The Illusion of Choice
I've played a few visual novels recently and they were kind of disappointing. Just very linear... not even an illusion of choice - which is not what I'm interested in in games.
I've been thinking a lot about interactive story telling. I assume they're still a thing, but when I was a kid there were these "choose your own adventure" novels. You'd read a page of text and then at the bottom it would say something like "If you want the main character to open the door to the dungeon, turn to page 83. If you want him to chicken out and run away instead, turn to page 27" They weren't terrible, but a lot of them felt rushed and sloppy.
Visual novels - GOOD ones - can build on that by making use of software to keep track of things. You can make a choice early in the story and then not even realize that that choice has an impact later on. OR realize it but not have the ability to go back and change things, and so you have to deal with the full impact of your earlier choices.
So I've been exploring what it takes to write a story like that - one where the reader has the potential of influencing how the story flows. And I've come to the conclusion that in a lot of instances, it's not that different from writing a story that's completely linear. There are moments where the details might be able to shift, and there is the potential for you to change a handful of BIG things, but it caries the caveat that the more you allow the user to change, the more complex things have the potential of being.
The conclusion I'm coming to is that the most important aspect of writing a story in this medium is giving the illusion of choice. Allowing the reader to feel as if they have agency in how things play out, and even given them one or two big choices that shape whether they arrive at "the good ending" or "the bad ending", but that in the end, it's not being able to shape the outcome that matters, so much as FEELING as if you're able to shape the outcome.
Which, when you think about it too long, starts to sound an awful lot like how the real world works.
I've been thinking a lot about interactive story telling. I assume they're still a thing, but when I was a kid there were these "choose your own adventure" novels. You'd read a page of text and then at the bottom it would say something like "If you want the main character to open the door to the dungeon, turn to page 83. If you want him to chicken out and run away instead, turn to page 27" They weren't terrible, but a lot of them felt rushed and sloppy.
Visual novels - GOOD ones - can build on that by making use of software to keep track of things. You can make a choice early in the story and then not even realize that that choice has an impact later on. OR realize it but not have the ability to go back and change things, and so you have to deal with the full impact of your earlier choices.
So I've been exploring what it takes to write a story like that - one where the reader has the potential of influencing how the story flows. And I've come to the conclusion that in a lot of instances, it's not that different from writing a story that's completely linear. There are moments where the details might be able to shift, and there is the potential for you to change a handful of BIG things, but it caries the caveat that the more you allow the user to change, the more complex things have the potential of being.
The conclusion I'm coming to is that the most important aspect of writing a story in this medium is giving the illusion of choice. Allowing the reader to feel as if they have agency in how things play out, and even given them one or two big choices that shape whether they arrive at "the good ending" or "the bad ending", but that in the end, it's not being able to shape the outcome that matters, so much as FEELING as if you're able to shape the outcome.
Which, when you think about it too long, starts to sound an awful lot like how the real world works.