Making CYOA Challenging

Authoring General Design Discussions
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And I thought I had author trust issues. :laughing: If the author is offering choices that are that shallow, they’re either not that good or they’re writing a certain kind of game, where every choice either continues the story towards the end or ends it (which isn’t a bad structure for the right story). In the game I mentioned above, the bad guys are following a specific plan, and your choice to pursue them or wait doesn’t alter that plan because you’re not interacting with them directly. So if you “call for back-up”, and don’t like the time frame for backup to arrive, the author gives you a chance to catch up to them if you hurry.

I think you’re expecting CYOA style to require the same kind of thinking as a parser, and it just doesn’t. That’s like expecting a cookbook to require the same kind of reading as a thriller. The goal in a CYOA is not to solve puzzles to earn more story, it’s to steer the story from start to end; all choices are within the framework of “where does this character’s story go”, and the choices reflect that. With a CYOA, if you’re not interested in the story and where it’s going, you’re not interested in the game. With parser IF, if the writing is acceptable, the story can be anywhere from vital to irrelevant (which isn’t to say everyone will like it either way, just that it can still “work”).

So “making CYOA challenging” isn’t the right question, in my opinion. The question should be “how do I design this so people want to explore this story?”. And that all comes down to craft and art, both of writing and of design. And those are difficult no matter what format an author is working in. Throwing in a few puzzles won’t gloss over poor writing, crappy grammar, typos, lazy design, or any of the other problems I’ve seen in CYOA.

Anyway, with the example you gave, say your friend does die if you try to save him, and you finish the game with the “sadder but wiser” ending. That’s part of the story you’re writing about this character, and you can always try again if you want to see “what if”. Or you can be done with it, just like you do when you finish a short story that doesn’t come out the way you want it to (I’m looking at you, Vonnegut). The difference is that a CYOA lets you keep trying if you want to.

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So, not to keep repeating my own example, but did you try Bigger Than You Think? That’s where I tried to split the difference. It’s not a gigantic puzzle-fest, but the goal is not “to steer the story from start to end”.

(That model has been well-explored by the Choice Of people, but it’s not synonymous with choice-based IF.)

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Al-Khwarizmi wrote:

“But the thing is that in most parser-based IF, the vast majority of the thinking that you need to do is not about choosing between several possible things that you can do, it’s about coming up with the things themselves.”

Actually, I disagree with the first part of this thought, but the second nails it perfectly. In parser IF, you do need to make a list of choices. It is held in your mind, but it is still there. Will this door unlock with the blue key? The gold? Or maybe I need to use a password. A spell. The difference is that hyperlinks point out which of these the auhtor has considered. You actually don’t have to read the author’s mind, unlike in parser IF where you need to hope that your reasonable list of actions has been catered for. And that you get the phrasing right.

Al-Khwarizmi continued:

“If my friend has fallen into a pit and I realize that I can make a rope for him by cutting strips from a bed sheet that I have, that requires actual thinking, and doing it successfully (or even doing it and failing because the sheet was not sturdy enough!) gives me a sense of accomplishment. If the option “try to help your fried climb by using your bed sheet to make a rope” is in plain sight, I don’t need to think.”

Right, and this is why I agree that “it’s about coming up with the things themselves.” This doesn’t seem to be a problem if the author of hyperlinked fiction has anticipated every logical action, but this could result in a very long list of links. The problem arises when the player hadn’t thought of the answer, and there it is, listed for you. No thinking. No challenge. I’m not sure there is a way to solve this, but it may only be of concern if your hyperlinked work is puzzle-oriented. That’s why I started this thread. I think, perhaps, part of the challenge for nonparser authors is to make the player care about the consequences that are presented. Surely given options as to whether or not to save someone’s life will make the player stop and think, just not in the “how do I solve this puzzle?” sense.

Al-Khwarizmi also offered:

“Maybe I do need to ponder if it is sensible to do that because it takes time and an enemy might come, or my friend might be drowned by the water slowly filling the pit, or something like that… but that still boils down to reading the author’s mind and guessing which path she thought was the right one, and ultimately it can be solved by just trying both options.”

Well, as I mentioned above, this is true for parser IF as well. You need to hope that the author has anticipated your action, and if at first you don’t succeed, just go through your inventory trying different things until you open that door. Or get your wife out of the water.

Neil

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I think the puzzle in a choice based game – if it isn’t trying to emulate a parser, add an inventory, etc., but is in the typical choose A, B, or C format – will be meaningful if they effect the character, or the story, or the world within the story. For example, I’m sure most of you have read or heard about this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

That’s choice-based down to a science. And, for a person who really thinks about it, choosing A or choosing B isn’t an easy decision, even though it’s only 1 of 2 choices. And the choice is meaningful, because it makes you stop and think about real life choices.

(edit)
A few games have used this – like Deus Ex HR. There is a sequence in the game where you are given two choices. However, (and this may be something outside of the scope of hyperlinks) you can choose a third option that effectively saves everyone on the track. I’m not sure if you can emulate this in hyperlinks, but offering the hidden third option would be the moment of epiphany and agency that I look for in a game.

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I hadn’t, and thank you!

I suspect, though, that an entire game like this would either be emotionally draining or, if overused, would eventually create distance and I would fail to care.

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True – it would be like watching an episode of “24”. :smiley: This is an example of how you can make someone stop and think because of a moral quandary, rather than a physical puzzle – which fits the bill as a puzzle, even with 2 options. This thought experiment was used in the movie The Dark Knight by the Joker, more than once. Even as a passive viewer, you are still forced to think about how you would make the choice – an interactive aspect in a passive medium.

However, in that movie, Batman finds the third choice through cunning, and saves everyone. Can this third option be hidden in hyperlinks?

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You keep going about about the third option and all I can think of is The Stanley Parable…

…which in hindsight may be more relevant to this discussion than one would think.

It’s just a wonderfully great game, really.

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I see what you mean! The Stanley Parable tells you that you have no choice, but gives you a choice. Which is, in essence, the third option. You see this a lot in heroic stories, where the hero, instead of choosing A, or B, has the power, or the cunning, to find a better solution that isn’t offered or apparent. The player in any game is taking on this role – and it would be great, when offered with 2 choices, if there could be a heroic turnabout hidden within the narrative for an astute player to find. (No more zombie clicking.)

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I was actually thinking of at least two instances where you can choose something that wasn’t meant to be a choice.

Well, as far as the narrator is concerned, anyway. It’s certainly a choice provided by the makers of the game. But it’s an invisble choice. One is when you might choose to act without prompting, and the other is when you are given a very clear do-or-don’t choice (I don’t remember whether the “don’t” actually did anything, or whether you just stayed in that scenario until you “did”)… and you sort of choose to refuse to do, by taking unexpected action (again, “unexpected” by the narrator’s point of view)

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But not unexpected by the game developers – and this is the magic of interactivity. It’s an illusion of control, even with a physics engine and an open world, there are still basic spawn points, and rules, and typically an A and B choice on how to resolve a mission (when given a moral choice.) This is actually used in modern games quite a bit to define the character.

The best games give you the third option, but don’t tell you there’s a third option – you have to find it. DE:HR has a ton of these scenarios. For instance:

The first major mission you have to stop terrorists that have taken over a manufacturing plant. When you reach the head terrorist, you can choose to talk him down (in which case he always escapes, and the hostage lives), or fight him. If you fight him, 9 times out of 10, he’ll kill his hostage. But, there is that 1/10th chance, where, if you get a stun gun ready, and move quicker, you can take him down and save the hostage – a hidden third option.

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Hmmm, Deus Ex 1 had a similar case. It was the turning point - an important game character gave you a clear instruction, and you could follow it. Or you could ignore it and keep talking to the prisoner that the game character wanted to be alone with. Or… you could take initiative and for the first time act on what you’d learned by shooting what you probably didn’t think would be a valid target (so much for stealth, though).

I hope we’re not getting too off-topic - I mean, we’re still discussing choices.

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Doesn’t that basically describe “The Test is Now READY” from the 2012 IFComp? An entire game of Trolley Problem-esque decisions, that is, not necessarily the second part.

It was a parser game, BTW, and I suspect that it wouldn’t work as well as a choice-based game. At least not if it starkly presented you with the choice to do one or the other. Maybe if there were a lot of choices where you could make one choice, make the other choice, or temporize, and it only gradually became clearer that eventually you were going to have to make a choice.

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Or, if you had a branch that looked exactly similar to another one, where you have started going down a path that is going to branch later on, but you aren’t clued from the outset – you can hide the choices within the branch. If I were creating a choice-based game, I would punish the player for just clicking through by having the “return” page, (like the cell you start in in howling dogs) look exactly the same when you go back – but it’s not. It’s a branch. Then, the probable outcomes begin to get set the more you choose, until the player is given a resolution – but not necessarily the winning one.

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Since a CYOA game is all ABOUT clicking through, even when the choices made are deliberate… I’m not sure I’d like to play your game. :slight_smile:

You have to play fair to the player, after all. You can even be sneaky and underhanded. But if you train a player to behave in a certain way to some scenarios - in Howling Dogs, for instance, you had the hub room you always returned to - it’s not fair to expect the player to, at a point late in the game, completely unmotivated, start trying to break the existing behaviour, especially since the player might have TRIED it… and given up because it didn’t work.

Here’s an example from Cutthroats. Most of the game (until your ship launches) you’re walking around, meeting people are a pre-determined place. Veering from this routine is not only dangerous, as you might miss the appointment or bump into someone you’d rather not… it’s also pointless, it becomes clear very soon that there is nothing to do most of the time EXCEPT to go forward with that appointment, with whatever previous preparations you might have made.

Then at one stage, you are EXPECTED to break from this behaviour and explore, you’re expected to be in a place at the far end of the map and hide to witness something you had no way of knowing anything about, then you have to… well, perform a bunch of actions. And if you don’t, you’ll get the BAD ending… and we’re still only halfway through the game.

So, yeah. Careful with that,

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That’s not exactly what I meant – I meant to hide the fact that the player has started going down a branch, which forces the player to read the story more carefully. Similar to the old pen and paper Sherlock Holmes type games, where you have to be observant about what you see, so you can make the correct deduction. Creating similar looking branches leading to other resolutions would punish people that are just clicking through without reading.

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As long as it’s something that it’s POSSIBLE to see first time.

But look, to be honest, if you revisit the same hub many different times, like in Howling Dogs, it’s unfair to expect the player to be as attentive as ever. Same as in parser-IF - you’ve gone past those rooms umpteen times, you’ll be skimming the text description, partly because you know it, and partly because your mind is a few steps AHEAD, looking to solve other problems.

So you’ll want something that’ll actually stand out a little bit. The equivalent of you going through a room and spotting something not quite right out of the corner of your eye.

I’d provide Enchanter as an example, but don’t ask me how, I totally missed the “decaying” effects that happened over time. I guess a single sentence that starts going “A thin veneer of decay covers everything in sight” just isn’t enough to actually signify, to me, that important changes are taking place.

I dunno how Degeneracy does it exactly, but it also starts off with small things not wortking too well…

…hmmm, actually Degeneracy is starting to look like a good example for this discussion (at least this current branch of it). And it’s a solid game. I recommend it.

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Pippin “Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishments” Barr made a trolley problem game. It is what it is, which is little – but not nothing. pippinbarr.com/games/trolley … oblem.html

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Yeap – this is closer to what I meant. The hub wouldn’t change – you could skim over it, but the probable resolution that you’re getting to (that you can’t see, because it’s 10 clicks away, or whatever) has been altered by your choices. In this way you could create scenarios that have very deep branches, and hide options within them where the character could create a scenario that doesn’t have to be A, or B, but now creates a C. But this “C” option is only available to the players that were reading carefully along the way. I don’t mean to be pull the rug out from under the player’s feet, but create scenarios that are not mindless clicking – because each click should have some sort of choice connected to it. And a choice means a consequence.

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That I can get behind. :smiley:

UnwashedMass - Thanks for the link. It’s cool, and what’s more interesting, it has various different degrees of choice. The original trolley problem is “You are in this situation, and there’s nothing for you - you do or you don’t”. Level 3, pushing the other person, is something else entirely. It can’t be reduced to the same “choose ONE or THREE people to die”.

I mean, it can, but you’d have to ignore human condition and assume that people are unfeeling sociopathic robots.

I do like the way this little “game” makes that point. I dislike the way that the ending screen reduces everything to numbers, as though all scenarious were comparable. But that’s probably part of what it was MEANT to do. So all in all, kudos for a successful thought-provoking five minutes.

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To be fair, Peter, those are all standard variants of the Trolley Problem encountered in the philosophy literature. The idea is that most people won’t… ah, I should spoiler this.

[spoiler]Most people won’t push the big guy off the bridge. That shows that there’s not strictly a one vs. three calculation going on.

Most people will throw the switch in the case where the trolley loops. That shows that the difference between the original case and the bridge case isn’t strictly that people are opposed to using someone to block the train. In the original case you could argue that you’re saving the three, and that it’s merely an unfortunate side effect that the one dies – you’d rescue him if you could. In the loop case, you need that guy to be on the top loop, or else the three people would die anyway.[/spoiler]

Anyway, I appreciated the ending screen; it summarizes what happened (yes, only in numbers) without pushing you toward a conclusion or accusing you of inconsistency or anything.