I actually feel like this kind of narrative meta-puzzle was a major thing in the post-Photopia early-aughts scene - things like Ingold’s All Roads and My Angel, Slouching Towards Bedlam… I actually kind of miss the approach, I really enjoyed it!
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You’re absolutely right! It’s still part of me enough that yesterday, as I played through What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed, I was surprised at how much the game ends up explaining when most of the story could also have been gleaned and guessed from the little fragments you come across.
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Oh, yeah, I am aware of those kinds of games, though I admittedly haven’t played too many - my main gaming group went defunct like ten years ago, as story games were on the upswing, and we’d evolved a bespoke, highly collaborative and narrative driven approach to the tradition RPGs we mostly played (player-defined character and narrative arcs, players running important NPCs, player-framed scenes, that kind of stuff) such that I think we felt like we’d already found a comfortable set of solutions to the issues those games were also engaging with.
Anyway you’re absolutely right that the analogy is a limited one, though I do think it’s easier to see how the traditional GM plus preplanned scenario model relates to IF than the more distributed-authorship storygame model. It’d be interesting to think that through in more depth, though - I have to confess that your thread on resurrecting IF theory convos has me thinking of looking more deeply at IF/RPG connections since that’s another space with a lot of theory grappling with problems not too dissimilar from those we engage with here.
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There’s that rank noobness I was talking about. A lot of the criticism I got for that game was about not trusting my players enough, and it was absolutely true. As any of my testers will tell you, I have a terrible tendency to shepherd and hand-hold that must be beaten out of me each and every time. I don’t know why I do this to the extent I do, since it bothers me when other authors do it.
I think experiences like Jess’s (and to some extent mine) with Photopia are my big fear-- that I didn’t explain it well enough, that the player will be lost, that I didn’t pull the narrative threads together successfully enough. One of the amazing things about Photopia is its confident attitude toward player experience; it is going to move a perplexed player along, and it doesn’t care whether or not that works for you, because that is how it rolls. I could use a dose of that medicine.
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I wonder if we also have some differences in what “railroaded” means. I define it sort of as “The game doesn’t let you do what you want to do,” or “The game lets you do what you want to do but promptly shoves you back on the path it wants you to go on.” I’ve played choice games where I’ve never been in a position that I went “Oh, I wish I could do [other thing]!” and every choice was reasonably carried throughout the story, which I wouldn’t describe as railroaded, but I wonder if you would.
It’s also possible that we just play different types of games; I think choice games have a much higher instance of branching often (thereby offering a less railroaded experience) than parser games. Regarding choice-based games and tabletop gaming, I also don’t think that they’re more railroady from being authored rather than semi-improvised, either - kind of the opposite. I actually feel like if you’re comparing D&D to, uuuuh, let’s say Vampire: The Masquerade — Parliament of Knives (a Choice of Games game) then it’s likely that …Knives is less likely to railroad you because the author’s had a lot of time to sit down and actually reason out all the branches, whereas a DM or something isn’t going to spend the time preparing so many branches, because why would you? You’re not going to be running hundreds of players with divergent choices through your D&D campaign, and they won’t necessarily expect you to.
(If you’re unfamiliar, …Knives (and many CoG games) offers a lot of branching; there are several significantly different endings, and the details of the story can vary a lot!)
Somewhat hilariously, I often feel that parser games are orders of magnitude more railroady, because despite your ability to walk around and examine and move things, they usually don’t give you any narrative agency. So in that sense, Photopia might reasonably be called railroaded, but in that sense I can’t really think of any non-railroaded parser games (but I’ve not widely played them); if anybody could name a couple I’d be interested in giving them a try.
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Kinda of a trick answer, but Sam Barlow’s Aisle would be the least railroady parser game I can think of by your definition.
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There’s also stuff like Short’s Galatea, though I would consider it more an experimental work than a parser game per se.
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Yeah, this – and your overall post – all seems basically right to me. I guess the elaboration I’d offer is that at the end of the day I don’t think there actually such a thing as being railroaded; if I had to try to define what I mean more rigorously, all there is is the feeling of being railroaded, which is a downstream symptom that the game’s mechanics are apparently insufficiently responsive to the player’s expectations.
One key word there is maybe “apparent” – I feel like discussing the amount of branching and number of endings isn’t quite a red herring, but also not exactly on point. Like, every year there are at least a couple post-mortems where an author complains that they tracked dozens of variables and wrote twice as much text as any single player would ever see, yet all their reviews complained about the story being stultifyingly linear. And you also see the reverse, where players are excited about how responsive and flexible a game is, before the author reveals that no, the whole thing was on rails the entire time.
To the extent that “railroading” is a problem, it’s an issue in the first case, not the second, I think most folks would agree – it’s all about avoiding the feeling that the player doesn’t matter. It’s tempting to say “the player’s choices” there, but I don’t think that’s quite right since it presupposes a set of expectations that aren’t going to be universally shared; that’s the second important piece. Very few folks would complain that Doom is a railroad, I’m guessing, even though you have zero impact on the story. You might object that that’s a bad example because nobody plays Doom for the story – but similarly, I haven’t seen many complaints that Secret of Monkey Island is a railroad, even though every player goes through the same plot beats, mostly in the same order modulo inconsequential stuff like which of the Three Trials you tackle first. And what about Zork? In some ways maybe it’s more like Doom than Monkey Island; it’s challenge-based game with an omnipresent risk of failure, and probably creates more of a sense of agoraphobia than railroading for first-time players.
What I’m getting at here is that “the game does/doesn’t let you do what you want” largely is a function of the responsiveness of a game’s mechanics, which can look radically different across different games – and “making narratively significant choices” is only one of many potential mechanics, even within just IF. It’s the alchemy between what different players are expecting those mechanics to allow them to do that drives whether someone does or doesn’t feel like they’re being railroaded.
To play this out relative to your examples: to a person who’s played a bunch of puzzley parser games, the framing narrative may not feel like the place where they’re engaging creatively with the game mechanics – instead, it might be the way the mechanics enable them to explore an environment, experiment to determine the behavior of the creatures and devices it contains, and eventually master its challenges. If that’s what you’re expecting from IF, the ability to just choose one of several pre-written paths will feel very game-y and disempowering. On the flip side, if you’ve played exclusively choice-based games, you’re probably used to a game’s mechanics allowing you to meaningfully impact a narrative, and being able to wander wherever you want and fail to advance the plot by not getting a puzzle right is more bug than feature.
The question this raises is whether it matters that a player have reasonable expectations about what kind of engagement a game’s mechanics will afford. I think it does and it doesn’t; it’s obviously unfair to expect every player to judge a game according to what its agenda is, rather than what they enjoy, but at the same time, it’s similarly unrealistic to expect an author to cater to every possible set of player expectations under the sun. This is where genre and communication are important! To circle back at last to Zarf’s point, I do agree authors have largely gotten better at this. Like, I haven’t played many Choice of Games offerings, but I feel like if I did I would have pretty well-grounded expectations for what I’d be getting into – all of their blurbs have bullet points that foreground the choice of gender identities and sexual orientations, as well as the different romance options, for example.
(To similarly bring things back to Photopia – it is 100% the case that its mechanics aren’t very responsive to players, either in terms of narrative impact or the more traditional engagement offered by parser games; as Victor’s article mentions, you can’t even really explore since the map reshuffles so you always see everything in the same order. So while I agree with his point that inevitability isn’t really part of the game’s intended thematic statement, I can see why many players focused on that!).
Anyway, to try to wrap this monster of a post up (I’ve been expecting my son to wake up any minute and require me to bring this in for a landing, but since he’s been sleeping well I’ve kept on writing) – in practice, I think there’s less of a “two cultures” issue between choice-based and parser-based games now than there was 10 or 20 years ago; there are tons of puzzle-focused choice-based games that aren’t that different from parser games in terms of where they create player engagement, and there are likewise lots of parser games that remove the risk of failure or the requirement of mastering puzzles in order to present an interactive narrative. But even within one tradition or the other, there are still approaches that are more or less likely to lead to players feeling railroaded, and analyzing how a game is (or isn’t) trying to set players’ expectations, and how it communicates the way its game mechanics respond to players’ actions, is to my mind a more fruitful way at getting at this than just looking at narrative structure or choice alone.
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But on the flipside, if some of my tabletop Vampire the Masquerade players decide to do something I didn’t expect at all, I can improvise around it, or call for a break while I prepare something new. Parliament of Knives will never let you make a choice the author didn’t code in.
This isn’t even necessarily about going “off the rails” the way the expression’s normally used—in Night Road (another VtM IF game in ChoiceScript) I’d often think “damn, I wish I could go ask Julian or Lettow or Dove some questions; I’m currently hanging around between missions with plenty of time, I know where they are, and I’m curious what they think about this situation, but the game just doesn’t have that option”. In a live game, I could improvise some dialogue with whichever NPC the players approached, about whichever topic was on their mind at the time; in IF, trying to implement all of that is going to spiral out of hand very quickly.
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For what it’s worth, my problem with Photopia might not be quite what you fear your games are at risk of.
My problem was that it was so easy to accidentally perform an action which completely discarded the whole scene, and drastically moved the game forward. I would have had a much better time if it was a little harder to do these major progression actions, so that a “drunken stumbling” couldn’t get through each scene.
As long as I am able to examine stuff, explore around, and perform actions that prove some minimum amount of understanding before the scene changes, then I’m fine. The difficulty of putting the information together can be quite difficult, and I’d be able to get through on my own.
If the game has zero hand-holding, but exhaling a little too hard makes the whole system table-flip at a moment’s notice, then the player has little hope of following along. I feel like that was actually the problem.
(EDIT: Sorry if I might sound a bit on-edge in this reply. I just got done playing a really tense mission in Deep Rock Galactic, and was laying down, waiting for my adrenaline to subside. This forum is one of my comfort locations online lol. I feel like my emotional state might have an effect on how I’m writing, but I’m not sure.)
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Yep, and the player’s left shouting “Hey! I wasn’t done with that, you twit!” at her screen.
Like one would scold an overeager waiter who clears away one’s still half-full plate of spaghetti.
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I think the term ‘railroading’ is most useful when it is confined to describing a very particular mismatch of expectations and desires that long haunted tabletop RPGs. This is the mismatch between having, on the one hand, a Game Master who expects the players to play through his or her carefully prepared story; and having, on the other hand, players who expect or at least desire to make decisions for their characters that significantly shape the story. Obviously this combination is impossible. But there have been countless roleplaying games which promised the players unlimited freedom to shape the story, and at the same time instructed the GM to pre-plan a story (or buy a pre-planned one in the form of a supplement). In those circumstances, it can seem as if the job of the GM is to carefully guide those pesky players – who are never just going along! – back to the story. This is railroading. And the best GMs are those that make the pre-planned story appear to be the result of the players’ choices, even though it is not – this is illusionism.
Of course, players frustrated with railroading tend to do bizarre stuff to break the story, and then the GM has to work ever harder to get them to where they need to go, and everybody ends up having no fun at all. There are some amazing adventure supplements from the early days of D&D where the GM is given a bunch of increasingly forceful ways for getting the players to, say, the necromancer’s island in case they don’t simply accept the quest in the tavern. Which raises the question: why wouldn’t they accept? And the only answer can be the mutual frustration resulting from the basic mismatch of expectations and desires.
Outside such a situation, the term ‘railroading’ quickly loses its usefulness. I think it’s helpful to approach this in terms of what kind of agency players expect, and what kind of agency they get. In a standard D&D campaign, players neither get nor expect agency over the larger story – after all, the Dungeon Master paid $50 for that new adventure taking you from level 6 to level 10, so you’d better follow that adventure! That’s the ride you’re here for. Instead, players get and expect agency in tactical combat (and sometimes in skill-based ‘roleplay’ encounters). Perfect. There could only be railroading here if the DM actually pre-cooked the fights in such a way that they could only be won one way, because that’s the only dimension where expected player agency could be taken away. Whether or not the story could branch in different directions is irrelevant.
As an IF example, compare a typical Choice of Games offering (with its widely branching paths and many endings) to Turandot (with its single path and ending). Is the second railroaded? Not at all. The typical Choice of Games piece offers the player the opportunity to create a character and pursue in-character character-dependent goals, with some chance of failure but a fairly high chance of success. This requires a branching structure with many ends. Turandot offers the player the opportunity to inhabit a very specific pre-created character and perform him as he undertakes what will turn out to be a quest of self-discovery. The game never takes away your opportunity to perform him. Arguably, a branching story-line with chances of success and failure would lessen player agency in this particular game. (It is of the essence that you can follow your instincts as a performer and engage in antics so ridiculous that you fall into the crocodile pit and come out unscathed, ready to continue the romance.)
In other words: railroading is a term used to describe the trivialisation of player choices in a situation where the expected/desired form of agency is control over the story, hence, where this trivialisation takes the form of always forcing the narrative back on a pre-conceived trail. The problem with the term is that it emphasises the form taken by the trivialisation, rather than the reason that this is a problem. This may fool us into thinking that a linear narrative is something bad; or that taking player choice seriously requires branching storylines. But that’s not true! What you need to think through, and communicate to your players, is what agency you want the players to have, and make sure you give them that kind of agency.
(This actually seems like a good topic for a longer essay… hm…)
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Yes, I think this is it exactly – when I started writing my post I actually used the word “agency” in much the same way you did in yours. But then it seemed to me the term might have some assumptions baked into it, and therefore tried to unpack it and landed on “the apparent responsiveness of the game’s mechanics to the player’s expectations.”
That longer phrase is clunky and has individual terms that likewise could probably be usefully defined (like, I think it can be an interesting question to try to nail down what is and what isn’t a game mechanic in a particular work!) but I found it usefully helped me clarify for myself what I meant by “agency” in this context.
Anyway, I very much agree that this would be a good topic for a longer treatment!
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