SJ Longthorne

I've used the dating sim example because it's a quick shorthand, but in fact there are loads and loads of situations where we want to allow the player to gradually express a choice over the course of a scene, using 2-4 variables. (Rarely more, at least within a single scene.)

The two variable case is just a point moving back and forth on a line (or if you use Choice of Games terminology, an "opposed stat"), so that's not hard to understand but it's also way less expressive than the three variable case.

You could generalize this treatment for four variables in a tetrahedron, but it would have been trickier for me to draw, so I didn't. (This time.)

Indeed, you could generalize it more and do more dimensions, maybe have a thing that animates your 3D graph over time or does slices of the space. That said, the higher-variable versions would start to represent stories that are harder for *players* to get their heads around