I agree with you completely on that, Pelle. The main reason I prefer parser IF to CYOAs is that, even if the plot is linear, it’s basically a rule of the genre that the player needs to be given some freedom to explore. I’m sure there must be some out there, but I’ve never yet seen a CYOA that really offers that (although some, like Solarium, do have a less linear hub-with-branches structure).
How is it really any different than, say, Photopia or All Roads or The Baron or The Statue Got Me High or nearly every other gotdang text adventure? (Hell, Photopia’s pretty infamous for the fact that you can’t really change what happens.) Nearly every game is going to be fairly linear to some extent, what is it about the CYOA format that bugs you for this reason?
I’m not sure if you saw my post, but it seems to me (with the limited sample of IF and CYOA I’ve played) that an implicit assumption of parser IF is that the player will have some freedom, if only temporarily, and of CYOAs that the player will not (that all the paths will either be dead ends or go to a single outcome). Many parser IF games subvert this, and hopefully many CYOAs as well, but my impression is that the majority do not.
I think this effect stems from the world model of parser IF, which is meant to encourage exploration, versus the limited choices that an author writes into a CYOA. The early printed CYOAs could only have so many pages, and the text on each page was static–there was no “statefulness” except which page the player was on.
I think it’s well worth re-reading the prologue to the classic article Crimes Against Mimesis:
I subscribe to this view.
The freedom is at a different level. Choice-based games offer the player the freedom to control the ending, and to explore alternate endings. The player interacts with the fiction.
Written in 1996. The dichotomy of puzzle-based vs “wander through a landscape and look at all the pretty scenery” turned out to be false.
“If it has no challenges at all, it is not a game, just a work of IF.”
and it’s true, regardless of age.
Hooray! You’ve argued that something is not a game; now you automatically lose the argument. 
This quote from Crimes Against Mimesis:
turned out to be remarkably anti-prophetic, as outside of IF there’s a fair number of game these days where the point is literally to wander through a landscape and look at the scenery (Dear Esther and Proteus the best-known right now, and among the more obscure there are some of Vectorpark’s Flash games, especially Seasons by Thomas, and Jordan Magnuson’s Walk Or Die which doesn’t even let you control how you wander). It’s turned out that people do call them games.
My internet homie Joel Goodwin (Harbour Master) posted a two-part series on this recently. As he says in the comments the “Is it a game?” debate is not very interesting at all, but what he was interested in was whether the people who make these, shall we say, challengeless games themselves feel restricted by the term “game” and wanted to call their stuff something else. The answer was generally “no.”
Curious point, thanks for bringing that up. I was unaware of it, and personally cathegorised Dear Esther as a multimedia story told in a game-ish environment, but it was very clear, from very early on, that it was not going to be a “game” by any stretch of imagination. Which did not diminish its worth.
On a sidenote, anyone played Ceremony of Innocence? Relatively obscure, a non-interactive story with a flase veneer of interactivity that nevertheless does serve to enhance the surreality of the experience. I loved it to bits and hate the fact I can’t play it in my modern OS.
I don’t care what people chance to call it. It’s not a game if there’s no challenge whatsoever.
people possibly call interactive 3D architectural visualization games too, just because they look like 3D games
I see what you mean, but it’s pretty clear that there are stretches of imagination by which Dear Esther is a game – lots of people call it that. (And it started as a Half-LIfe mod.)
FWIW my sense is that if I tried Dear Esther out on someone who didn’t play videogames at all they would not be able to finish it. Amanda Lange’s report from IndieCade suggests something similar; she says that non-gamers clearly found Gone Home more accessible than Dear Esther because there were short-term goals and stuff to interact with (and also because FPS navigation is harder for novices than you think if you yourself are used to it, and it’s easy to get stuck in a bunch of rocks).
namekuseijin: “LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”
might try pulling your head out of your butt
…and? So?
The IF community exists to support interactive fiction - regardless of whether it’s a “game” or not.
Questions of whether something is a ‘game’ or not are uninteresting to me. It’s IF; IF overlaps with games, but I’m not concerned with games here. I’m concerned with interactive fiction.
My response to Dear Esther (I have a blog post somewhere) is that the designers consciously limited themselves to a UI of pure navigation(*) and were still able to create common videogame structures: challenges, player agency, implicit goals (both short- and long-term), implicit goals for the protagonist which are frustrated by the game mechanics for plot reasons.
This is worth studying.
(* Albeit a navigation interface taken from gaming, which is not an irrelevant point, as mattw notes above.)
To me a big subjective difference is if I feel like I can wander around some area to explore it, or if I just follow a directed graph of text paragraphs leading from start to goal.
This graph of all the paragraphs in Lone Wolf Fire on The Water I think shows what I mean:
projectaon.org/en/svg/lw/02fotw.svgz
First thing I thought of when I saw that graph a few years ago was how it reminded me of (many, many years ago) when reading that book I felt like there were very limited choices, and I was just following along and rolling some dice, making not that many meaningful decisions. There is branching, but you never leave the mainstream more than for a few paragraphs.
Contrast that with most parser-based games, or more complex paper game-books like Fabled Lands, where the sections are not just paragraphs of text, but usually represent a physical location in some simulated world. You are in a room, and can navigate to a new room, then back to a room you were in earlier. Even if only a part of the game world is open at any one time, it still to me feels a lot more like being in a real place. It’s not that feeling of having to pick the right choice now, because it is the only choice I will be allowed to do in some location before the story moves on and I have to pick a new choice somewhere else. Usually you go left or right, and after a while you end up at the same destination either way, but very rarely are you allowed to go back to also look what was down the other branch. Sounds ok for some types of puzzles, but in CYOA-style works that is the unfortunate default.
Gog save us from the “what is video games” discussion.
pelle, your point is one that I’ve put a lot of thought into. You’re right that it’s the default in CYOA to have a linear start-to-finish path, and it’s also standard to have branch deviations dovetail back into the main thread. This is mainly, IMO, because doing otherwise is harder. It’s not impossible, though, and I’m interested in seeing which ways of breaking that mold are feasible using choice-based languages.
I wonder if I shouldn’t host a little game jam where people make CYOA style games that explicitly allow exploration and have a persistent, explorable environment.
I should have clarified - it was pretty clear in my head that this was going to be anything but a “game”.
Anyway, I didn’t get much of anywhere. Without any sort of guidance I wandered around listening to a voiceover and unable to interact with my surroundings. I got bored more than I got intrigued, and quit when I somehow found myself trapped between a few polygons and unable to leave.
I checked out DEBT. The story is not bad, but is it a CYOA-game? Of course, if the C stands for “click”. There are no choices, just single suggestions, it is like turning the pages.
Then I checked another one of this exhibition, and sorry, I was put off (mildly spoken) by a picture of male genitals that was integrated into the game. What’s the big idea?
I already made a short statement to that game. Keep in mind that there may be young kids trying out these games. Regardless of the intention – there should not be any visual pornography. I don’t want to be a moralizer, it is just common sense. Plainly spoken, displaying such material is not constructive for the idea of interactive fiction.
Note: I just realized that there has a warning been added to the game description on the IFDB-page. Thank you. There had to be done something about this entry. But I still doubt the effectivity of such material.