Concept

Interesting decisions

You might say: meaningful choices

Sid Meier's description of a game as a series of interesting decisions: choices shaped by the situation and by what the player knows.

What it does
Is the test for every system: does it add choices like this, or only work?
Ask
Is there an obvious best answer here?

Sources

  1. Sid Meier / Leigh Alexander, GDC 2012: Sid Meier on how to see games as sets of interesting decisions, What Makes An Interesting Decision?Games are a series of interesting decisions
  2. Sid Meier / Leigh Alexander, GDC 2012: Sid Meier on how to see games as sets of interesting decisions, What Makes An Interesting Decision?Good decisions are situational. There’s a very key idea that when the decision is presented to the player, ideally it acts in an interesting way with the game situation,
  3. Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, ch. 1, p. 11What are they thinking as they make choices in your game? How are they feeling? Are the choices you’ve offered as rich and interesting as they can be?

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Interesting decisions" (interesting-decisions) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/4x-strategy/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal