Why we love games with the butterfly effect

Why do we love games that implement the butterfly effect? What do these type of games that others don’t?

The simple answer is that you get to make your own choice. Does your character go down the left path or the right? Now you may be thinking that it sounds boring, well, what if the left path lead to a million dollars and the right path lead to your character’s death? Not so boring now is it?

Whether it’s death or money or something completely different, the whole point of butterfly effect games to give players a choice and have the story change based on their choices. Do you want to go camping with person A or person B? Did you pick B? Well next time you need help don’t ask person A , they remember your choice and now the story has changed. Did you pick person A? Better stir clear of person B.

Take the new horror game Until Dawn as an example. Your choice can either help your character survive or be brutally murdered, it all depends on your better judgement and if you don’t think fast enough, your character is out of luck.

Butterfly effect games are all about choices and each choice doesn’t just affect you, it affects the characters around you. If you ever played one of these games the chances are that you made a choice, saw the outcome, and wondered what would have happened if you made the other choice. That’s the beauty of butterfly effect games, they keep you guessing, they make you want to replay it once you beat it and make all the opposite choice you made the first time. Most butterfly effect games have multiple endings and those who love 100 percenting the game love getting every ending.

The beauty of these games is that there is no laid out straight and narrowed path, we all start off playing the same scenario but as soon as the first option comes up we all find ourselves on different paths to different choices that lead to different endings, all  while playing the exact same game, most people don’t have the same gameplay experience because everyone has their own ways of handling situations and make their choices based on their own ways of thinking.

Take The Walking Dead for example. Who you befriend and help will change your story. Sometimes you to make a choice between two people and whoever you don’t save is killed. Who do you like more? Who is a bigger help to your survival? Who is more trustworthy? All of these things you have to think of in just a short amount of time and your choice alters the story.

Butterfly effect games can have big choices or little ones, choices with happy outcomes and those with bad choices. With the way you get to choose your path and interact the in-game world, it’s no shocker why these games are pretty popular.