Scenarios

There are three drivers of player choice in Glass Ceiling:

- Handicaps

- Objectives

- Scenarios

They link together fairly intricately so it's difficult to talk about them completely in isolation, but the one that has given me a lot to think about recently has been the scenarios, so that's what I'm writing about today. I'm sourcing ideas from my own experience, from family and friends, from mainstream news and media, and from social media and blogs.

I decided that scenarios that offering binary options - Choose A or B - just wouldn't be enough to represent the challenges faced by women every day. It also didn't allow the game to represent the impact of the way a woman is perceived on the options that she has for handling different situations.

Therefore, I concluded that each scenario should offer four choices, each with a different result. The player may not always have access to all four options due to handicap requirements. Also, I felt it was important for the results not to be completely predictable, as this reflects the everyday reality.

With that decision made, I set about defining some scenarios within each of the life areas. Lots of ideas in the Teenage, Career, Everyday, and Online areas, but I had a bit more trouble with the other three areas.

For Love, I quickly realised that the character's relationship status has a significant impact on the possible scenarios, not just on the possible options. The same applies to Family, where whether a player has a child or not has a similar effect.

I don't really want the player to have to discard cards that don't fit with their current state, so I decided to split the Love and Family scenarios into a basic set and a special set for players with more than one token on their 'relationship' and 'children' objective cards respectively. I'm not certain that this is the ideal approach, but will try it out and revise if it doesn't work in testing.

For Social, my own social life has been a bit restricted by personal circumstances recently so I'm not feeling very inspired here. But I am certain that the various sources I am using will give me plenty of useful insights.