So, let’s say you’re making a narrative-based game, and you want to present your players with a decision – an interesting decision. That means this decision’s going to have consequences, ones which are going to affect how those players are going to experience the rest of the narrative. Now, some of those consequences are going to be hinted at or outright stated by the text – if you tell a player they’re at the edge of a tall cliff, then the fact that choosing to jump off that cliff is going to probably lead to a messy landing is only implied, but it is very much an implication any player paying attention can pick up on. At the same time though, not every decision is going to be so clear-cut. Sometimes, those consequences are going to be more nebulous, more ambiguous. Sometimes those consequences don’t fully make themselves known for a long time. How much do you tell your players about the effects of their decisions? And what kind of headspace do you want your players to be in when they make that decision?
These are the sorts of questions which inform the level of information transparency you give to your players.
In its most basic sense, information transparency is the level of information you give your players about the world their player character is inhabiting. This doesn’t just refer to exposition about the setting and the characters – I’d actually argue this is the less important of the forms of information transparency – but also about the mechanical workings of the game systems underneath the narrative: the figurative cogs and springs that lead a player to one outcome or another. At a maximum level of information transparency, every single one of these inner workings is revealed: whenever an internal story flag is tripped or a variable is incremented, the player is told about it. At any time, they can access a database of these workings and get an explanation of where they currently stand among the mechanical metrics which determine the workings of the story – as well as an understanding of what precisely to do next to achieve a particular outcome.
This level of transparency usually isn’t seen in games, not even in ones which maximise information transparency. Ultimately, this is because all of the tension of a participatory story like a narrative-driven game comes from a certain degree of uncertainty over what’s going to happen next: a tension between the player’s goals and the outcome of their decisions. By always providing the player a clear chart of what each variable and lever does and where each branch of the story goes, then the player isn’t so much engaging in the story as they are simply following a step-by-step guide to getting the ending they want. Arguably, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of thing, and the ubiquity of guides and cheat menus for narrative-driven games certainly attests to the fact that a lot of people do. However, this level of information transparency also strips a narrative-driven game of any level of challenge or tension – and it also doesn’t so much break the immersion of the game’s setting as it does grind it into pieces: after all, it’s hard to maintain the suspension of disbelief when you can see the gears inside every animatronic.
At the same time, too little information transparency can also be a problem. When players make decisions, they want to do so with at least the illusion of being informed. If you don’t give them enough information to make them feel like they can at least understand the majority of the likely consequences each one is likely to lead to, then you’re going to lose their engagement. This was traditionally the problem with a lot of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 80s and 90s, although in that case, it was easy enough to simply flip back to the page you were on and pick the other option instead. The fact that modern narrative-driven games tend to be much longer and more mechanically complex means it’s often not so easy for a player to undo the choices which led them to an undesirable outcome, especially if they don’t know what those choices were in the first place.
So, naturally, what you want is something between these two extremes. Something in between a total transparency which leeches all the tension out of a narrative and all the magic out of the setting – and a total opacity which makes the player incapable of making intelligent decisions. However, where you want your game to sit on this scale between extremes depends primarily on your design intention – which is to say, how you want your game to represent the story you want to tell mechanically, how you want to encourage the player to approach your narrative, and what kind of experience you want to ‘sell’ to your players.
As an example: say you’re designing a game where the player takes on the role of a mastermind in a royal court, a veteran plotter who understands the fundamentals of intrigue like the back of their hand – a game with a very clear range of perfect to bad outcomes determined by the player’s ability to inhabit that role as a mastermind effectively, by setting up, carrying out, and adapting to plots and conspiracies. In this sort of case, maybe you’d want to be more transparent with mechanical information: it would represent the skills at reading people and plotting against them that the player character is already supposed to possess – and it gives the player the information needed to engage effectively with the main “gameplay” mechanic of plotting against the player character’s enemy.
At the same time, take another game, in the same setting, but the player character is a newcomer to court, one with very little experience in its workings. Say that the narrative is less about “winning” in the court intrigues which swirl around the player character, but stumbling into them and being swept along in them, often in a way which leads to decisions which make sense at the time, but only proceed to get the player character deeper in trouble. For this kind of narrative game, you’d probably want less information transparency, to represent the player character’s own lack of experience, as well as to help explain how people like the player character get swept up like this in the first place: it’s a lot harder to sympathise with someone who makes decisions which are bad in hindsight if you know from the get-go that they’re going to lead to negative consequences, so in this case, a lack of information transparency will lead to the player’s own internal thoughts echoing the player character’s in thinking ‘well it seemed like a good idea at the time’.
Of course, you could play around with this scale as well. One thing I’ve done before is have characters which the players have chosen to be expert at a certain discipline or field of study be able to gain more information than one who hasn’t. The result is a form of what might be called ‘ludonarrative resonance’: a dynamic where the player’s experience with the game is shaped by the way the game interacts with them, thereby deepening the immersive bond between player and player character. This is something which is almost never a bad thing in narrative games where the player must inhabit the role of a player character, since it encourages the player to make decisions the way the player character would.
Ultimately, this sounds like a pretty simple concept, but turning theory into execution is always, quite difficult. It’s one thing to have a design intention, it’s another thing to have it land properly. I’ve been trying for twelve years now, and I always feel like I’ve missed the mark one way or another.
The most common result of that sort of misstep, at least for me, is that while I provide information – what I sometimes call ‘signposting’, it doesn’t reach the player in a way which allows them to use it as part of their decision-making process – which is a problem when that information is supposed to be an important piece of context to help them make their decision the way they want – or the way that the character they’re playing would be encouraged to.
Some of that might obviously come down to a skill issue. Some people simply don’t pay attention, and if it’s their inability to parse the clues which you’ve given them, then that might be their fault. At the same time, if you’ve presented those clues unclearly, or in a way which is too obtuse to easily understand for some of your intended player base, then you’ve failed to translate your design intention to practise, which is obviously something you want to avoid. A common pitfall here is to assume that the player is operating on the same sort of logic that you are, and will thus parse the clues you give them the same ways you would. This is often not the case. Different worldviews and perspectives lead to people approaching different pieces of exposition and narrative signposts from different directions, and being too opaque or too subtle with those cues may lead to a situation where a player loses engagement with your narrative simply because of some kind of cultural or mechanical mismatch. While you want to avoid revealing more information than your design intends to, you do also want to make sure that what you do want to reveal is easily readable to your intended player base.
I know that personally, I’ve often worked under the fear of falling into the other extreme – that of being so obvious with my signposting that my players feel like their intelligence is being insulted, but seeing as that’s evidently a point I’ve never actually reached, I’m beginning to think that it’s better to err on the side of heavy-handedness in this regard. Other possibilities are to simply make the level of information transparency a modular option, if possible – making it so the player can decide just how much information they have access to. This could possibly mess with the tone or the design intention of your story by – for example – providing a player with more information than their player character would realistically have at that moment, but whether that’s worth avoiding the possibility of making the game potentially unplayable to some section of your intended player base is something you have to weigh, as a game designer.
Of course, that’s what it all comes down to. All of this advice is intended to help you pursue your own design intentions as a game designer. I can’t tell you what those are because I don’t know the story you want to tell, all I can do is try to offer whatever advice I can on how best to tell it.
Paul Wang 