Picture the following: you are travelling in a dark forest when you come to a fork in the road. Left, or right? You take the left-hand path, and before too long a ferocious ogre leaps out at you. So far, so straightforward. Now imagine that you somehow go back in time, take the right-hand path, and Lo! the same ogre appears before you with malintent. It would appear that the ogre exists in a superposition of states that only becomes determinate after you have picked one of the two paths – hence, ‘Quantum Ogre’.

The Quantum Ogre is a classic example of when a player’s choices obviously should lead to different outcomes, but don’t actually do so. It’s a way of fostering the illusion of player agency without having to work for it: design one destination, but present a choice of two paths. Of course, in Table-Top RPGs – where the Quantum Ogre originated – the Game/Dungeon Master might just about get away with it, since the player usually can’t go back in time and take the road untaken. In a video game, however, the player can take both paths, on top of which someone will eventually upload a list of all the choices in your game that do and don’t matter.

The case of the Quantum Ogre illustrates a perennial problem for all games that fall somewhere between sandboxes and linear narratives. On the one hand, you want to give your players interesting choices that feel like they matter (the choices, that is, although I suppose the players by extension). On the other hand, the moment you start introducing branching story pathways you face the problem of bloat, since those pathways grow exponentially. Even if you find a way of reconnecting those paths somewhere later down the track, you’re still investing a huge amount of resources in creating parts of the game that the player may never see. 

Obviously, the Quantum Ogre (and his good friend, ‘Seven Different Dialogue Options for Saying “Yes, I’ll do the quest”’) provides a way around this problem, and there are plenty of games that have made use of it. However, since people tend to hate hypocrisy more than sin itself, the shattering of the illusion of agency can come at a high price. Fortunately, there are ways of making choices ‘matter’ without needing to change the game narrative that the player actually plays through. They’re not mutually exclusive, and choice-heavy games tend to use a combination (with the occasional Quantum Ogre thrown in for good measure).

First off, we have choices that affect how the game is played. These tend to give the player different items or abilities, but by and large keep the prime story pathway unaffected. Basically, they’re a narratively dressed-up way of letting the player change their ‘loadout’. In inFAMOUS (2009), for example, the player’s conduit powers change depending on whether they make predominantly ‘good’ or ‘evil’ choices. In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021), the player is frequently presented with choices such as: 1) transport the bones of a priestess to a shrine to boost morale; 2) nick the priestess’ powerful bow from her tomb; 3) resurrect the priestess as an undead companion for their party. In Mass Effect (2007), the player can end up with a different set of squadmates to bring on missions (and very different relationships with those squadmates), but the missions themselves are largely the same. The list could go on, but the point is that these kinds of choices affect the gameplay while keeping the prime narrative confined to a single pathway. Minor offshoots (like NPCs being enamoured or disgusted with the player’s actions) and a variety of endings embroider the tapestry without requiring a whole new tapestry.

Then we have the choices that ‘matter’ because they’re designed to weigh heavily on the player’s conscience. These often revolve around the fates of NPCs or parts of the larger gameworld, but rarely affect the playable parts of the narrative. There might be a brief cutscene to explain the far-reaching consequences of the player’s choices, or they’ll get a mention in the final wrap-up before the credits, or (for double the fun) they’ll be intertwined with ‘loadout’ choices. Yet what makes these choices impactful is the fact that they present the player with philosophical or ethical problems. In the firstWitcher game (2007), for instance, the player must decide whether to protect a witch from an angry mob by (eventually) slaughtering the ringleaders of said angry mob. It’s a variant on the classic Trolley Problem, with additional complications coming from the fact that both the witch and the ringleaders appear to be guilty of some pretty heinous crimes (although there’s also a deliberate ambiguity around all of this that exacerbates the problem). The choice the player makes here doesn’t affect the main plot at all – they still get the pass to move on to the next area – but the situation, the stakes, and the uncertainty of guilt all make for a compelling and memorable moment.

Plenty of other narrative-heavy games throw these kinds of choices at players (especially CRPGs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 (2017) and Pillars of Eternity (2015)). If we take The Witcher’s example, it seems that the effectiveness of these choices boils down to a few essential elements. First, immersion is key: if we don’t care about the fate of the gameworld or the people in it, or if we start viewing these things as constructs rather than people, then the choice and its consequences aren’t going to matter. Closely related to this is the emotional investment the player has in the situation: a choice that will affect ‘people’ that the player has come to know is much weightier than a choice affecting vague and unnamed NPCs.

Another important part of what keeps us immersed is the extent to which the situation we’re placed in seems natural or contrived. Despite its fantasy elements, the situation in The Witcher is not only believable (what with its actual historical counterparts), but also reveals itself gradually over the course of the level so that when the final choice is presented it seems all but inevitable. Contrast this with the standard ‘The tentacular god of the deeps demands its sacrifice of puppies or it will flood Manhattan’ (OK, not a choice I’ve actually encountered in a game, but there have been some that weren’t far off). The point is that presenting a grounded, situated, and organically emerging problem is a large part of what separates a game (or any form of narrative media) from an ethics class.

Finally, there’s the matter of the choice’s ambiguity. Obviously, ambiguity isn’t always desirable, especially not repeated ad nauseam. However, when it’s properly deployed it can make a choice feel like it has a significance beyond the bounds of the game. In The Witcher, the player can gather as few or as many clues as they like, and while those clues may inform their decision, there’s no ultimate ‘solution’ to be uncovered. It doesn’t help that some of the NPCs are probably lying, and that there are a few of the ‘rules’ governing the natural/supernatural world that aren’t concretely laid out. In the end, we’re left knowing that we don’t know everything, and we have to make a judgement call. This also has the potential to make us interested in what other people chose, and why.

A staple of what we might call ‘discussable’ art is that it features some kind of intractable problem, and the only real difference in games is that the player gets to make the all-important choice. This choice therefore matters because, on the one hand, a narrative unknown tends to nag at us like a missing tooth (this is the driving force behind the whole genre of detective fiction, after all). On the other hand, we’re left in a position where our choice won’t be entirely dictated by what’s been given to us by the game (since that’s incomplete). We necessarily insert our own prejudices, morals, and patterns of behaviour into the situation, and therefore our choice inevitably reflects a part of ourselves. 

The types of choice that I’ve been discussing here – ‘loadout’ and ‘problem’ – are probably the two main ways games make choices matter without affecting the main story. Hybrids are also fairly common (where a problem choice is also a loadout choice), and although I’ve mostly focused on RPGs, this isn’t the only genre that features them (take resource-management strategy games like Frostpunk (2018) and The Banner Saga (2014), for instance). Of course, I wouldn’t be doing due diligence without pointing out that some of the games I’ve mentioned do actually have some branching pathways in their main stories as well, although that gives them all the more reason to also use loadout and problem choices to keep things manageable. 

To come back full circle, there is a sense in which, although they seem to matter, the loadout and problem choices do still share a kinship with the Quantum Ogre. Although – unlike the Quantum Ogre – they are choices that lead to different consequences, those consequences leave the prime narrative largely untouched, ultimately putting the player back on the path that has been laid out for them. Yet when they’re done well, it’s entirely possible that these problem choices can end up seeming far more important than the main story – and thus it will be these smaller, self-contained narratives that the player actually remembers when the game is over.