In gamification and serious games, there is often and underlying motive of nudging the player towards a desired action or choice. Through multiple rounds of playtesting, we found that players were more interested and engaged if they were free to make their own uncoerced choices and then see the consequence of those choices play out in a simulation. A setback we faced relatively early on was that players felt they were just "clicking through the experience" without making any meaningful choices. Agency gives the player power over the game, so they can see their choices have impact

We chose to address this through simulation -- the player makes choices by talking to residents and then sees a simulation play out based on those choices. Creating simulations that react to player choice is certainly a technical challenge, and ended up being a significant part of our development time. It also requires a lot of care and pre-planning to ensure that player choices and corresponding outcomes still align with the mission of the serious game. In our case, we decided that the residents would not always take the player's recommendation -- depending on how difficult the action is, and how much time and effort the player spent on the conversation, the resident may fall back on an easier option. While the results can be seen in the simulation, we found players struggled to interpret what was happening, so we added a news report at the end that lays out the details, including quotes from residents about why they did or did not take the recommended action.