Some Kind of Wonderful Mechanical Man
Choice. Choice is an illusion in games. A game may offer you different paths, different weapons, different encounters; it may even let you do these things at your own pace. But everything you're offered as a "choice," has been pre-planned, pre-programmed, pre-made. Everything in the game, has already been chosen. You may be able to choose to either save the little sisters or harvest them, but that choice isn't yours - someone has already made the choices for you. You're just choosing A or B - and that isn't choice, that's a goddamn pop quiz.
But Deus Ex - the original? That game had real choice. Mostly because, for the most part, nothing was an illusion. Sure, there were mission objectives, and hidden paths, and weapons to select, but the majority of the time, Deus Ex dumped the player into their world and said, "go ahead". The choices the player made weren't so much big ones like "good or bad?" - rather, tiny ones, seemingly inconsequential, like "do I go in the back or front door?", or, "do I hack the panel or look around for the password?" The game was still linear, but by having the choices be small things that frequently compounded, it made sure choice wasn't an illusion - it was as real to life as game can possibly be.
