The decision pattern, some refinements

In my last post, I described the decision pattern as something pertaining to the rest of the play-experience within the game. That's a pretty loose definition, so I'll try to narrow it down a little further: The concequences of the decision should influence either the main plot or a diverse number of distinct and unrelated subplots, such that it is different from making a different decision.

Implementing decisions is one of the greatest ways to give the player the impression that his performance matters, if he is able to recognize that his decisions actually make a difference. In other words, if the player does not realize that judgment is being passed on him, he will not modify his manner of playing, and thinking, accordingly, and his experience will arguably be more shallow.

This is perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of the decision pattern; since a lot of games do not pass permanent judgement, and chooses not to have significant concequences for many decisions, a game which utilizes the decision pattern will necessarily need to make the player understand that that it utilizes it. That is to say, one can safely assume that the player, at the onset, suspects the game is very linear, and that he will suspect any choices implemented of being unimportant.
I can be quite difficult to dispell this suspicion, and perhaps calls for a special "tutorial" section to help the player understand the dynamics of the game.

It's actually worthy of note that once the player has become convinced that judgement will be passed on him, his manner of thinking will be henceforth modified. So, theoretically, you could have very intricate manners of passing judgement in the beginning of the game, and then later introduce choices whereupon the same judgement will always fall, without the player realizing it if the judgement is a reasonable response to all choices.
This utility is exceptionally conniving and very powerful as long as the player is fooled, since you can make the player think he's being responded to without actually being responded to. In other words, you get the same effect that non linear storytelling offers without actually having to make it particularly non linear.

There is a huge problem with this approach however: The player may be inclined to reload the game at an earlier point and try again if he is unhappy with an outcome. If he realizes that you're not actually judging him anymore, he will likely immediately modify his behavior and be inherently suspicious of the implementation of decisions again, a suspicion that may not go away as easily a second time around; fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, and all that.

The trick is to make the player see that there is an immediate difference; there has to be a distinction which is deep enough that the player thinks it may matter in the long run, even after playing through the same 5 minutes of game to try out deffirent choices. If the player can tell that it doesn't even matter immediately afterwards, the choice won't matter much to him because it doesn't matter much to the game.

A good idea is to implement distinct rewards and punishments for different choices in the immediate term, since at the very least, that will make the player care out of greed. But additionally, it's important to have a large amount of long threads; this is to instill in the player that not only is there an immediate difference, but there may well be long term differences as well. In fact, foreshadowing can be a powerful tool in this regard. If a character openly tells the player that he hates the player in one branch, and not in another, then the player will expect that there may be concequences to being hated. There doesn't have to consistently be concequences, as long as the concequences pop up later often enough that the player starts trying to act based on the idea that there may be concequences.

Once the player is in that mindset, doing a conversation where a character decides to now hate the player, that conversation will have an impact. It doesn't actually matter wether or not the player always or never have a future confrontation about something or other; all that matters is that if the player does have a confrontation, it gets tied to the conversation where the character admitted (or didn't admit) to hating the player, such that the player is able to tie the idea of judgement to his earlier action.

If the confrontation and the conversation are spaced far enough apart, the player won't be inclined to reload to check the difference; he may speculate that, if he didn't make the character hate him, the character'd been more confrontational, perhaps the character would have brought a lot of goons along with him; or, if he did make the character hate the player, then he may speculate that the confrontation wasn't inevitable. Either way, it's possible to do a tangible feeling of judgement without actually doing a lot of work to implement that judgement.
On a second playthrough, such things will be revealed to the player, but if you've actually made a game that is good enough to warrant two playthroughs, that's good enough, so you should just take that and be glad. At that point, you can live with the player deciding not to play anymore; he'll still, undoubtedly, recommend the game far and wide.