The Freedom Fallacy: Understanding "Player Autonomy" in Game Design 

you probably dont care but does anybody know of a trick to log back into an Instagram account?? I was dumb lost my account password. I love any help you can offer me

@Drake Maddox i really appreciate your reply. I found the site on google and im waiting for the hacking stuff now. Takes a while so I will get back to you later with my results.

@Drake Maddox it did the trick and I finally got access to my account again. I am so happy:D Thank you so much you really help me out!

@Ezra Jaxson You are welcome =)

True, but talking in adventure mode, as someone else mentioned, is rather like talking to a particularly boring database.

[Personally, I played Guild Wars for a long time and would act differently based partly on the character type I was playing as. Some of that was also skill and weapon setup, but my skill and weapon setup (and name choice and look) were direct results of my interpretation of the creature I had chosen.... so to me, some of my in game behavior (social towards other players - as well as pursuits and in game achievements) WAS a direct result of the character customization opportunity.... THAT is a study I'd like to hear about.] That's just roleplaying, D&D/JRPG style.

Fingers crossed it’s Light No Fire

How is it supposed to give me a sense of Pride and Accomplisment, if I cannot buy it in Lootboxes?

Pride and accomplishment are parts of needs satisfaction.

I don't think you get the joke

Yeah. I agree with TLOU2 and I've loved how he explained why invested players didn't enjoy ME3 and how it basically ruined the previous experiences. I cannot replay ME because of that ending, but I wouldn't be able to explain it as well as he did... (and I've tried many times). I understood how and why it was broken from the narrative perspective, but only now I understand why I actually cared, so to speak.

I loved this talk as well. I would argue that TLOU2 case falls into a "can't make everybody happy" situation (since for me what the story did worked very powerfully, exactly bcs it subverted the expectations, making me do things toward the end that I didn't really feel like doing bcs of affection to the characters involved, both of them. And the emotional response from this was something more complex than "just satisfaction", because I think that's the whole point, the game doesn't want you to come out of it feeling "victorious" , but completely beaten up by what happened...which I found very, very powerful ) If you were referring to something else than I was thinking, of course maybe what I say doesn't really apply.

@@lorenzotosiart no I understand what you mean and I agree wholeheartedly, I love the game because the story is definitely one of if not the most powerful I've seen in a game but like the other reply said, I can't deny it gets in the way of me wanting to replay it.

Classic Top-Down RPGs as well as immersive sims are not really open world games. First one relies heavily on text, which can get quite complicated when you look at characters who need to animate faces, move their hands and so on. Also they are bound by the possible story interactions, you can't go to any place and do whatever you want, you are bound by the boundaries of dialogue options. Second one almost always is set inside a Building of some kind - not open world. Only game that has succeeded in giving narrative choice, volution and everything, FOR ME (just my opinion) is ELEX from pyranha bytes. While it is graphically not the best looking game ever and combat is something you have to learn from youtube to enjoy because it lacks a proper explanation/tutorial - it is the only open world RPG which is not a full sandbox where none of your choices matter (it's the opposite, everything matters, you can destroy entire cities with some choices (and vanish all quests inside those cities)) and doesn't hold your hand. Meaningful, impactful choices (fully voiced) + complete freedom (you have to find quests/questgivers by runnig through the map and talking to random people) + non-hand-holding = Elex Haven't found another game of it's kind yet.

@@johnleorid have you tried the gothic games?

​@@johnleorid Dwarf fortress is somewhat like this, though Adventure mode is still being worked on. Making a long story short, actual fantasy with procedural simulated creatures down to the muscles is very brutal.

very well said

Yes! I thought you would say "creativity" but expression is equally accurate, I think. I think that need was entirely missing from this talk.

I agree with you. Parts of this talk resonated, and parts of this talk felt specific to one type of gamer, and maybe his research is geared towards the widest commercial audience.. In a game like GTA, you have communities of players who just want to role play as members of society and tell collective stories. Of course he didn't mention social volition, and perhaps that is covered there. I have the same Skyrim experience, where sometimes I go in with a goal of only playing with knives, wearing tiaras, and adopting a dog and building the perfect house for him. I can't get invested in The Witcher because I have no investment in Geralt. To say it comes down to changing his shoe color feels shallow. In my eyes, it's about making a character I identify with who I will take through a journey and tell a story with.

I think you are right here. But i believe that it is hard to make a cohesive talk by trying to account for every player type existing. So I see that talk as an general overview of the topic but you need to apply it to specific games and their audience's motivation for better understating. And in general, this talk refers to SDT which is a huge topic by itself.

Yes I have the same with the square Enix Tomb Raider series. Some sidequest puzzles seem really good but Im just not motivated to play them. Sometimes I even would get into a sidequest by accident, and then would be disappointed because it didn't matter at all.

Have there been any exceptions to this? Perhaps Dark Souls, where the ‘side quest’ is simply to find and fight the optional boss. They’re fun in their own right

@@jeroenkoffeman9402 "Yes I have the same with the square Enix Tomb Raider series. Some sidequest puzzles seem really good but Im just not motivated to play them. Sometimes I even would get into a sidequest by accident, and then would be disappointed because it didn't matter at all." In a good game, the fun of getting to do the side quest should be its own reward. Like games with "Boss Rush" or "Challenge Room" modes, they exist just to give you more content to PLAY, even if they don't unlock anything or grant you an in-game item.

Looking at Dungeons and Dragons, this will age really well

That's why Eve works so well. The game itself has almost no narrative but it exists as a kind of permanent structure for you to engage with other agents in meaningful choices. Half the game takes place at a kind of meta level outside the game in discord and chat.

First image is Altair, second Connon, but he talks about Itally and stuff (Ezio) haha.

Was gonna comment the same thing. Also crazy that the same problems happened with other games. The more things change, the more they stay the same lol

Hes a psychologist and has some knowledge of video game design. Not sure what what Star Citizen is enough to understand your comment, but i can tell you this guy doesn't have a damn clue how game development works.

Wylie28 He was attacking this idea that you just procedurally generate star systems, rooms, dungeons, etc., as a game designer, and the massive sand box which result will in itself lead to satisfied players. Space games are especially seductive from this angle because they offer so much 'space' and thus so much potential 'freedom' to do what you want. He's saying that 'freedom' doesn't lead to satisfaction rather volition does. Choices must be meaningful or purposive and not just manifold. A world of infinite choices (freedom) but where each choice is as good as another is paradoxically a world with no freedom. It's very apt for what Chris Roberts is trying to do and why so many people have bought into it.

do you know for how much time?

​@@yawarapuyurak3271 It's patented by Warner Bro. But typically patents lasts 99 years, or something. Most things older than 100 years are public domain, but I know the "US" have begun "extending" patents, which is just so stupid. Edit: Was thinking of copyrights, patents is around 20, my bad. (and copyrights is around 70, but have also been extended before)

@@liva9994 that's just stupid. It only helps to monopolize something. Patents should be around 5, maybe 10 years in order to give a head start to the creator, but not so long that they can monopolize.

@@yawarapuyurak3271 Oh right, my bad. Well I was confusing it a bit with Copyright, but yea, around 20 years is a patent. But worth mentioning that if you're rich enough, you can extend patents by longer.

@@liva9994 Damn, that's still a lot. 20 years of never seeing something like that? come on!

I have had exactly the same experience with Far Cry 2. Highest difficulty and just traverse the map. There was a challenge in doing that, even without the missions (which I found very boring). Yet the speakers point still remain that the stories you created were enabled by the mechanics of the game, the NPCs you had to hide from, their movement patterns. If it managed to make you play through without using narrative as a clutch, it has succeeded as a videogame and has satisfied at least one need: that of mastery. And quite possibly self-determination, although that's a lot simpler for games that don't rely on dialogue choices and are open world. I don't know how much this second one applies to Ghost Recon Wildlands. In my own experience in Far Cry 2, me clearing out road blockades didn't do much, they always respawned. This enabled more gameplay, but also made me feel like I wasn't achieving anything (missions were more successful in doing that). Far Cry 2 had an awesome mechanic of companions who showed up when you were dying and helped you. Every once in a while you had to help them as well. Very little talk involved but still created strong attachment, and i think that fed the need for relatedness.

When you save or blow up megaton in Fallout 3, the world has reacted to choice, but he is talking about this on a bigger scale, this is why i felt fallout 3 & NV more engaging than Fallout 4

Think of it like making a computer generate the story for the game by itself without any need for humans to make a script.

So I guess most fallout missions do a better job of mixing dense rpg game mechanics with alternate outcomes than skyrim did. It seems really strange he doesn't mention these games because from what I can tell they are the pinnacle of autonomous play compared to others.

That seems like an almost impossible goal that would only work in very enclosed games where you can't do much to begin with so the possible branching paths are few.... or games with low fidelity e.g sims, where you really write your own narrative.

The idea is that people have expectations that must be met in a fun game world. They must feel like they're having an impact in the world, or a narrative they enjoy, characters and story-lines that pique their interest and keep them engaged, character growth, progress and so on. These expectations are impossible to meet in a procedurally generated game world of near infinite to infinite size, because the amount of developer hours to create experiences on them with sufficient variety and levels of engagement would be as infinite as the world. The only way to tackle this issue eventually is to be able to create mechanics in the game that can take the reasons we play games, and generate them procedurally in interesting ways and fill a universe with reasons to keep exploring and playing and doing things. I would say that some glimpse of this could perhaps be seen in grand strategy games and turn based games, where a lot of the narrative of how the game plays and ends up is a result of AIs drudging along and shaping the world around you. In many of these games you will never play two games that follow the same paths, the same inter-entity relationships and so forth, despite a developer not curating the experience beyond starting conditions and mechanics/AI routines.

I was thinking about this talk for a long time, and the best I could think of was a food metaphor where you give players a menu: Freedom: The menu has a thousand options Autonomy: The menu's options are distinct and impactful Volition: I want what's on the menu I think the key distinction is that autonomy is about the desire to make meaningful choices that impact the world. Freedom is about the quantity of choices available. It reminds me of sensory deprivation chambers, in a weird way. Humans have a real need to interact with and change the world, and when deprived of any contact with the world, we start to hallucinate things so we can interact. Some choices we make are really satisfying and make us feel like the main character in our life story, and some are so unimportant and boring that we forget we made the choice 5 seconds after making it. The choice to marry my wife had only a few possible outcomes, but has brought me lasting happiness and satisfaction, whereas the toothpaste I bought out of the 30 brands at the store was just boring and made me feel like I was in a documentary showing how boring life can be. Most of the toothpaste is the same.

I agree - I like a mixture - like undertale or as you say something with a really satisfying story arch over a sensible time frame like inside. I guess this kind of experience is going to shift more and more into the world of indie games rather than mainstream games.

@@OliverWallaceStories Undertale gives players a lot of volition and agency, the game responds to even the most insignificant decisions from the player, and yet it offers a tightly designed experience shaped by you the player. Goes to show those things aren't mutually exclusive, and there's no reason to believe volition is a negative thing other than of course personal preference like the original comment said, and that not every single game needs it, like Inside, fenomenal game.

"I'm too old school for openworld games. I just want to go from A to B and pass through the linear narrative excactly as it was intented by the makers." The Legend of Zelda is open world and came out in 1986, same year as the original Metroid. You can prefer linear games but it's not a question of being old-school.

Roguelikes and roguelites: reset player power and world every 25 minutes

You’re assuming that the only way to build volition is by power upgrades, which is false.

i can be anything i want Reeeeeeeeeeee

minecraft's volution generation is correlated by how much you want to discover. after a few hundred hours, when you have read all the wikipedias, since you know all the game systems, volution disappears

​@@arthurllorens172 Yet people play it for thousands. It's not just discovery, but also self expression and crafting (no pin intended) narratives as you build your world. It depends on how you play of course. But I wouldn't say discovery is the game's only strength.

@@justGoron That's interesting. Yeah, we could say that Minecraft generates volution for different types of people.

Ubisoft makes a lot of boring, forgettable, near-identical copy/paste games. Sometimes they literally just copy the world map from one game and reuse it another.

You did take the time to respond and give a more accurate breakdown so thank you for that. I appreciate the synopsis you gave, but I still have a difficult time reading this talk as anything but superficial. From a top-down level I'm not certain there's anything I'd change in my original statement. It can very easily be stated some motive is necessary for creating voluntary engagement. And as far as procedural generation is concerned, you're right that the speaker did broach the subject. But the reason why I didn't include it originally is that it's the same point, only reiterated. I disagree that this was an engaging talk, but that's subjective. If you think there's value in it then that's fine. I'm glad you and perhaps others took away more from this than I did.

Yes but this motivation to play a game comes from the opportunity to make choices and the feedback that those choices matter and make an impact on the world. That was the core message of this talk and yes it's only one line but autonomy is so important to the player's engagement that it deserves an hour of discussion to stress this :) And in that hour he provides examples of structures which help foster autonomy(volition) e.g. shifting narratives, dense RPG mechanics, meaningful impactful side quests, feedback. And tries to show us that when our yearning for autonomy isn't satisfied it irks us greatly in an attempt to just prove how important it is to design with that core message in mind.

The title is clickbait. He is not a gamer and his Mr psychologist attitude is slightly annoying. But he is right. He is so right. It is good the talk goes over his thought process and examples so you can understand it better and find wrong turns in his logic. Like, Witcher 3 is not a hybrid of Skyrim and Mass Effect. It is Mass Effect. This is mostly because Skyrim has nothing going for it apart from missions and an open world. It does not have a strong enough identity to be a part of a hybrid. I always say, structure structure structure and simulation! He showed that to engage the audience, you need procedural techniques. He didn't tell how to do it but at least it is a concrete goal if you want to undertake it. Also the trap of mind-reading was a very good insight for linear( and multi-linear) narratives which is why I prefer non-linearity and it also points to the power of gaming as a medium, you can defer engagement and results to the player and simulation.

Yeah, it'll suffer all right. Perhaps he's heard of Minecraft?

Your volition goes down, but because raising kids is fundamentally your choice, your autonomy is intact. To put it another way, it was *your choice* to limit your own freedom by having children. Say you're in the middle of a game world. You have 360 degrees of choice in terms of which direction you want to explore in, but at the end of the day you can only travel in one direction at a time, so you must voluntarily forfeit all but one of those infinite possibilities. You lose that freedom, but keep your autonomy because you made the choice, not the game.

@@amanofnoreputation2164 "Your volition goes down" No, your volition goes UP, because you (presumably) WANTED to have children. Your freedom goes down, because you (presumably) find yourself obligated to take care of children and can't just randomly go out for several hours with your friends (and especially not your spouse/partner) on a Wednesday night whenever you feel like it.

Skyrim is from Bethesda, which is a ZeniMax subsidiary. Mass Effect 3 is from BioWare, a subsidiary of EA Games. GTA V is from Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take Two Interactive. Many of the games he used have no affiliation with Ubisoft.

23:05 Pardon me a moment. Just a sec. BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAAAAA OH GAWD DID YOU REALLY JUST SAY THAT? Alright, I'm better now. I can breathe again. Wow. Seriously. NO. Skyrim has an absurd amount of hours played for the same reason virtually every other game with that kind of long term engagement has: it allows the users to create their own stuff. As in excessive levels of customization with modding tools. Go on, go count how many people still play unmodded skyrim. I can wait, shouldn't take more than the fingers on your hands. Yeah. Because skyrim as a base game is actually pretty lacking. What has people still play skyrim is what has people still play minecraft, or second life, or starcraft - you can just keep adding stuff onto it to do, and they add some more themselves as well. Every single person I know who still plays skyrim has the same complaint: it takes 3 dedicated full work days to reinstall it because they have 600 mods they need to install along with it. So what have we learned boys and girls? You're sort of close with volition, but your explanation here was awful. No, it's not the game world that makes skyrim still playable for so long, it's that you have to continually provide new experiences for your players, and if you let them produce their own experiences, then it will continually generate more for you... right up until you release your new game, or a competitor does. PvP games maintain this by having each new battle revolve around the other players you fight generating new content, and because as your skill level progresses you encounter different types of foes to face so you're always guaranteed something new... unless the game doesn't provide more content and you get stuck in a skill rut as most people do, in which case you'll notice first person shooters basically all have a life expectancy of 6-12 months, whereas League of Legends is still going strong because it keeps adding more stuff for people to do. So why did all of LoL's competitors die? Because you need a constant influx of new players and they didn't manage to do the two things required for that: lowering the skill floor and promoting the PvP nature by way of tournaments. And the fact of the matter is pro gamers go where the money is, so whoever has the biggest prize gets the pros, and the pros pull in fans, and then the fans play the game themselves and show their friends to generate more fans so you have a constant influx of new players. Skyrim isn't a PvP game, so it has to do this via giving the players the ability to add content to the game in other ways, namely modding tools, and then those players show their friends the neat new mod they just built and they keep playing the game because they keep getting new mods. If the game starts to grow stale, go pick up a dozen new mods and your problem's fixed. Graphics sucking because the game's almost a decade old? Better install a mod which updates all the models, animations and textures. Because you can do that. So no, I totally and completely disagree with your assertion at 23:05 entirely. I agree that YES, these are things that totally can be huge benefits, but that's not what makes skyrim popular today. It'd be like saying that people like listening to music, and that's why cars are so popular, because they have a radio in them. It's like... uh... yeah, that's... kind of a tiny, small part of a car, but that's not even remotely close to the primary reason why people use them.

You miss the whole point of his presentation, this is not about how the progression of the player but how to gives a meaningful progression to the player, just like he said at about 27:00: HOW CRAP TALI DIE WHAT I GONNA DO, answer: I'm gonna savescum because I love tali and without her the story is meaningfulness. This presentation is about this: don't gives player autonomy, gives them meaningful choice that they want or at least that they will adhere to, this way they will stick to your game and remember it after they finished it. As for the "things will be better than they are now, if not for yourself, then for your children", well this is crap. Even the few people that want that in the real world wants something else in a game, yes I agree they want a better future, but a better future for themselves, some peoples want to just destroy everything, some want to become the wealthiest dude on the planet, others want to become all powerful and so on. If you really thing that everybody want only one thing and that this thing is a better future for everybody, you are sadly just very naive.

It's really not, his data set is massive and has predictive validity for commercial game success and has good test-retest reliability. You have armchair conjecture. Obviously development time and budgets provides constraints, but that's a limitation on linear games and is not a unique feature to open world games. He's trying to answer what to put in the open world not whether or not to have them

@@S590573 You can believe whatever you want.

"The free choice to get married and the supposed loss of freedom seems more a personal statement than an ideological one as you gain some freedoms or privileges in marriage that you wouldn't get otherwise." If you don't think marriage is a restriction of choice, you are an alien who needs to do more research before you can blend in with the Earth Hu-man creatures.

@@scottlee600 Go play The Last of Us twice, then go play Fallout: New Vegas twice. There is a value in meaningful choices.

He did say some sandboxes work and he had not the time to get into those, though.

^ Yes he did.

That's not what he's saying. It's not about giving the player a checklist of things to do, or even directing their playstyle. I think it might easier to describe what he's talking about by describing a failure in 'volition'. In sandboxes a failure in 'volition' usually feels like the game is incomplete. For example maybe you build a spaceship and then when you go to fly it and you suddenly realise it has no purpose. There's nothing to shoot, there's no trading and to top it off it's limited in speed to 5m/s. While it was a lot of fun to design the ship. What's the point if you can't test your design? You could've had the same experience from just using a 3d modeling program. That's an extreme example, but I have played a lot of EA sandbox games in various genres that are almost this bad. The gist is when building a sandbox you need to meet player expectations and have enough systems to tie everything together. From that players will be able to derive their own goals.

What he is doing is trying to generalize an audience of people that want different things. Some people want the very experiences he says are bad. Its a stupid discussion. There is no wrong way to make a game. You can research what the mainstream audience wants, but you can never objectify entertainment product design. Ive seen the "x object has no purpose" argument many times. Whenever x gets removed or changed people complain. Why? Because they found something they enjoy doing with it.

Well coming from a Dungeon Master perspective, this talk actually strikes at something that a lot of newer DMs do wrong. They fill their world with random encounters/NPCs/etc from the rolling tables in the Dungeon Master Guide and then the game is OK, but to make it real fun you need to give these encounters/NPCs purpose. And that is something that I do not see in many of the new games. It feels more like they are just thrown in there to extend the amount of time you get when you play the game, and at least for me, that is not compelling.

Thank you for that yonas

Clearly he's not a real gamer.

Not all gamers are game developers and not all game developers are gamers.

Some gamers only play the game genres they like. In my case, there's a lot of titles I've never touched, even though they're famous. They just don't appeal to me. But as a game dev, I have looked into videos and articles about some of them to see why they are so popular.

Yeah, that's true too. Well, in my youth I did play as many games of the genres I like as much as I could (thanks to the power of simulators, haha). But now, I don't really have the time. Though, I'm still the kind of people that mostly sticks to his preferred genres. For example, I rarely touch platformers, unless it's to learn something...

So? They're basically the same anyway. XP

He never said that linear game were dead, he just point out that "open world", "be who you want to be", tags sounds more sexy to customers than "play this "story", "guy", "whatever"", he also said that game like "the last of us" are also great to give players some Volition but it's way more tricky to do this. IMHO If you want to watch something more about how to give your playerbase a goal that they will achieve through they own means, be it linear stuff or more open story thingy, watch ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4mgK2hL33Vw.html (this is also a GDC talks but from a writer point of view)

@@fitzolivaw758 thank you! I'll check it out

If you're unhappy with your life you should do your best to take steps to better it. Hopefully you find a better self, and success along with that.

hope you're more reasonable now, read your comment and delete it

@@Rexodiak what a shitty thing to say. at least the other guy was condescending.

@@DarkenedVibe when i originally read your comment i found it mildly amusing. but now that i'm brought back to it by another poster a couple interpretations have come to mind. one charitable and one not. the charitable interpretation isn't really what you said, but if you basically meant "i hope you find a friend", you are a better person than i gave you credit. and that possible disgrace isn't something i can tollerate. to accidentally denougue others is subhuman, it violate my identity and most abashed of all i would be responsible for it. that interpretation is what causes me to reciprocate empathicly. for- for you to bring up a lack of friendship, would imply you were having some difficulty with it, and that is something i can help with, not that this is particularly timely. regardless, mastering decorum and sociality isn't particularly satisfying. so you need to determine if you are lonely, friendless, and whether you want help. i can teach you nihilism, which allows mastery of most skills nearly effortlessly, including those of social conduct, but if you are lonely it wont help. it helps friendlessness, and esteem, but not spirituality. it is cold, where there normally is the warmth of incompetance. the original way i took your comment back when you made it was that of an ideologue disclosure trying to evangelize an inferior point of view; the growth ideology. but only now with emotions dry, do i see the potential error in my perception. back then i realized "Hopefully you find a better self" is a great backhanded compliment, taken at face value. i laughed when i first read it. or perhaps when i misread it due to my mood. if you were trying to reach out for help, and i mistook your attempt to reach out as scathing wit, i must apologize. and to make amends i offer topical aid without qualification. if this is simply irrelevant from untimeliness, i wish you well all the same. and if my initial reading was correct, keep the fire burning. your quip is an excellent turn of phrase. if you want to go into comedy you are a good 30% there. i didn't say it then, but i hope you are not only proud of your conduct, and i hope you wear it on your sleeve. a great many people can't give a good insult, let alone put lingerie on it. keep your head high and strut, because you become the standards of your conduct. as for me, there is no potential for a better self. and no motive for a more sociable one.

@@morthim O wise sage of the internet, teach me the ways of nihilism Now seriously, how does nihilism allows mastery of most skills?