Thanks for a good read.
I don't exactly understand your distinction between a "Faustian choice" and "triggers". Is a Faustian choice not simply a trigger, albeit on a larger scale?
Regarding Marie in 11th Hour: Unfortunately, I have not played this game, but I think this scenario is an excellent excuse for me to go into a rant about how player control should be broken. The more you allow the player to decide for the character, the less personality of his own the character will have. If you want to depict a player character as being attracted to this Marie, then you should make the player struggle with the controls to keep the character from choosing to go with her.
This is even more of an issue when dealing with morality. I don't like the idea of giving only choices whose consequences are uncertain- generally, a character will have an opinion one way or the other. But what if the character and the player have different ideas about morality? Here's a solution I first came up with a few seconds ago. What if, when faced with a tough decision, the player is unable to make the choice at all, but is instead given points to let the character think about?
Let me spell it out: The PC is faced with a life-altering choice. The camera faces the character, and now the player is put into a dialogue with the character, representing the inner dialogue he is going through. The player is given a dialogue tree of all the things it might occur to the character to consider. When clicking on one of them, the character will voice his agreement, which will steer the deliberations in a new direction, or disagreement, which will either steer the dialogue in the opposite direction or leave the same dialogue options, depending on what type of attitude he's taking. (As you can imagine, there is a tremendous amount of character development not just allowed, but demanded by this format.) By choosing which of the arguments to run past the character, the player can indirectly control the outcome. If he really really wants something, it will be very hard (though not impossible) to talk him out of it, because he'll keep rationalizing it.
Now let's say the player remembers something the character wasn't told earlier but has unfortunately forgotten. The player is not allowed to shout out, "Hey! Remember this!", because it would break the integrity of the game. Instead, the player is given choices which are very loosely connected to the subject, and by choosing them the player can steer the dialogue in the direction of the forgotten item, so that he keeps getting more closely related questions until he is given the question, "Wait a minute! I was supposed to remember X!". This does not break the game, because there is a simple explanation for this within the context of the story: The PC knew there was something he was supposed to remember, and it kept nagging on his mind until he remembered it.
I think you can all see the elegance of this format. The downside is of course that it will demand very complex dialogue trees, which while insightful can't be very fun to write. But I imagine the game would be littered with little, barely relevant internal dialogues, which are easier for the writers to deal with, and only a few really earth-shaking choices.
