Here''s some stuff i''ve picked out of a psychology text book i thought you guys would find interesting. Copied straight from the book... "A characteristic of many everyday desicions is that they involve several options or conflicting alternatives and there is often uncertanty about the eventual outcome of each choice. Desicion making where conflicting choices occur, as it is argued, makes people adopt deffering coping patterns for dealing with the stress that is generated: 1) Unconflicting adherence; the desicion maker continues previous behaviour wnd ignores information about potential gains and loses involved. 2) unconflicting change; to a new course of action. The desicion maker uncritically adopts which ever new course of action is most salient or most strongly recommended. 3) defensive aviodance; the desicion maker aviods the conflict by procrastinating, shifting responsibility to someone else, or rationalising the choice of the least objectionable alternative. 4) hypervigilance. the decision maker searches frantically for a way out of the dialemma and impulsively seizes on a solution that promises immediate relief. 5) vigilance; the decision maker searches systematically for relevant information, assimilates information in an unbiased manner, and carefully eveluates each alternative before making a choice. vigilance reflects the optimal decision strategy." The point at hand is that there will be times where we as game designers will probably benefit from putting conflicting choices in our game or not being able to aviod having them in there at all. This elaboration of the players reactions to those situations should help you to understand how a player is going to react to these scenarios, and to help aviod these player actions from being viewed as irrational.

The trouble though is that the game designer can''t know how the player will react to a dilemma or obstacle or why the player arrived at that decision. The thing about psychology that was interesting to me was realizing how many unconscious and subconcious processes go on that factor in to our behavior, emotions and thought patterns. Without knowing the player''s life background, social dynamics and cognitive patterns, it may be hard to understand why a player chose what he chose.

all human beings play by a certain rulebook...but everyone''s rulebook is a little bit different from everyone else''s...sometimes a lot different from everyone else''s. Neurotic and psychotic people have random rulebooks, or no rulebooks at all. If we could read each person''s rulebook, we could understand their behavior, demeanor and belief structures. Like I said though, some of the rules are conscious to us...others are "hidden" rules that even we ourselves aren''t aware of.

At best a game designer can allow enough free-form decision making where free choice is a possibility, or he can make the game linear, in which case the player is essentially forced into a certain pathline. In an open-ended system though, it is virtually impossible to have direction, since the player himself creates the story. Therefore the game designer has to come up with a "goal" system that allows the players a general direction in which they go to acheive this goal. Goals can be becoming rich, getting better at skills, becoming famous, etc etc.

It sounds like your text book is based more on cognitive psychology. I might recommend looking up books on existential psychology (a form of neo-Freudian psychology) as well as humanism. A new field of cultural psychology is also interesting (and fascinating to me since I''m eurasian, and have both a western and eastern way of looking at things).