Choice is the religion of our age. From parents of schoolchildren to supermarket shoppers, we are all constantly advised that more choice is a good thing. But we also know that hundreds of television channels all showing garbage does not consitute a meaningful choice at all. Videogames, too, offer increasing numbers of choices to the player: far from their austere, one-concept beginnings, they bristle with option menus and gameplay tweaks. But is it always the case that more is better?

More senior readers of Edge may remember a ZX Spectrum game called Dark Star, a brilliantly stylish 3D space shooter which at the time featured the most comprehensive “front end” ever seen. Under the menu “Change the game”, it would let you decide how accurate and fast the enemy missiles were, decide how many enemy ships there would be, or even play without planets. Dark Star offered several quite discrete variations on its gameplay for the price of one.

This is one aspect that has increasingly come to define the videogame form: games are not just interactive but customizable. Of course, in theory it would be possible to buy a dramatic Turner seascape, hang it on your wall, and daub a bright pink cartoon chicken in the bottom right-hand corner, thus customizing the painting to your own liking, but in an art-historical context that would normally be construed as vandalism, because the canvas is presented as existing, and meaning, in one definitive state. Efforts to encourage the consumer to reimagine the artistic product have been made in other areas, however, from the short-lived fad in the 1960s for loose-leaf novels, whose pages were not bound together and could be read in any order, to the release nowadays of electronic-music tracks as tweakable aural toys on CD-Rom.

Dance music in particular, with its inherent culture of remixing, has almost thoroughly abandoned any notion of what is the “definitive” version of one of its artworks, and in this sense it is still more radical than the videogame. For however many options it might offer the player, a videogame still needs to present a core experience that we feel represents the authentic nature of the gameplay. The option to race without weapons in WipEout Fusion, for example, is arguably an option too far, because it can be read as an implicit admission that the weapon balance in what we still feel is the “core” game is disturbingly off-key; on the other hand, the non-combat racing is a curiously soulless experience. We thus have a choice between two slightly unsatisfactory modes of play, which is worse than having no choice, if the game is perfectly tuned in the first place.

Naturally there are many choices that are nice to have. The wondrous array of bot, weapon and gamestyle options in Perfect Dark’s multiplayer provides a near-inexhaustible Lego set of combat scenarios, but only within the context of a game whose one-player campaign is tightly controlled. The increase in options in modern videogames must also have something to do also with a wish to appeal to an ever wider market, and an ever broader range of skillsets among gamers, but these arguments will always be double-edged. One could argue that the option to use electronic helpers such as traction control in Gran Turismo 3 is a cop-out, especially since it defaults to on, so that many players might never have to come to grips properly with the driving physics. On the other hand, the traction control is simulating a real device, and it leaves players free to challenge themselves later by refusing its aid. The now-standard “hub” arrangement of areas in exploration games such as Jak & Daxter, meanwhile, offering the implicit option of selectable challenges, avoids the frustration of having to play one tricky level over and over again, but it can also easily lead to apathy and a loss of motivation, missing the focus and tension of linear adventures such as Tomb Raider.

The easiest way to appeal to a broad range of consumers, however, is also the most widely-abused option system: that of selectable difficulty levels. So often a harder difficulty level merely makes the tasks the player has to complete more tedious: giving bosses longer health bars, or causing you to weep with boredom while you down yet more Metal Gears, is a horribly artifical way to extend the game. All too rarely do increased difficulty levels result in the player having to rethink her tactics and strategy in a creative way, as in Halo or Advance Wars. The PAL version of MGS2, meanwhile, committed a cardinal sin with its pre-game questionnaire, when the consequences of answering its questions were not made at all clear. Meanwhile, the one option whose absence most players lamented - to play as Snake all the way through - is only to be addressed in the “remix” of the game, tellingly named Substance.

We’ve come a long way since Dark Star, and maybe it’s time to consider which choices are necessary and which are cop-outs; which are well-engineered alternatives and which simply muddy the issue. Arguably more videogames should limit front-end choices to an absolute minimum, and offer key customization decisions in-game, such as the clever way in which Halo dramatises its control options in the first level (which actually convinced me to change my long-held preference for inverted look).

There is a good aesthetic and psychological reason for this: when playing games we don’t want to get the feeling that we are manipulating software. I know plenty of people who aren’t preferences junkies and have never even figured out how to nuke Clippy in MS Word, so why should they want to wander through a similar forest of menus in their time off? And it can hardly be coincidence that some of the most refreshing games in recent times - Ico, Luigi’s Mansion, Pikmin - offer the player virtually no options at all. For if the game is good enough in the first place, why would we want to change it?

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