KADL001: Restricting Choices, and their narrative significance

じ☆ve冰风

This is something I wrote for 姫HimeWorks, and I was advised to post it here. I talk about the narrative potential of restricting choices whether by hiding, or disabling them. You can read the orginal here. (Well, really they're the actually the same, I'm just making a shameless plug to my site) Hope you enjoy it.

                        Yes, I'm, still laughing at this joke, I have a weird sense of humor.

Well, it goes without saying that sometimes, you have to restrict a player's options, this is something that must happen in games in order to maintain some sort of progression, usually, you can do this with switches, but if you ask me, it's much cleaner to use 姫(Hime)Work's  disable and hidden choice conditions. What can you do with these plugins, well a bunch of stuff:

You can lock chests:

                        *sigh* if only there was a conveniently shaped key somewhere in the nearby vicinity...

You can make people talk to you only after you do them favors, you can disable quick travel locations blah blah blah blah.

If you ask me, that's kinda boring, there's a lot more you can do with disabling and hiding choices narrative that people don't tend to explore very often. For example:

It can be used to highlight a character's powerlessness:

                        "What do you mean you can't massacre the population of [insert one more name here] village, it's for the sake of the [insert yet another name here] empire, you can't let your morals get in the way of your just cause!"

                        Smoking Doesn't Kill People, People Kill People.

In both of these cases, [insert another name here], and 正(Sei) are doing things they probably shouldn't, yet neither of them is strong enough to resist. The choice is there, primarily to emphasize that these charterers are powerless against those who are stronger than them.

It can also be used for comedic effect.

                        Well, I found it funny.

It's also important to remember where disabling choices is much better than hiding them. While at face level, both of these seem similar enough, they can give the player very different connotations.

For Example:

                        Ok.........

                        whoops

Now, compare these two outcomes:

                        Wanna fight?!

                        hindsight is 20/20

Well? In the top image, the option to talk is hidden, in the bottom image, the option is merely disabled. Do you see the difference? While the top image comes off as 天子ちゃん(Tenko-chan) being aggressive and wanting to fight you, the bottom image makes you realize that the option to talk was there. You just sealed it off by murdering Tris with a kranasFlare.

That isn't to say, that disabling choices is always better than hiding them, I can give a good counter example here:

                        My God! We've finally left that accursed island that was in the middle of the ocean for seemingly no reason, but why could this be?
                (Because this scene is actually in the game)

Here, it makes much more sense to hide the "About the Package" choice, because it's never going to be used again. If you leave it disabled, the player is going to think that there's something they can do to re-enable it. And that's one of the things about using disabled conditions, if a player sees a disabled condition, they will usually try to figure out how to enable it, that's all but guaranteed. This means that you have to account for this when you use disabled actions.

So yes, I feel that disabled choices are an under-utilized mechanic that can be used in many unique ways. It's more than just disabling the choice, it has a truly profound impact on the player's soul, and allows their feelings to... (Ignore that sentence, it was stupid). (No, even better, rather than hiding my mistakes, I will disable their ability to appear!) (I'm just making bad jokes one after another huh. Anyway, hope you found this mildly insightful, and not me over-analyzing something at 11:43 PM because I'm high on caffeine.

Thanks for reading!

-kranasAngel - クラナスエインジェル

Plugins Featured

姫HimeWorks' Disabled Choice Conditions

姫HimeWorks' Hidden Choice Conditions

Thanks to 姫HimeWorks for making me do this, it really was a lot of fun.


本贴来自国际rpgmaker官方论坛作者:kranasAngel处,因国际论坛即将永久关站,为了存档多年珍贵资料,署名转载到本论坛存档,由于官方帖子为英文原帖，需要中文翻译请点击论坛顶部切换语言为中文就可以将帖子翻译成中文浏览,方便大家随时查看,原文地址：https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/kadl001-restricting-choices-and-their-narrative-significance.49500/