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Original post by Tim Ingham-Dempster Guildwriter, thats not quite what I'm talking about. The issue is that if you give the player a choice then that choice has very little emotional power because the player could repaly the game and choose differently. Therefore the choice has no real consequences and so doesn't matter. This has me slightly worried about the whole concept of interactive narrative, if no choice the player makes has any significance, then how can a narrative (which is essentially about choices) have power if it is interactive? I'm thinking that maybe if every option led to the same place but by different paths it would work, and we would just loose the tool of the difficult choice for the player.

Tim, the problem I see with your reasoning is this:

While the player could go back and replay a different game a certain way, that does not necessarily divest emotional power from the choice in question. If the choice were the last choice the player made or did not have to live with the consequences of said choice for very long, then yes, the choice would have no meaning. But if the choice falls into neither of those categories, that means that for the rest of that playthrough, that narrative thread that the player and designer share together, it is for all intents and purposes permanent. The player cannot time-travel back, change a decision, and then zip back to the present and feel the effects of the new choice with no effort expended.

In short, if there is no cost to reversing a decision, then that decision does not matter. But with what you're worrying about, there is always a cost because in order to reach that choice, the player has to go through the game all over again.

Furthermore, according to your view, a narrative is purely an event driven affair. Stories are more then plot forks along a linear path. If that were the case, then there would be no difference between say, "Bridget Jones Diary" and "Pride and Prejudice".

Emotional numbness toward games
Re: Guildwriter

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I find myself very uninterested in Facade.

That makes two of us. Façade was so boring I couldn't spend 5 minutes with it. I never finished one run to know whether it is a game or not. But an interactive story is not necessary a game, and I know the technology is there for generating emerge conversations, as existed in Sims (the one with persons). I don't play Sims either so my understanding is only second-hand, but Sunandshadow knows a lot about it.

Do you find that you can't appreciate games anymore when you know how to make them? Do you find any interactive story that you particularly like?

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Original post by Wai That makes two of us. Façade was so boring I couldn't spend 5 minutes with it. I never finished one run to know whether it is a game or not. But an interactive story is not necessary a game, and I know the technology is there for generating emerge conversations, as existed in Sims (the one with persons). I don't play Sims either so my understanding is only second-hand, but Sunandshadow knows a lot about it. Do you find that you can't appreciate games anymore when you know how to make them? Do you find any interactive story that you particularly like?

Not really. Working on my own game hasn't caused me to appreciate games less. My experience with playing them has. It's like reading books. After you've read enough, you start being able to predict plot twists and endings. It's the same with games, I've played them enough to the point where everything starts feeling familiar. Especially the stories. If I have to deal with one more amnesiac protagonist, my eyes are going to roll back so far in their sockets that they're gonna get stuck in place.

I haven't met a single interactive story I enjoy. They usually fall under one or more of the following categories:

1) Not fun.
2) So avant-garde that I find them offensive.
3) Trying too hard.

That's not to say that they aren't sometimes memorable, it's just that I didn't enjoy playing(?)/interacting(?) with them.

Probably, some people just don't like interactive stories. Me, I like choose-your-own-adventure books when I was little, I still find choose your own adventure html stories fun now, and I love interactive story games like Tender Loving Care. In my imagination the ideal videogame is one which would provide a virtual fantasy world which was a immersive as a good novel, and playing it would feel like lucid dreaming.

On the other hand, as a writer I don't really enjoy writing interactive stories. I had fun designing the one for Xenallure but for the most part it's more fun to write something just for myself, without worrying whether an assortment of players would prefer to go directions I'm not personally interested in. I attempted writing one of those choose your own adventure html stories, but instead it turned into a non-interactive story where several main characters were living out loosely-connected stories in the same setting and time period. Instead of making plot choices, the reader chose how the story was presented: the gender of pronouns used for the hermaphrodite characters, and what order to read the chapters in, or whether to only follow one or two of the main characters. That was interesting to write but the net result reminded me of something like the 'novel' (I use that term loosely) House of Leaves which is so avant-garde people read it because it's weird, not because they are enthralled by the story.

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Original post by Wai The relation between permanentness and emotional impact Re: Sunandshadow I think Tim was address the component of permanentness in invoking emotion. The perspective is that if you are asked to make a life changing choice, a majority of the emotion you get comes from the fact that you can't go back and try the other path. Like marriage. Why is it stressful? It is because you can't easily change your partner and undo the choice. Tim was referring to designs that approach this level of strong emotions. The easier it is to undo the choice (either by re-loading, or by corrective actions), the more likely that the choice itself lacks that special component that makes it emotional. Think about grocery shopping. You choose between getting apples or oranges. It is a trivial choice. Suppose you got oranges and you don't like it, you could always get apples next time. Big deal. However, permanentness is not the only factor that invokes emotion. Therefore a story with choices can still be emotional (for a different reason). So I was suggesting Tim at first to just concentrate on making the emotions strong (for other reasons). But I think he could also "fix it" by making the environment permanent.

Interesting. Maybe the difference in my perspective is just my personality - I'm always thinking about possibilities and potentialities and adaptability, I don't think of things like marriage as being Permanent with a capital P. I was just working on a story idea about a divorce, actually.

[ Off-topic ]

Re: Sunandshadow

You could write interactive story without trying to cater to all choices the player might want, but only the choices you want. But to do that you would need to enjoy exploring multiple situations in parallel (instead of feeding it to the main plot). For interactive stories with a shorter run (4-5 hours), I agree with you that it is fun to do multiple runs. Sometimes the story is presented in such a way that the player cannot tell what the story is really about until completing one run using the logic of the real world instead of the logic of the story world. At the end of such a run, the player learns the logic of the story world and does another try to get the perfect solution. In my design though, I try to teach the player the logic of the story world up front, so that the player could play using that logic through out.

Re: Guildwriter

Then you need a protagonist that is amnesic about being amnesic. Then your eyes would roll back to the front. Are you working on any more story? What do you find fun?