If you can choose to never adopt a Little Sister, that means you'll never have to guard her, so you'll never have those Little Sister-centric battles with the Big Sister. Can you then dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend fighting that character just by doing that?

ZM: Yeah, you can. This is part of what I was talking about in terms of trusting player choices and trusting how much you feel like you want to be involved with the system.

If we haven't done our job to make it seem interesting enough for you to interact with something in the game, a lot of times we are not going to force you. If that means parts of the story or parts of the world don't seem as interesting to you as a consequence, we are not going to rub your nose in our game design.

Obviously, as a major story character, there are places where every player will definitely run into Big Sister, but it's the same thing with BioShock 1. You could play through BioShock and ignore Big Daddies the entire game.

You could. Most people didn't. That's the model for that goal. If you make it optional but highly attractive, the player owns it in a way that feels like they chose to engage with that thing. They're much more attached to it.

If you lock the player into a room every three hours of gameplay and force them to experience your awesome content, they're going to get annoyed, they're going to tune out. They're going to turn off the game at that point and just never come back because you're making them do a thing they don't want to do anymore.

That's really hard from a development perspective. With tons of people working on this stuff very hard, they bring up the issue, saying, "Really? We're just going to let people coast through and never see this? Are you sure?" You have to trust the player, and you have to trust your ability to make those things attractive enough. If you can't make people want it, forcing them to do it isn't the right decision in the most cases.

AF: "Say yes to the player" is a frustrating rule to live by. Sometimes you have to say yes to things that you totally didn't want to say yes to. But at the same time, respecting the player is a core value of ours.

If we start telling you what to do, are you playing a BioShock game? What if we say, "Could you please do exactly what we say now? If you do these things, when you do them, we'll open the door."