Emotional Context In Decision Design

Wanderlust Travel Stories is an anthology of interactive travel literature we published in fall 2019. In this article, I share how we used context and personal perspective to make choices relevant for the player and easier to implement.

Designing narrative choices for the player that feel meaningful and consequential is a recurring challenge in various genres. Branching stories and systematized changes to world-state are common but often expensive solutions; another approach is to update the player character’s emotional state. One prominent example of this is Depression Quest, which creates a feedback loop in which your choices affect your mood which affects which options are available to you in the next choice.

In this post, Artur Ganszyniec discusses a deeper version of this approach used in Wanderlust Travel Stories, in which the combination of the player character’s fatigue and stress levels determine how they see the world - which does modify which options are available, but also creates different emotional contexts in which the same options may be chosen for different reasons. I suspect this approach would only really work in games where you are playing a defined character whose emotional state is an explicit mechanic, but it’d be interesting to see it applied in, say, a Quantic Dream game.