Mutable game-world and curated choices in interactive fiction

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I’m thinking about a design I’ve been experimenting with, where a choice-based IF allows players to propose new options that are curated and integrated into a persistent game world, and I’m trying to understand whether this form of play actually engages people (beyond myself, of course).

This is a follow up on my earlier prototype announcement (Scribarchy - collaborative storytelling platform)

I’m still unsure I’ve answered the most basic question for myself, which is whether this is actually a game anyone wants to play. I am genuinely curious and not looking for validation.

Very briefly, and without re-pitching the whole thing, the experiment looks on the surface like a fairly conventional choice-based IF. The unusual part is that players can propose new choices or directions when they feel the existing ones don’t quite cover what they want to do. Those proposals aren’t accepted automatically. They’re curated and integrated by the author with an eye toward the overall themes and coherence of the work. The resulting changes persist, so later players encounter a slightly altered world shaped by earlier play.

What I’m wrestling with isn’t whether this is possible, or even whether it’s interesting as an experiment, but whether it offers a kind of pleasure that justifies the added complexity and loss of permanence.

Some questions I don’t have good answers to yet:

Does inheriting a world shaped by previous players feel like added depth, or a distraction?

Is proposing actions a satisfying form of agency, or an awkward interruption of flow?

Does the loss of a “definitive” version of the work matter to you as a player?

Would you personally be curious to play something like this more than once, or at all, if you weren’t invested in the experiment behind it?

I’m not trying to argue that this should replace traditional IF, or that persistence is inherently better than replayability. I’m honestly trying to understand whether this design is serving a real player desire, or whether it’s mainly scratching my personal itch.

I’d be especially interested in hearing from people who think this isn’t for them. What about it fails to appeal, or feels actively unappealing?

Thanks in advance. Thoughtful pushback is very welcome.

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This isn’t my kind of thing, but I feel like there have been things in this space in the past. Most directly, perhaps: Alabaster was an Emily Short experiment in collaborative conversation design: original blog post, oldest blog page of the alabaster tag.

Mote (2020 NarraScope video: I think there was also one in 2022?) was an experiment in building multiplayer chat to support roleplay – rewording chat messages in different person based on who’s talking, etc.).

MUDs, of course, often involve collaborative creation, with various degrees of supervision and hierarchy.

Live choice-based storytelling with polls on social media also feels like it falls in this space, sort of?

I suspect that (as usual) the tricky part is in the details of “is this specific premise interesting to someone” and “are you allowing the right amount of co-creation for people to find it interesting?” Again, not my thing, probably wouldn’t ever be: I want someone to tell me a story, not take part in telling it. But I’d guess that demonstrating experience in doing this might be a selling point? Have you taken part in forum roleplay, or roleplay in MUDs or on text chat? Do you LARP, or play (or GM) tabletop roleplay?

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In some sense this is called “playtesting”. :)

(For parser IF you don’t need any mechanism at all to support this. You ask people to send you a transcript; you look through it for “I don’t understand that” errors; you decide which ones should be supported and which ones should have better failure messages.)

Making it a first-class part of the play experience is interesting. I don’t know if I’ve seen that before. Not as curated suggestions. Player-contributed content tends to be wild-west, anything-you-want-to-add stuff – see MUDs – and the results are invariably people competing to see how weird they can get until everybody loses interest.

(There are role-playing tools which work this way in the context of “collaboration between players and GM”, but I think that’s a different vibe.)

I’m going to bet “awkward”. It’s not agency because you don’t know if your suggestion will be accepted, and even if it is, you won’t know until tomorrow.

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What you propose feels like flipping choice based games around into “open choice, with some guidance/hints” games.

What you describe, if I understand correctly, is: “the game gives choices, but then allows the player to suggest other choices”, but what that reads to me like, from a player experience standpoint, is: “the player gets to suggest a choice, and there are also explicit choices to guide the player if they don’t think of anything else”.

I think overall this approach can be engaging as a mechanic, but this largely depends on how strong the narrative is. In a poorly written game, it may simply feel frustrating, but this isn’t unique to what you propose. A great parser game engine might feel frustrating to a player if the story isn’t well conceived or structured.

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Thanks for your response.

Although I played a lot of TTRPG’s back in the day (and even participated in a LARP, a unique experience that is a story for another day) and rattled around in various MUDs and MMORPGs, my inspiration for the prototype came from playing many, many hours of Fallen London. I came to realize I wanted to do something other than what was listed, and to have whatever that was to be integrated into the Fallen London world. It would be unfair to criticize Fallen London for not having a way to do that; it is hard to imagine that their writers would have the bandwidth to accommodate such a request. So I set it out to try to create a platform where I (and others) could try and do that very thing, on a smaller scale but hopefully just as satisfying.

So I am grappling with where, if anywhere, this concept lies on the spectrum (or if there is even a spectrum). Perhaps I am the only one that is interested in the idea, which was the origin of the OP.

Thanks again for the insights.

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Thanks for the response.

Yes, that’s a good way to express it, playtesting. The players and author are building it together, and once the “test” is “done”, if ever, the results of the test remain as an artifact for future players to explore.

By it’s very nature such a process would be slow going, especially at first, as the game play loop is measured in hours and days instead of minutes. An example of comparable pace might be play-by-post games.

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Thanks for your response.

I like your description of it as open choice with guidance, and as you said a lot depends on the quality of the author at the helm.

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I’ve been playing around with a similar idea when I started working on ChronicleHub, and very much am still considering it. My current worry is whether it might cause people to feel entitled to have their options integrated, but with a Quality Based Narrative system in the back, adding options might not cause as much friction.

There is the danger of having so many options it becomes very hard to keep track of mentally, and a user might get overwhelmed, but that is in the hands of the author to help curate. It might be more feasible or easier on the user with a short list view, or with an option-search if the amount of options becomes too many to keep track of.

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The issue that jumps out to me is that the main limitation on the number of options in the game isn’t the author’s ability to think of possible options, but the difficulty of handling the consequences of those options, since the complexity of the story grows exponentially with the number of options presented to the player.

I’m sure most authors could easily anticipate a lot of “what if someone wants to do X” possibilities for their game already, without needing to solicit suggestions from players, but the decision to not present many of those options is an unavoidable necessity. In order to keep things manageable in practice, the authors would have to prune the suggestions aggressively enough that the odds of a suggestion being accepted would be too low for it to constitute an integrated part of the “gameplay experience.”

You could of course add suggestions as more of a “community feature,” rather than a game mechanic, but at that point what you really want is just robust mod support, maybe with some route for mods to be officially integrated if they’re good enough. That offers a route for the game to improve over time by sharing the implementation effort with the community, rather than just soliciting suggestions whose ability to be implemented is still primarily limited by developer resources.

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I also looked at Storynexus.

That worry about players feeling entitled to have their options accepted is valid. Managing expectations is probably required here, in that proposing an option isn’t a promise of inclusion. My instinct here is to try to incorporate the option as much as possible if it doesn’t damage the narrative. At the moment I let the player describe the option and the requested result if the option is successful. Then I will try and fill in the details and hopefully don’t have to do much else or change the text of the original submission, lest there be some hurt feelings.

The risk of option overload is another thing also I’m concerned about. As the world accumulates history, it becomes easier for the space of possible actions to grow faster than a player can comfortably reason about. Are there rules of thumb about how many options is too many?

I am also concerned about author overload. I was hoping that by allowing players to create not just options but other game assets, that load might be reduced somewhat. In the end the author will end up having to moderate everything that will end up permanently in the game, so that is going to be the bottleneck, which I haven’t thought of any way to avoid.

Thanks for sharing your experience with ChronicleHub. It’s helpful to know others are running into the same questions from different angles.

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This sounds really interesting, and could be excellent if done well. A big if, obviously.

There are some games that do this listed on IFDB, though I don’t think any of them let the players suggest choices outright. 500 Apocalypses might be of note, though. It’s a collection of snippets chronicling worlds that have undergone various apocalyptic events. The intro says that players can submit their own snippets to a specific email, and the author will review them and put them in. I don’t know if that email is still actively checked or if the game is still updated, given it’s been about a decade at this point.

In general I’m enthused by the idea of IF that has a server-based multiplayer component. I’m not into multiplayer IF games that require two or more people, since I find it cumbersome to get the extra players, but I think the possibility of interacting asynchronously with other players has a lot of promise. Moirai, a short game from 2013, got a lot of attention for letting players do that.

Edit to add: I’m not fond of AI-generated art, which gets a mention in your original thread, so I wouldn’t use a platform that enforces it. But if a player can turn it off and not interact with it or see it at all, that would be fine with me. Just my personal views, others may think differently.

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I think there is potential to do something interesting with this as a multiauthor collaborative system. But the way it’s phrased feels like this is getting at something of a design philosophy debate we keep seeing: basically, whether the player or the author is the one who should have more power. The idea that more player agency is in itself more desirable seems strange to me because it suggests that a game should just be about fulfilling the player’s wishes and not telling a story communicating an experience or delivering a challenge. Like, at a certain point if your ideal is to let the player try anything they want, then you don’t want to make interactive fiction; you want to run a TTRPG.

And there is potential for something like this in that space! But it seems important to come at it from the right angle, because I assume most authors and players of IF are interested in what the author has to say more than what a player can imagine. Having a limited palette of choices tends to reflect something about the character that a player is playing, which tends to be quite important for what the player is getting out of the game.

I do like the idea of previous players shaping a game world. I just wouldn’t personally feel having them add more choices is the right way to go about it. I think it would depend on what the game is.

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Thanks for the response.

Moirai is a good example of the kind of asynchronous interaction that interests me, where other players are present in the world without requiring coordination and can affect the game-world for the next player.

I agree that server-based, asynchronous interaction feels like a promising middle ground. I like the sense that other players have left traces, even if you never meet them directly.

On the AI point, that’s useful to hear. I was thinking that folks would either love or hate the AI, but I think you are suggesting that there is middle ground where someone might still play if the AI could be turned off for them?

Thanks again for the thoughtful response.

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I think that’s a fair concern, and I don’t actually see this as an argument that more player power is inherently better. I agree that one of the strengths of IF is precisely that the shape of the choices can say something about the character, the situation, and the experience the author wants to communicate.

What I’m trying to explore isn’t unlimited freedom, but whether there’s a way for player input to be filtered through authorial intent rather than replacing it. Proposing a choice isn’t meant to imply that it should be accepted verbatim. As zarf pointed out, it is somewhat akin to playtesting. I am thinking if someone proposes a choice there was some motivation for doing so. They could just be trolling, trying to turn the narrative into a free-for-all (for whatever reason). They could see a hole in the narrative that the usually all-seeing author missed. Perhaps they are trying to guide the narrative in such-and-such a direction for their own enjoyment. If authorial intent is seen more as a multi-lane highway rather than single lane road, then the one kind of choice is more like asking for pothole repair, the other is asking for lane changes, and the third is asking go off road (best analogy I could think of at the moment).

I also agree that this wouldn’t make sense for every kind of game. For some stories, a tightly constrained set of choices is exactly the point. For others, especially ones about living worlds, I’m curious whether letting earlier players shape aspects of the space can add something without losing focus.

Thanks again for your response.

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This is the case for me, personally, though I would still heavily prefer an app with no integrated AI generation whatsoever. I also know a lot of people, especially in art and writing communities, are against AI on principle and won’t use anything that has generative AI in it, so removing it would make them much more welcoming towards your game. People who are fond of AI, at least here, tend to be newcomers who aren’t engaged with the community and are often pushing a product of some kind - you can look at the AI tag for examples.

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Both.

It isn’t IF, but I’m reminded of No Man’s Sky, which I enjoy quite a bit. It can be fun to randomly run across other players’ bases. But it’s mostly interesting because it is unexpected, and it would spoil the game for me to constantly be running into other people’s stuff.