The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[PATV] Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 4: Negative Possibility Space
Blizzard handled this in WoW the best possible way: making wall climbing impossible and attempting to do so gets you a short vacation fromt he game. No more looking for places you can go if you're awesome. Nope, it's a bannable offense. So much fun... /sarcasm
I got really pissed when they didn't fill said space in NWN2's expansion pack.
Out of all the endings, not a single one let me destroy the wall of the faithless.
While that is plot instead of level design, it still falls under me wanting to do a thing that they didn't think of.
That specific example was thanks to them working with someone else's IP with its own canons. Granted they should have known better than to set up expectations that they wouldn't be allowed to meet.
And they certainly did set them up. There are futile options there to let you attempt and destroy the wall, only to be prevented by something stupid like a god. It's not something they merely didn't "think of."
Back in the days of vanilla WoW, I took my shaman and some water walking potions and ran around the southern edge of Kalimdor, from Tanaris to Feralas. Right off the edge of the map. I soon came across a beach littered with airplane parts, but nothing I could interact with; further along, a Tauren town that looked like one of the world artists had hit Ctrl-V by mistake. Other than that, nothing. Just sheer vertical cliffs representing the far edge of what was supposed to be an impassable barrier. Somebody had decided laziness was the best medicine and didn't even put up any invisible walls.
I remember climbing some challenging mountains in Mass Effect 1, getting out of the maco, and promptly sliding through the polygons to the bottom of the world beneath the ground. I think some of the pleasure of going to these hard to reach places is just doing it. That said, when there actually is something there... oooo boy! I'll explore every single thing in a game if they give me just one prize. Goes double for dialogue options.
The entire time I was watching this, I was thinking of Guild Wars 2. They have some wonderful bonuses for people wanting to look in the off corners of their maps. There's a full pirate themed jumping puzzle in Lion's Arch that I found simply by exploring one of the corners of the map by a Vista.
Two examples I can think of, one intentional, the other unintentional: In Crackdown, when you FINALLY climbed that spire, you got the bauble, but you also got an achievement if you dove into the pool some million feet below. Unintentional: In Everquest, when it first came out, you were able to fall through the map in a couple VERY small VERY specific places that would act like a teleport. It was originally used by devs and testers as quick-travel methods. Too many people exploited it, and they were patched, but the first time you found and used the teleport spots? It was awesome.
When you said "negative possibility space", I thought maybe you meant the opposite of possibility space. Like, things within a game which you purposefully, intentionally cannot do. Like how you (can't) fast-travel in Dark Souls (or at least the first half of the game).
That might be an interesting topic for an episode. Gameplay designed around things the player CAN'T do.
Like how in stealth games, you CAN'T fight enemy guards very well, and the entire game is built around that concept.
I would often spend a night wall-walking in vanilla WoW simply to explore unfinished areas. I didn't really care that they were unfinished, I just liked the exploration of it. In a game with millions of subscribers, and thousands on the server at any one time, I was in an area that was probably unexplored by 90% of them.
In Skyrim I was amazed to learn about the entire continent being just beyond the invisible walls at the edges of the map. Seeing it and knowing that it was just outside was exciting.
I didn't really need a treasure chest in these spots to make them feel awesome.
I agree that giving even small rewards to choice in games make them better, but I don't think the exploration examples fall in line with that. Sometimes you just want to explore and break the game in new and interesting ways. If I reach an "unreachable spot" and there's a note from the Devs, that just means I haven't gone far enough.
I hated the illusion of choice in TWD, because it was often obvious, that the choice was completely meaningless. The biggest example of this is the death of carlie/that other dude I let die. Just because that person COULD die, it means they WILL die. It's basically a spoiler inside the game. That scene really shattered any illusion I might've had before. Even the scene at the start where you try to rescue the son of Hershel feels incredibly meaningless if you actually try to save him. I want consequences from the decisions I make. If that takes much time to build then so be it, I rather have 3 big choices in a game (scale of the Witcher 2 choice for example) then 100 completely meaningless ones, that are cloaked to be meaningful.
If the ingamechoice is not important in the game context THEN it is fine to only do the thing you described in this video. Just giving me an extra message will be enough. But if you CLOAK it and lie to me and tell me it's important I will figure it out most of the time even if it's just me reloading and playing the scene again, because I want to know.
There's the Fallout aspect of creating a character with low Intelligence which practically changes the dialog to the whole game. I'm not sure if that really counts in this aspect, but it's something that came to mind.
This. This is why I'm here every week. To hear about something I've never put into words about games, but I immediately know what they're talking about. This is such a complex and beautiful art form and I appreciate it all the more because of you guys.
@mtheg
Are you seriously complaining about the fact that your choice on whether or not you tried to save Carly or Doug had an immediate and obvious effect? That's certainly a new one.
the "9 Irony" achievement in Bioshock 2 is one of my favorite moments I've had with a game
I had no idea it existed beforehand, I was doing the action simply because I thought it'd be funny, and felt rewarded 10-fold when that little achievement notifier popped up.
I was bothered by the Carley/Doug decision it "Walking Dead" for a different reason- but a reason that also sort of ties into the whole "negative possibility space" issue. It bothered me because other characters- and by proxy, the game itself- seemed to think I had let Carley die because she knew Lee's secret. That wasn't the case at all. It was actually Carley's earlier comment about "you never know who's going to turn out to be a hero" that caused me to make that call, thinking that Doug might have hidden reserves that might be important to the group later. In a strange way, mistaken assumptions about *why* I as a player made a certain choice are capable of bothering me more than consequences or their lack.
Sterling7: Boy do I know that feeling. There are times (KOTOR and KOTOR2 come to mind) when the choice I make could be read a couple different ways. I think I'm being smart, by picking an answer that SEEMS too simplistic, because I see another feature of that decision that could come around and help me later. Then the payoff is revealed, and I feel stupid for having read too deeply into the dialogue.
It's hard to know how to fix that problem, I mean, it's not as though you can then have a follow-up prompt saying "What is your intention? Are you insulting the child because you're an inhuman monster, or because the child is an inhuman monster... maybe both?)
I think if there is a solution to that, it's in having some stat (lets call it charisma), change the degree of any outcome. The stronger your stat, the more credit the game gives you that you actually KNOW what you're doing. Alternately, just making dialogue clear and not subject to interpretation... but that sounds really dull.
@Sterling7
I get where you're coming from, but I never found this shaming of the player for their supposed motivations to be problematic in The Walking Dead. Whenever this happened to me, I found that they gave you responses that allowed you to either agree with their measure of your character, or completely disagree and throw it in the accuser's face. So whilst the whole confrontation in the last episode came off as delusional, with one character accusing Lee of every poor motivation, I just wound up threatening the guy in response because he was being ridiculous, and there was no point even trying to explain myself to him.
My biggest problem with TWD in light of this episode was always the decisions you don't get to make. I mean, all through the story, you get to reaffirm that you're going to look for Clem's parents. But then when you make it to episode 4 and actually arrive where they were last, the plot railroads you into not immediately striking out in search for them, and as a result disappointing Clem. There were other smaller examples (a dropped radio you're forced to rescue, an unpreventable zombie bite), but that one was the most glaring.
As for mountains, climbing them is its own reward.
And I still think that if a negative possibility space is sufficiently fleshed out and acknowledged by the dev, then there is choice there. That is, a single line of dialog down the track for a dialog tree decision that changes nothing else in the game, still makes that decision a choice. As far as I'm concerned the illusion of choice only describes those choices that don't actually choose or affect anything.
Dark Souls again. See somewhere from another point in the world? Yeah, you can probably get there. And there will probably be a unique bit of gear stashed in a dark corner. Or something horrible that will kill you almost immediately. Typical game experience: "OOH! What's over there?? HEY NEAT there's a--"
YOU HAVE DIED.
Hm... I kinda disagree with what the EC crew are expressing here. I kinda like when I get into the "negative possibility spaces" without developer acknowledgement. Especially when you REALLY get into them and the game itself starts to break down and not make sense.
For example, I found a place you could jump across a ledge in Borderlands 2; normally, the jump was impossible unless you had some sort of speed boost (Speed boosts are moderately rare, and class skills only in Borderlands 2, if you're one of the ten people who've not played it). When I got to the far ledge after innumerable tries, I found... strangeness. My character was literally walking through walls and falling through floors, running about on invisible geometries. I wasn't supposed to be there, but I'd made it and got to see things that the level designers HADN'T thought of.
I think it's the feeling of "You made this game. But I broke out of it" that enamors me so much.
@Waladil While I agree with that perspective, and it it's really cool to find something that the devs go "hmm, I did not see that coming", wouldn't you agree that when you do find such a gap in development and to find a sign there saying "bet'cha thought we forgot about this, didn't you?" that it would be a nice feeling that the devs did think of it?
One of the most effective ways to fill negative possibility space when you can't think of something meaningful in the game can be to put something completely irrelevant to the game itself BUT STILL ENTERTAINING OR AMUSING there. The result: AN EASTER-EGG. Just don't go overboard with easter-eggs, 'cuz they can sometime have adverse effects on how immersive the game feels.
@lordlundar I concur. It's fun to break things, but even more fun when there's an acknowledgement that you have done so. This is a perfect opportunity for an Easter egg.
Crazy glitches occasionally function as rewards in their own right, like MissingNo from Pokemon, but that would have been a lot less interesting if it just crashed the game or handled the error gracefully, which are more common results.
It would be nice to get an achievement for breaking the game.
That feeling you get when a door won't open which looks like doors you can usually open? When you enter a building and find it contains no furniture? When you get to that turret that you could just barely reach and find that, although the NPCs can fire it, you can't?
That's unfulfilled negative possibility space.
Filling these player expectations is all part of keeping your design consistent. If the doors you can open look different from the ones you can't (or, even better, you can open every door), if every room contains at least some kind of furnishing (or its emptiness is addressed), if every weapon in the game is usable, it reinforces the notion that what you're doing matters, and that you have control over the outcome.
It's not hard, either. Arma 3's Altis map is full of empty houses. It's bad enough when there are simply a lot of buildings you can't enter, like in Chernarus, but it's far more frustrating when things just feel unfinished. It wouldn't be hard to procedurally generate clutter for those rooms. A desk in the corner, a chair, a bed, a couch. Whatever's appropriate for that type of room.
Of course, Arma 3 is unfinished, so that's not a serious problem, but it's worth paying attention to what's missing.
Negative Possibility Space doesn't have to always take the form of an easter egg or some special bonus connect for people who manage to take advantage of those unexpected discoveries in game.
Whenever I climb a mountain or skyscraper in a game, its not in the expectation of a hidden treasure chest or some bonus content "reward". More often than not its for the same reason people climb mountains in the REAL world.
Tactical advantage, or just a pretty view.
A spectacular enough vista or a position on a map that grants a wide view of the region can be reward in and of itself. Particularly in MMOs and FPSes. And knowing I had to WORK for that view, that I didn't just come out of some cave "as intended" but that the reason I'm seeing this village or that valley laid out before me is because of MY hard work.
Now that I think about it, I guess that's one of the reasons I still prefer the original Borderlands. In BL2, I run into invisible walls ALL THE TIME trying to attack raider bases from unexpected angles or sneak into areas that have not yet been "opened" by the plot but there are a million side objectives and Easter eggs deliberately worked into the game for players to find. Hiding free stuff in DELIBERATE negative possibility space creates an unfulfilled expectation in ACTUAL negative possibility spaces. It turns exploration into nothing more than a jumping puzzle.
@mtheg
Are you seriously complaining about the fact that your choice on whether or not you tried to save Carly or Doug had an immediate and obvious effect? That's certainly a new one.
What? No. My complaint is, that the developer was lazy and killed them off later to avoid more branching plotlines. It didn't make too much sense for them to die in that situation. At the time I thought, that it was great, that I had such a decision but when she died it all went to 'meh'.
The whole "no way a designer would have thought of this" feeling? NetHack and other crazy rogue-likes have that in spades and they are indeed the moments everyone talks about forever. It is the best.
My personal favorite for me was the cockatrice chain:
Scratched by a cockatrice? Turned to stone. Hrmm, better kill them at range.
Killed a cockatrice! Let's go get that corpse. Turned to sonte. Hrmm, better wear gloves.
Wearing a blindfold, using esp to see monsters, something on the floor, you feel around with your hands... it's a cockatrice corpse. You turn to stone. Damnations! Gloves again...
Killed a cockatrice, have gloves, got the corpse... wield it like a weapon? Hit an ogre... the ogre turns to stone! Yesss!! The power! Troll? Stone. Ton of Orcs? Orc statue museum. Straw golem? More like a stone golem! You hit the straw golem with a cockatrice corpse. The straw golem turns to stone. A stone golem hits you! A stone golem hits you! A stone golem hits you! You die... You win this round designers... (I literally said, straw golem, more like a stone golem out loud to my friends before that happened). Amazingly satisfying.
What he actually said is that "hiding free stuff in DELIBERATE negative possibility space creates an unfulfilled expectation in ACTUAL negative possibility spaces."
And Borderlands 2 is indeed very poor at handling this issue.
The stand-out example has to be the Sanctuary map design. To find all the "Cult of the Vault" secret Borderland 2 decals to get a mini-achievement and stat boosting points, you have to climb on the rooftops of Sanctuary. However, there is no indication of which rooftops to climb onto. As a result, some rooftops have secrets on them and ammo/money boxes, but others aren't climbable in that you can get up there only to be met with an invisible wall instead of any rewards.
If Borderlands 2 had handled this consistently, there would be no problem. If all buildings had nothing on top of them bar invisible walls, players would soon learn not to climb them. If all buildings had loot up on top of them, or simply nothing, then the player would be excited to see what was up there. But because Borderlands 2 incentivised climbing some buildings but discouraged climbing others, the player is constantly frustrated, not knowing whether attempting to climb something is even worth it if they may not be able to even reach what is visible on the roof.
Having a player scour everything is fine, but there has to be a clear indication as to when they are starting to break out of designed content. If they can't tell where Negative Possibility Space starts and ends then anything that happens in that undesigned space is still going to reflect on the game itself. So either the mechanics you reinforce to the player cannot be used to enter Negative Possibility Space (but not emergent or discouraged techniques), or you will have to have no Negative Possibility Space at all.
Ha!
I just realised that Negative Probability Space is, to an extent, not exclusive to games.
Take movies for instance. Whilst the way we interact with them is different, they still have Negative Probability Space and, quite appropriately, the bad ones are called Plot Holes. Negative Probability Space in this media are topics that arise from the movie which the viewer can then go away and explore further, but which aren't fully explained in the movie.
The good movies appraise such further thinking by leaving "easter eggs" in that both prompt the observant and congratulate the critical thinker. Like how Back to the Future has Twin Pine Mall become Lone Pine Mall after the Delorean wipes out one tree. These little details in otherwise unimportant side areas make the movie feel more complete, as the producers have taken care to think about and flesh out their universe.
The series on choice/agency has concluded, and I have not been convinced. If the dev railroads my choice or makes them irrelevant (assuming I'm playing a game where I expected meaningful choice, not Halo or the like), they'd better make sure I never notice. If I do, bad review goes up whereever I'm present on the intertubes.
So is The Walking Dead a double Negative Probability Space example, when you're warned that you let Clementine eat human meat and it doesn't matter at all?
I for one, was furious with all the lack of consequences of the things I did. I have never played a game where I've felt more hopeless regarding my choices, especially when I load the checkpoints over and over to avoid a death of a character that basically comes down to other characters being completely unreasonable without any sort of possible rebuttal or action, not because of any immediate threat.
I realize that this is in part a design choice to make people feel on edge or immersed in the extremely dire situation these people are in, and that I liked the game so much that these things bothered me to a much greater extent than if I didn't really care.
The end result is the same though, I felt bad for having played it, in the end and I felt that there should've been much more to either punish or reward you for your choices and not rely so much of the illusion of choice as it did. That's why I feel it's a double NPS.
Mass Effect (as the other example) at least gave you dialogue lines that were supposed to be rewards, as well as bonuses to end content, while the walking dead heavily abused the hint notes to tell you irrelevant information, which in the end just made me distrust them and the designers behind.
[PATV] Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 7, Ep. 4: Negative Possibility Space
Posts
Out of all the endings, not a single one let me destroy the wall of the faithless.
While that is plot instead of level design, it still falls under me wanting to do a thing that they didn't think of.
And they certainly did set them up. There are futile options there to let you attempt and destroy the wall, only to be prevented by something stupid like a god. It's not something they merely didn't "think of."
Back in the days of vanilla WoW, I took my shaman and some water walking potions and ran around the southern edge of Kalimdor, from Tanaris to Feralas. Right off the edge of the map. I soon came across a beach littered with airplane parts, but nothing I could interact with; further along, a Tauren town that looked like one of the world artists had hit Ctrl-V by mistake. Other than that, nothing. Just sheer vertical cliffs representing the far edge of what was supposed to be an impassable barrier. Somebody had decided laziness was the best medicine and didn't even put up any invisible walls.
That might be an interesting topic for an episode. Gameplay designed around things the player CAN'T do.
Like how in stealth games, you CAN'T fight enemy guards very well, and the entire game is built around that concept.
In Skyrim I was amazed to learn about the entire continent being just beyond the invisible walls at the edges of the map. Seeing it and knowing that it was just outside was exciting.
I didn't really need a treasure chest in these spots to make them feel awesome.
I agree that giving even small rewards to choice in games make them better, but I don't think the exploration examples fall in line with that. Sometimes you just want to explore and break the game in new and interesting ways. If I reach an "unreachable spot" and there's a note from the Devs, that just means I haven't gone far enough.
I hated the illusion of choice in TWD, because it was often obvious, that the choice was completely meaningless. The biggest example of this is the death of carlie/that other dude I let die. Just because that person COULD die, it means they WILL die. It's basically a spoiler inside the game. That scene really shattered any illusion I might've had before. Even the scene at the start where you try to rescue the son of Hershel feels incredibly meaningless if you actually try to save him. I want consequences from the decisions I make. If that takes much time to build then so be it, I rather have 3 big choices in a game (scale of the Witcher 2 choice for example) then 100 completely meaningless ones, that are cloaked to be meaningful.
If the ingamechoice is not important in the game context THEN it is fine to only do the thing you described in this video. Just giving me an extra message will be enough. But if you CLOAK it and lie to me and tell me it's important I will figure it out most of the time even if it's just me reloading and playing the scene again, because I want to know.
Take a bow.
Are you seriously complaining about the fact that your choice on whether or not you tried to save Carly or Doug had an immediate and obvious effect? That's certainly a new one.
I had no idea it existed beforehand, I was doing the action simply because I thought it'd be funny, and felt rewarded 10-fold when that little achievement notifier popped up.
Super fulfilling.
It's hard to know how to fix that problem, I mean, it's not as though you can then have a follow-up prompt saying "What is your intention? Are you insulting the child because you're an inhuman monster, or because the child is an inhuman monster... maybe both?)
I think if there is a solution to that, it's in having some stat (lets call it charisma), change the degree of any outcome. The stronger your stat, the more credit the game gives you that you actually KNOW what you're doing. Alternately, just making dialogue clear and not subject to interpretation... but that sounds really dull.
I get where you're coming from, but I never found this shaming of the player for their supposed motivations to be problematic in The Walking Dead. Whenever this happened to me, I found that they gave you responses that allowed you to either agree with their measure of your character, or completely disagree and throw it in the accuser's face. So whilst the whole confrontation in the last episode came off as delusional, with one character accusing Lee of every poor motivation, I just wound up threatening the guy in response because he was being ridiculous, and there was no point even trying to explain myself to him.
My biggest problem with TWD in light of this episode was always the decisions you don't get to make. I mean, all through the story, you get to reaffirm that you're going to look for Clem's parents. But then when you make it to episode 4 and actually arrive where they were last, the plot railroads you into not immediately striking out in search for them, and as a result disappointing Clem. There were other smaller examples (a dropped radio you're forced to rescue, an unpreventable zombie bite), but that one was the most glaring.
As for mountains, climbing them is its own reward.
And I still think that if a negative possibility space is sufficiently fleshed out and acknowledged by the dev, then there is choice there. That is, a single line of dialog down the track for a dialog tree decision that changes nothing else in the game, still makes that decision a choice. As far as I'm concerned the illusion of choice only describes those choices that don't actually choose or affect anything.
Randall Glass anyone?
http://www.warthog-jump.com/
YOU HAVE DIED.
For example, I found a place you could jump across a ledge in Borderlands 2; normally, the jump was impossible unless you had some sort of speed boost (Speed boosts are moderately rare, and class skills only in Borderlands 2, if you're one of the ten people who've not played it). When I got to the far ledge after innumerable tries, I found... strangeness. My character was literally walking through walls and falling through floors, running about on invisible geometries. I wasn't supposed to be there, but I'd made it and got to see things that the level designers HADN'T thought of.
I think it's the feeling of "You made this game. But I broke out of it" that enamors me so much.
Crazy glitches occasionally function as rewards in their own right, like MissingNo from Pokemon, but that would have been a lot less interesting if it just crashed the game or handled the error gracefully, which are more common results.
It would be nice to get an achievement for breaking the game.
That's unfulfilled negative possibility space.
Filling these player expectations is all part of keeping your design consistent. If the doors you can open look different from the ones you can't (or, even better, you can open every door), if every room contains at least some kind of furnishing (or its emptiness is addressed), if every weapon in the game is usable, it reinforces the notion that what you're doing matters, and that you have control over the outcome.
It's not hard, either. Arma 3's Altis map is full of empty houses. It's bad enough when there are simply a lot of buildings you can't enter, like in Chernarus, but it's far more frustrating when things just feel unfinished. It wouldn't be hard to procedurally generate clutter for those rooms. A desk in the corner, a chair, a bed, a couch. Whatever's appropriate for that type of room.
Of course, Arma 3 is unfinished, so that's not a serious problem, but it's worth paying attention to what's missing.
Negative Possibility Space doesn't have to always take the form of an easter egg or some special bonus connect for people who manage to take advantage of those unexpected discoveries in game.
Whenever I climb a mountain or skyscraper in a game, its not in the expectation of a hidden treasure chest or some bonus content "reward". More often than not its for the same reason people climb mountains in the REAL world.
Tactical advantage, or just a pretty view.
A spectacular enough vista or a position on a map that grants a wide view of the region can be reward in and of itself. Particularly in MMOs and FPSes. And knowing I had to WORK for that view, that I didn't just come out of some cave "as intended" but that the reason I'm seeing this village or that valley laid out before me is because of MY hard work.
Now that I think about it, I guess that's one of the reasons I still prefer the original Borderlands. In BL2, I run into invisible walls ALL THE TIME trying to attack raider bases from unexpected angles or sneak into areas that have not yet been "opened" by the plot but there are a million side objectives and Easter eggs deliberately worked into the game for players to find. Hiding free stuff in DELIBERATE negative possibility space creates an unfulfilled expectation in ACTUAL negative possibility spaces. It turns exploration into nothing more than a jumping puzzle.
What? No. My complaint is, that the developer was lazy and killed them off later to avoid more branching plotlines. It didn't make too much sense for them to die in that situation. At the time I thought, that it was great, that I had such a decision but when she died it all went to 'meh'.
My personal favorite for me was the cockatrice chain:
Scratched by a cockatrice? Turned to stone. Hrmm, better kill them at range.
Killed a cockatrice! Let's go get that corpse. Turned to sonte. Hrmm, better wear gloves.
Wearing a blindfold, using esp to see monsters, something on the floor, you feel around with your hands... it's a cockatrice corpse. You turn to stone. Damnations! Gloves again...
Killed a cockatrice, have gloves, got the corpse... wield it like a weapon? Hit an ogre... the ogre turns to stone! Yesss!! The power! Troll? Stone. Ton of Orcs? Orc statue museum. Straw golem? More like a stone golem! You hit the straw golem with a cockatrice corpse. The straw golem turns to stone. A stone golem hits you! A stone golem hits you! A stone golem hits you! You die... You win this round designers... (I literally said, straw golem, more like a stone golem out loud to my friends before that happened). Amazingly satisfying.
That's a pretty absurd interpretation of what @ReaverKing said.
What he actually said is that "hiding free stuff in DELIBERATE negative possibility space creates an unfulfilled expectation in ACTUAL negative possibility spaces."
And Borderlands 2 is indeed very poor at handling this issue.
The stand-out example has to be the Sanctuary map design. To find all the "Cult of the Vault" secret Borderland 2 decals to get a mini-achievement and stat boosting points, you have to climb on the rooftops of Sanctuary. However, there is no indication of which rooftops to climb onto. As a result, some rooftops have secrets on them and ammo/money boxes, but others aren't climbable in that you can get up there only to be met with an invisible wall instead of any rewards.
If Borderlands 2 had handled this consistently, there would be no problem. If all buildings had nothing on top of them bar invisible walls, players would soon learn not to climb them. If all buildings had loot up on top of them, or simply nothing, then the player would be excited to see what was up there. But because Borderlands 2 incentivised climbing some buildings but discouraged climbing others, the player is constantly frustrated, not knowing whether attempting to climb something is even worth it if they may not be able to even reach what is visible on the roof.
Having a player scour everything is fine, but there has to be a clear indication as to when they are starting to break out of designed content. If they can't tell where Negative Possibility Space starts and ends then anything that happens in that undesigned space is still going to reflect on the game itself. So either the mechanics you reinforce to the player cannot be used to enter Negative Possibility Space (but not emergent or discouraged techniques), or you will have to have no Negative Possibility Space at all.
I just realised that Negative Probability Space is, to an extent, not exclusive to games.
Take movies for instance. Whilst the way we interact with them is different, they still have Negative Probability Space and, quite appropriately, the bad ones are called Plot Holes. Negative Probability Space in this media are topics that arise from the movie which the viewer can then go away and explore further, but which aren't fully explained in the movie.
The good movies appraise such further thinking by leaving "easter eggs" in that both prompt the observant and congratulate the critical thinker. Like how Back to the Future has Twin Pine Mall become Lone Pine Mall after the Delorean wipes out one tree. These little details in otherwise unimportant side areas make the movie feel more complete, as the producers have taken care to think about and flesh out their universe.
I for one, was furious with all the lack of consequences of the things I did. I have never played a game where I've felt more hopeless regarding my choices, especially when I load the checkpoints over and over to avoid a death of a character that basically comes down to other characters being completely unreasonable without any sort of possible rebuttal or action, not because of any immediate threat.
I realize that this is in part a design choice to make people feel on edge or immersed in the extremely dire situation these people are in, and that I liked the game so much that these things bothered me to a much greater extent than if I didn't really care.
The end result is the same though, I felt bad for having played it, in the end and I felt that there should've been much more to either punish or reward you for your choices and not rely so much of the illusion of choice as it did. That's why I feel it's a double NPS.
Mass Effect (as the other example) at least gave you dialogue lines that were supposed to be rewards, as well as bonuses to end content, while the walking dead heavily abused the hint notes to tell you irrelevant information, which in the end just made me distrust them and the designers behind.
can we, like, engrave that onto the moon or something? It's THE biggest fundamental problem in game design these days.