Choice is a funny thing. We've all been there - that critical moment where we're asked to choose between good and evil, between saving the world or letting the one person in the world you love die...at least in a video game. Games give regular folks like you and me a chance to experience the thrill of making choices on a daily basis that would shatter the minds of a real person. While these choices might feel like the biggest change in the game's limited universe, the truth is that these choices are simply illusions...and it's likely you'll end up in the same place no matter what choices you make.

A good example of a game with the illusion of choice is BioShock. After a horrific plane crash, you find yourself in the middle of the ocean and somehow manage to arrive in an underwater city called Rapture. During the entire game, your choices are dictated by your objectives to bring down the city's founder, Andrew Ryan. At the end of your quest, it is revealed that every single one of your "objectives" was actually brought about by a code phrase used by your ally during the game. In actuality, the only choice you can actually make is whether to save or harvest the creepy girls known as "Little Sisters," which gets you a different ending but has no impact on the direction of the game itself. The same could be said of the classic first-person shooter Half-Life where the developers became experts at giving the illusion of choice of direction when there is really only one path to the end of the game.

Even open-world games that boast choice like last year's Infamous, or the Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed series are not truly bound to choices. There are many optional missions to take part in and they may make the game easier for the player towards the end of the game, but these choices do not significantly impact the direction and eventual conclusion of the game itself. In most cases, you're still going to get the same gameplay in the end with a slightly different ending cinematic. The choices are in the minor details of the game, not necessarily in the story. While they may not impact the story or progression of the game very much, these tiny details and customizations are what make games fun and unique. Games like Fallout 3 give players a general direction in which to go, but does not tell them how to accomplish their goals. Role-playing games that allow you to build up a team of characters to your own specifications and preferences help you have a larger investment in the game itself, making the direction you go and the quests you attempt to finish seem more exciting.

The truth of the matter is that choice is what drives many of today's games. Games like the recent Mass Effect 2 boast choice as one of the major selling points of the franchise. While the game does allow the player to choose conversational options to boost your character's scores in either a "good" or "bad" direction to unlock new dialogs, the fruits of these choices are largely cosmetic and most have little to no impact on the eventual end of the game. (There are, however, a handful of choices that are the exception to this broad statement that change the game drastically.)

Even in puzzle games, there are certain ways that are strategically better to start off and certain methods that are used to guarantee a certain level of success. These strategies are usually well-known and widespread and once again give players very little choice in how they play the game should they want to succeed. Games like World of Warcraft play themselves after a certain point, and conventions that have been around since the very first version force players into certain archetypes depending on which class of character they decide to play.

When a game boasts choice, what it really means is that there are tiny choices within the game that seem incredibly significant at the time, but impact the eventual endgame of the story very little. It's like in real life - day-to-day decisions can seem epic at certain times, but in the grand scheme of things, they matter very little. However, by giving players this illusion of choice, developers also give the illusion of freedom within the game, even though players might actually be doing exactly what the developer intended all along. It is the ability to make these choices that make games a unique piece of media and that keeps players coming back for more. The ability to control the destiny of anything, be it a grim-faced hero out to save the galaxy or the placement of an l-block in Tetris, is not something that is experienced on a regular basis in real life. Games give us choices that seem much more epic than those on a standardized test, but when all is said and done, we realize that the choices we made had so very little to do with the ending. Is that sad? Maybe. But no one can deny that you must have had a heck of a fun time getting there because at the end of the day, just the ability to choose is fun.