How I Learned to Write Compelling Interactive Fiction

Here’s a short and well-written article covering principles to consider when designing IF by a writer who took Susan O’Connor’s masterclass. It’s worth reading the whole article, but I thought I’d share the author’s key takeaways…

Introducing choices early creates immediate engagement and sets up the precedent that the game is listening. It’s better to pay this off sooner rather than later, or you betray that trust with the player.

Make sure there is a context for choices. Without context, there are no stakes or emotional investments.

Be clever about where you branch a story and keep it minimal. Don’t branch early, because you will have a monster on your hands.

Use micro-decisions where you can to create a sense of player ownership without having to branch. Micro-decisions don’t create new branches but DO create a new line of text.

1 choice is no choice at all, but might be thematically appropriate or necessary to progress. 2 choices can create dramatic tension. 3 is the ideal median. 4 lets you lock choices off. 5+ is excessive but can be fun and makes for good micro-decisions.

It’s better for the player to be aware that their decisions lock branches off than not knowing and assuming the game is linear. This is why Telltale has prompts like “X remembered that.”

The inverse of that is labeling/highlighting unique choices based on how players have played or built their character. Eg. Baldur’s Gate: “[Bard] You came from the same school and recognize the tune.” This creates a selection bias — people think it’s the better choice because it’s “unique”.

Leverage cumulative player micro-decisions to a climactic branch for the most organic and memorable experience. If you do it well, players will be surprised that the game took all their micro-decisions into account and paid it off in a dramatic way.

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A lot of times when people make claims like this the game itself turns out to be pretty lame.

But I opened it just to check and clicked through Alford a few minutes and it actually seems really cool; I stopped and I’m going to go back and play it again later, slower. Thanks for sharing this!

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I did the same. Seems like a fairly solid Twine game. Only played through one branch/ending, but I’ll be back to play through it again.

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Maybe I’m just in a bad mood today, but “micro-decisions” are basically a gimmick to make the game feel interactive when it isn’t. It might be a nice way to add atmosphere, but it isn’t really a major design consideration.

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Agreed, but fairly harmless assuming the game isn’t primarily composed of them. Allows the addition of some color and possibly adds some ambiguity to which decisions truly matter. The latter could be either a good thing or a bad thing depending on the overall writing and design.

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In jest, but your observation reminded me of this bit about low-impact choices in gaming: When game choices make no difference - Choice - YouTube

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These two seem to be contradictory:

Introducing choices early creates immediate engagement and sets up the precedent that the game is listening. It’s better to pay this off sooner rather than later, or you betray that trust with the player.

Be clever about where you branch a story and keep it minimal. Don’t branch early, because you will have a monster on your hands.

And the parser is just a gimmick to make it seem as though the player can type anything. Good games are the ones that maintain that illusion.

It is just not practical to have three decisions at each passage in a long game, where every choice is a whole new branch.

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I will throw in my own point here, for what it is worth. I think video games do this as a matter of course - and parser games certainly do.

Every choice should reflect what the player character does next, not what happens around her. If the next passage is the king making a speech, then the choice is “Wait for the speech” or “Listen to the speech”, because that is what the player character is doing. It is not “The king makes a speech” because that is not under the player’s control.

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It certainly is a gimmick, I don’t see how that’s a bad thing though.

It really comes down to what you expect from the game. Choice-based gamebooks are usually closer to “books” than to the “games” side of the family. There has been innumerable debate already if they’re “real” games and I don’t mean to start that conversation again, but if, for example, I’m questioning a character, fishing for information, and the game gives the option to be agressive, seductive, savvy, or whatnot, in the end, not matter which choice, I get the info, but my experience as the player has been different. This kind of choice does not branch the story, but I’d argue they’re no less interactive.

This kind of choice is known as “flavour choice” or “fake choice” in the ChoiceScript community.


No because offering choices does not equate branching, see my comment above.

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