Surprising outcomes.

One of the biggest problems with explicit choices 
is that they make it really obvious that you’re

making a decision.
And just in case it wasn’t completely obvious,

let’s put a notification on screen to back that up.

So, it’s pretty hard to surprise players 
with the consequences of their decisions.

But with invisible choices, the game 
can secretly and silently track your

actions without you ever realising it - and then 
surprise you with an outcome later down the line.

Like, in Metal Gear Solid, when you encounter 
the mind-reading weirdo, Psycho Mantis.

PSYCHO-MANTIS: “You are a very methodical man. The 
type who always kicks his tyres before he leaves.

And yet you’re rather ineffective in battle.”

What’s actually happening here is that all along, 
the game has been secretly tracking things like

how often you save, how many traps you’ve sprung, 
and even the contents of your PS1 memory card.

And then Psycho-Mantis can give the appropriate 
voice line. It’s a typical Kojima party trick,

but a neat example of how invisible 
choices can surprise the player.

Other examples might include 
saving Biorr from this cell,

only for him to come to your aid in 
the fight against Penetrator. Or your

actions at the start of Chrono Trigger 
getting brought up in the game’s trial.

The other thing is - because explicit 
choices are given such prominence,

I think players quite rightly expect for them 
to have equally significant consequences for the

storyline. And to be disappointed when, typically, 
they don’t. But when choices are invisible,

even tiny consequences are impressive 
and memorable by comparison.

Now, if I’m going to be listing advantages… 
I should probably also touch on the

challenges of implementing invisible choices.

For one, it can be hard to honour every choice the 
player might make. There’s a scene in Firewatch

where you have to deal with some skinny-dipping 
teenagers and the game will react to loads of

different actions - including tossing their 
boombox into the water. But the programmers

had to create a very complex and robust system 
to account for all of these different actions.

Interested devs can find some resources to 
help with implementing invisible choices

in the description for this video.

Also, this system doesn’t really work for 
every type of choice. If your only way of

communicating to the game is down the barrel 
of a gun, that’s not going to work for more

nuanced decisions. But it doesn’t have to 
be either / or. Back to Firewatch, again,

that game tracks actions like picking up 
objects - but it also has a full dialogue

system through the walkie-talkie. That gives 
you two very different ways to express yourself.

Another challenge is that when choices are 
made ambiguous, players might not know that

they even had access to certain options 
- and feel cheated when they find out.

I made a video about Fort Frolic in Bioshock, 
and mentioned how you can leave the area without

killing Sander Cohen. But according to my comment 
section, plenty of people didn’t know that walking

away was a valid choice. So, you may need to 
teach players that other actions are available.

And, finally, players may not realise 
that they’re seeing the consequences

of previous actions. The nice thing about explicit 
choices is that they are, well, explicit about

the fact you’re having an impact on the game. But 
invisible choices can easily be missed altogether.

In playtests of Dishonored, Arkane found 
that some players thought the game was

incredibly linear - but only because those player 
didn’t even realise they were making choices.

They were too subtle, too organic. Likewise, 
it’s easy to get to the end of Silent Hill 2

and have no understanding that the cutscene 
you receive is actually the result of some

obscure and obtuse actions 
you’ve made throughout the game.

It’s important, then, when using invisible 
choices, to be quite heavy handed with dialogue,

and make it crystal clear to players that 
this is an outcome of their earlier actions.

GHÛRA THE SINGER: “Like a little chorus he comes 
back round. He usually dies is what I’ve found”.

Too subtle, and all your hard work is wasted.

So, there we have it.

Action games don’t need to twist 
themselves into an RPG or a text adventure

in order to react, remember, or 
reflect on the player’s choices.

These games already have ways for the player 
to communicate - to express intent, and values,

and decisions, and moral leanings. 
By implementing invisible choices,

players can speak using the verbs they’ve 
already been using as part of normal gameplay.

And in doing so, games can make 
the options more ambiguous.

One choice can be harder to make than another. 
The game can track dozens of tiny actions that

the player is making. And the consequences 
of your decisions can be more surprising.

Ultimately, we say that actions 
speak louder than words - and I

reckon more games should make that 
a reality. Thanks for watching.

Hey! Happy new year! So people who 
back GMTK on Patreon get a monthly

“reading list” of 20 articles and videos that 
I recommend. Here’s one from this January's list:

why the superhero genre is 
not comparable to the western.

You can check out the full list over on 
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Thanks so much for your support.