Narrative choice skeptic? That’s me. Yes, I love characters with inner lives, and stories with subtext, but when the game mechanic involves literally printing that stuff up on screen as text I struggle to suspend my disbelief. My instinct is to grok the mechanical consequences of the choice rather than really live the story. But choices don’t need to be about action and consequence. There’s a rich seam of choices that function essentially as personality quizzes for the player. I feel affection for those bits in Mass Effect where players eavesdrop and then pass judgement on a range of moral quandaries. I particularly like games that use this data to personalise themselves for their players. I did, in fact, make a game built around this idea. It scored 6 in this venerable publication (in the industry, this is known as an upside-down Edge 9). The biggest challenge we had there was that we gathered the player’s data throughout the game. Wouldn’t it have been more effective to have the player’s vitals right from the start?
Perhaps modern technology could help. A big data game could track your skin temperature via your webcam, then map that to a psychological profile. Your next DualShock might be able to read your mind. Wouldn’t that be great? To explore this idea I asked the Edge team if they would go the extra mile (they owe me for that 6) and they agreed. So this month we printed 4,096 different versions of this issue. That’s a version for every unique type of human in the world. We used algorithms and big data to match you precisely to your tailored column. In fact everything you’ve read so far has already been calibrated. Was it particularly interesting to you? You made it this far, so we can assume everything is working correctly. (If you bought this magazine from a shop, you’d be surprised how much we can tell about you based on where you buy your physical copy.)