Designing Decisions as in games. Manufacture the experience

These are ideas from designing games book by Sylvester.

• Decisions are a powerful source of emotions.
  • Explaining it requires logical reasoning. Plainly, we need to tell why we did it and how we did.
• Many media provoke emotions through spectacle, music, character.
  • But only the stickiest ideas are derived from the successful outcome of a particularly pleasant decision.
    • They can be important, inconsequential, difficult or easy.
    • With lots of information or with scarce.
• In an essence, the decision is not about what has happened, but what about might happen.
  • Everything that doesn’t happen is irrelevant and thus no need to worry yourself.
  • If we talk about classical game design, decisions that had been reached during interaction with the world had far-reaching consequences.
    • An agent lives in the continuous simulation of the world, stretching into the future. And a person perceives outcomes on emotional level, because of that decisions have substantial effects on our behaviour.
  • Board games are all the same, go, checkers, chess, movement of pieces on the board are unimportant. What critical is an internal decision process that makes games fascinating.
• Decision could be reached and taken action on it only and only if possible future understandable.
  • Thus, consequences of the decision must be partially predictable. Not without uncertainties, but predictable.
  • The key to the sweetest decision is information balance.
    • Not starvation.
      • Starvation is usually hidden. Nobody wants to think about additional research and cognitive effort.
    • No excess.
      • It’s not a decision. It’s something else. Abundance of information removes necessity of decision.
        • ![[A definition of a perfect manager#^98144b]]
    • They both bring indecision, though on different grounds.