Recently, I watched a video by The Trinket Mage discussing the increase in multi-colored commanders in Magic the Gathering, and its ramifications on deckbuilding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4SfXfZHB-I). This got me to thinking about the same idea, as applied to game design as a whole.

In general, the consensus when it comes to gaming is that choice is good. Player agency is a good feature to have in a game, and most games benefit by providing choices for their players, and making those choices matter. However, when the choices players make don’t matter, or the player has too many choices, it leads to several problems. The primary one for both issues is player satisfaction. “Why did I have to make that choice? It didn’t matter” or “Why would I choose anything else? This is the clearly the best option” are two main views that come from these issues. For me, I see the matter of too many choices being the greater offender, as it often hides larger issues in the game.

Taking an example from the video, lets assume we are building a deck focused around dragons. Commander decks are a 100 card deck, with no two cards being the same. Each of these decks has a commander from which the deck’s color identity is determined. Magic has five colors (white, red, black, green, blue), and cards in a commander deck must only contain colors shared with the commander (e.g. a red-white commander cannot have blue cards in the deck). With this in mind, we can consider two commanders. One is a, say, red-green dragon focused commander, that buffs your dragons. For this deck, we need to consider our best options within those colors. We can’t run the single best options available, since they might not be in our color identity, or might not synergize well with the cards we do have available in our color. As such, we need to be creative with our deckbuilding to build around this restriction. Our other commander might also be a dragon focused commander, that buffs our dragons. However, this commander is all five colors. Suddenly, we have access to practically all the cards in the game. We can always choose the best options, and why wouldn’t we. Our deck will, on average, be more powerful than if we were building with the red-green dragon commander, but it will feel samey, and lose a lot of the individual touch that goes into building a unique deck.

“Given the chance, players will optimize the fun out of a game” – Soren Johnson

The problem in the example is not the lack of choice, but the abundance of choice. Effectively, by being given access to all the best possible options, the player lost access to other options. In a sense, by giving so many choices, several were made redundant, and the amount of effective choices was overall lowered, thereby making a game have less effective choices than it first appeared. This is an easy pitfall to fall into, if you assume that more choice is better, but developers also need to remember that part of the reason choices are good is that players get to make them. If the player feels forced into a choice, whether because it is more optimal, fun, or reasonable, it brings into question the reason for that choice.