When Chris Avellone says “players are selfish,” he is not accusing players of being immoral, entitled, or commercially demanding. He means that players naturally want their time, choices, character builds, and imagined identities to matter. The designer’s job, as Avellone described it in a December 2025 Ars Technica interview, is to make the game respond meaningfully to that investment.
Although the headline highlights Fallout 2, the interview’s central example is Planescape: Torment. Across that game, tabletop role-playing, Fallout Van Buren, and Fallout: New Vegas, Avellone describes a consistent philosophy: support different kinds of players, give characters opportunities to matter, and let failure become part of the story rather than automatically erasing it.
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What Avellone means by “players are selfish”
In ordinary conversation, “selfish” suggests a moral flaw. In Avellone’s design vocabulary, it describes a condition of role-playing: players want the experience to be about their character and their decisions.
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They want a carefully developed build to open a door that other characters cannot open. They want a diplomatic solution to feel as legitimate as a violent one. They want companions to react to their behavior. They want the game to recognize the role they imagined, rather than forcing them into the designer’s preferred route.
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The idea is therefore closer to player-centered design than to a criticism of player entitlement. A player’s “selfishness” is the desire for the game to respect three things:
- the time spent learning and playing it;
- the identity and abilities chosen for the character;
- the personal goals that make the experience meaningful.
That does not mean every choice must produce a spectacular branch or that the player must always win. It means the game should make the chosen approach feel valid and consequential.
Why Planescape: Torment is the key example
Avellone identifies Planescape: Torment as the first major application of this approach. The game makes nearly everything about the player-controlled protagonist: an immortal amnesiac trying to understand his identity, memories, past actions, and relationships.
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In Torment, player centrality comes through:
- defining the protagonist’s personality through dialogue;
- choosing how to interpret an unknowable past;
- determining which relationships matter;
- deciding whether the character changes or repeats old patterns;
- making philosophical questions part of the player’s own experience.
This distinction matters. Making a game “about the player” does not require flattering the player or making the world obedient. A game can challenge its protagonist while still treating the player’s identity and interpretation as the center of the experience.
“Shine moments” make a build matter
One of Avellone’s most useful concepts is the shine moment: a situation in which a player or character becomes indispensable and feels heroic because of the way they were built or played.
In a tabletop campaign, a heavily specialized character may spend several sessions watching other characters solve problems. A good game master eventually creates a situation where that specialist is the only person equipped to help. The spotlight is not merely cosmetic; the character’s particular identity changes what the group can accomplish.
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- A stealth-focused character infiltrates a location without triggering a battle.
- A diplomat resolves a conflict through speech rather than combat.
- A scientist uses technical knowledge to discover a solution unavailable to other builds.
- A companion’s personal history becomes essential to a quest.
- An unusual role-playing decision produces a distinct outcome.
- A specialized combat build faces an encounter designed around its strengths.
A shine moment is not simply a cutscene praising the character or a temporary stat bonus. It is a credible moment when the player’s chosen identity is necessary, uniquely valuable, or especially well suited to the problem.
This also explains why a game can technically allow a build without truly supporting it. If a science-focused character can distribute points into Science but never receives meaningful opportunities to use that expertise, the build exists mechanically but not narratively. Avellone’s approach asks whether the game gives that character a reason to matter.
Do not force players into the designer’s preferred game
Avellone’s philosophy also rejects the assumption that every player should engage with an RPG in the same way. He specifically discusses min-maxers, heavy role-players, and people who skip dialogue or story material.
A min-maxer may be interested primarily in optimization. A role-player may care more about personality and consequence. Another player may explore every corner, while someone else rushes toward combat and ignores conversations. These players are not necessarily playing incorrectly; they are prioritizing different sources of enjoyment.
That creates a difficult production trade-off. Supporting every style equally can require enormous amounts of writing, testing, reactivity, and encounter design. A game that tries to accommodate everything may also lose thematic focus. Avellone’s point is not that every route must receive identical content. It is that designers should be cautious about “crushingly” punishing a player merely for failing to value the same things the designer values.
The practical version of the principle is:
Offer multiple legitimate ways to participate, even when those ways do not produce identical experiences.
That can mean allowing a player to bypass dialogue without making the entire game collapse, while still making dialogue-rich play rewarding. It can mean supporting both optimization and role-playing, rather than treating one as the correct way to engage with the system.
Failure should create situations, not just reload screens
Avellone traces part of this thinking to tabletop role-playing, where unexpected dice results can become material for the story. A failed roll, a character death, or an enemy escaping may produce a more interesting campaign than the outcome the game master originally planned.
This is the logic behind his early concept for Planescape: Torment: death would not necessarily end the story or force the player to reload. Instead, it could become part of the narrative flow. The idea was partly intended to reduce the interruption created by the traditional reload-or-quit response to death. Avellone also recognized that players were accustomed to treating death as failure, so the concept collided with established expectations.
The broader lesson is not that every game should make death permanent or remove save files. It is that a predetermined story should not be protected so aggressively that player consequence becomes meaningless.
Failure tends to work well when:
- the player understands what happened;
- the consequence changes the situation rather than merely wasting time;
- the game continues to provide meaningful options;
- the outcome follows the game’s rules or the player’s reasonable expectations;
- the player can learn something from the result.
Failure becomes frustrating when it silently invalidates a long sequence, forces a reload without adding information, or punishes an action whose risks were never communicated. Avellone’s approach favors consequences that acknowledge the player’s action instead of pretending it never occurred.
“Don’t give, then take away”
Another lesson came from a tabletop mistake. Avellone recalls giving players a major treasure, then removing its unique items at the start of the next adventure because he knew the characters would eventually recover them. The players did not know that recovery was planned, and the decision nearly caused a revolt.
The lesson is about perceived fairness as much as reward balance. A reward is also a promise. Players judge the result of their effort according to what they believe they earned. If a game immediately removes a hard-won item, title, relationship, or power without preserving the meaning of that accomplishment, the earlier effort can feel wasted.
This is not an absolute ban on temporary loss. A reversal can work when it is foreshadowed, narratively justified, and gives the player some control over recovery. The original achievement should still matter. The game should not act as though the reward was irrelevant merely because it plans to take it away.
In other words, designers can transform a reward, but should respect the player’s interpretation of the effort that produced it.
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Avellone also describes using player interviews to understand where people wanted their characters’ stories to go and how they expected to play. The goal was not to outsource design decisions to survey results. It was to expose gaps between what a game technically allowed and what it meaningfully supported.
For Fallout Van Buren, Interplay’s canceled version of Fallout 3, the team created a tabletop RPG to test systems and character archetypes. Avellone mentions concepts including ghouls, super mutants, and a “Science Boy” archetype. The tabletop format could reveal whether different characters could contribute, whether unusual abilities had practical value, and whether each archetype had opportunities to shine.
This is a particularly useful design method because it tests more than isolated mechanics. It asks whether the character’s build has a place in the fiction:
- Can the archetype solve problems in its own way?
- Does the story recognize its identity?
- Can it contribute outside of combat?
- Are its consequences understandable?
- Does the player feel rewarded for choosing it?
Avellone says some elements from Van Buren later found their way into Fallout: New Vegas. That should not be read as meaning that New Vegas was simply a completed version of the canceled project, or that every feature came from Avellone. It is better understood as an example of ideas moving through a designer’s body of work and the wider teams with which he worked.
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Player authorship versus authorial control
Avellone’s philosophy does not eliminate authorship. Planescape: Torment has a distinct voice, carefully constructed themes, and a highly authored world. Player-centered design operates inside those boundaries.
The tension is between four different kinds of freedom:
- Freedom of action: the player can attempt different solutions.
- Freedom of identity: different character concepts are supported.
- Freedom of interpretation: the player can understand the story in different ways.
- Freedom of consequence: choices produce recognizable results.
More branches do not automatically create more agency. A game may offer many dialogue options whose outcomes are effectively identical. Conversely, a tightly authored game can give players strong agency by making a small number of choices personally meaningful.
Player-centered design also has limits. If every NPC exists only to flatter the protagonist, every build is equally effective in every situation, and every consequence is softened, responsiveness becomes empty. The player can be central without the world becoming submissive.
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The design principles Avellone described remain relevant to RPGs with branching dialogue, flexible builds, companion quests, systemic problem-solving, and failure-forward storytelling. They offer a useful checklist for designers and game masters:
- What is this player trying to feel or become?
- Where does the chosen build matter in a way another build cannot replicate?
- Can failure create a new situation instead of only demanding a reload?
- Does the game recognize different play styles without abandoning its identity?
- Will a major reward remain meaningful if the story later changes its form?
- Do the player’s internal goals overlap with the game’s external objectives?
The last question may be the most important. A quest can tell the player to save the world, but the player may actually care about protecting a companion, proving a theory, recovering a stolen object, or becoming a particular kind of person. The strongest RPGs make those motivations overlap. The player advances the game because the game’s stated objective has become personally significant.
The point behind the provocative headline
“Players are selfish” is memorable because it sounds hostile. In context, Avellone’s meaning is more precise: players want an RPG to recognize that they are the ones investing the time, making the decisions, and inhabiting the role.
Good player-centered design does not promise constant victory or unlimited freedom. It gives the player’s chosen identity room to matter, allows unexpected outcomes to become part of the fiction, and treats effort as something worthy of respect.
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That is why Planescape: Torment is such an important example. Its player-centeredness is not mainly about power. It is about making identity, memory, morality, relationships, and interpretation feel like the player’s responsibility. The game is authored, but its meaning is completed through the player’s choices.
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