When is comes to design decisions, you are the expert, make the best choice for your game.  Too often, games leave in too many options for the user to sort through and decide.  There should be plenty of INTERESTING decisions in a game, crisis points that drive the action and narrative.  BUT, why bog down the user with tedious choices that you the game creator did not care to refine for them?  Further, why present them with loads of exotic and unfamiliar choices, when most people will only be interested in a few options?

I like finding off-line examples for game design scenarios.  Here is one from the world of ice cream.

THE 5 MOST POPULAR ICE CREAM FLAVORS  (Flavor, percent preferring. Source: International Ice Cream Association)

1. Vanilla, 29%
2. Chocolate, 8.9%
3. Butter pecan, 5.3%
4. Strawberry, 5.3%
5. Neapolitan, 4.2%

When it comes to ice cream, the vast majority of people prefer plain old vanilla.  More people prefer vanilla or chocolate or strawberry than prefer to have them packaged together for them in Neopolitan.  Even common flavors like mint chip and rocky road do not compare to the basics in preferrence.  So when offering a choice to players, use your expert judgement to narrow the choice to appealing and interesting ones.

Let’s think about vanilla for a moment.  Default, white, plain vanilla.  Vanilla is a rare and expensive tropical spice.  It is difficult to grow, pollenate, harvest and ferment.  It is rich and complex in its aroma and flavor.  The thing about vanilla is how you use it.  Use it well, and it is the best selling flavor.  Make a “vanilla” game, but make it with skill and care, and you can have a mass market hit. 

In ice cream, and in life, more people prefer vanilla to the alternatives.  Vanilla is mass-market! That said, people prefer rich, quality Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream to artificial vanillin frozen dairy product.
 

John Hench, the legendary Imagineer who worked for over 60 years for Disney gave a lecture about his work.  Below are some exceprts that express how he, and Walt, set about desiging for a mass-market audience. Good lessons for making OK games good, and good games great.

“Audiences respond to our animated movies because they are about survival. People respond to them. Survival is the basis for all games. There is a power of theater in it. Maybe why we have no resistance to entertainment is because it teaches us about survival. At the park, we toss a pseudo-menace at you and we allow you to win. You might feel you are going too fast for safety but it really is safe and eventually, you win and you feel good about winning. They are feeling things, maybe something they haven’t felt in years because they’ve been doing humdrum kind of things where they haven’t felt those feelings.” 

“There is a greater sense of order. At a state fair or carnival, everything clamors for you, so you look and look and try to make sense out of all these chaotic images. You are forced into making a lot of judgments. At Disneyland, when it comes to a ‘decision point,’ we try to offer only two choices. We don’t give seven or eight so that you really have to work hard to decide which is the best of those choices. We only offer two and then a little farther along, we give another two. They are still getting those seven or eight choices eventually but we are unfolding them gradually in segments so it is less overwhelming.

“This low-level of consciousness which we exploit is the extraordinary invention of the (Disney) Studio. Other parks fail at details because they are built by people who don’t understand images. Images override everything.”

There are lessons here for all game designers who seek a wider, even mass-market audience.  You can read more about Mr. Hench’s lecture in Wade Simpson’s full article here.