That’s why choice-based games have evolved to have the interesting consequences depend on combinations or accumulations of choices, rather than individual moves.
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Yeah, the Twine last project I was working on explicitly used player choices to determine whether or not the protagonist overcame their character flaw and thus gave them a positive, negative, or flat character arc at the end… I was going for a somewhat literary model.
In retrospect I had far too many “high level” branches in the main plot and would have delivered just as fine a play experience with something far more linear and saved myself a ton of work. Lesson learned!
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One way around this is to conceal unmarked options in the text — the equivalent of “examine,” perhaps. The link is present but formatted to look like plaintext, so the user must read carefully and mouse over every word.
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Which is an interesting idea—but it can also turn into the textual equivalent of a pixel hunt or the choice equivalent of guess-the-verb.
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Might be fun to hide secret options/easter eggs if that suits the theme of your experience.
I agree. I considered doing this with the project I’m working on, but realized that the user would most likely be trained by the game to just mash the left-click as they dragged the mouse across every word. The text equivalent of mashing the X button as you bump your character along every object in the room in a JRPG.
To be honest, I prefer my options to be more opaque. If I’m locked out of an option, I prefer to see the potential option even if I can’t click it. It makes me curious of what decisions would be required to get someone’s affection level (for example) high enough at that point of the story to be able to access that option. It gives me incentive to play again. IIRC, this is how the Choice of Games stories work.
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If you were consistent in your use of it — only hide links on nouns, let’s say — and trained the player to seek them, you could make it work. With the right balance of no-links, boring-links, and serious-clue-links, you’d create a sense of exploring and discovery that Twine mostly lacks.
There will always be players who mash the button until they see boobs, penises, blood, and/or explosions. I don’t design around those strategies.
What I meant was that it would start off as the player thoughtfully considering which words may be important before clicking, and then will eventually become a trial and error of “What about this one? No? And this one? No?”, and then finally will become clicking every single word without even reading them. As gamers we’re trained to take repetitive tasks and reduce them to the most efficient method. Mashing left-click will be the inevitable result.
Edit: One fix for this would be to create a “penalty” for clicking the wrong word. Like a message saying “you don’t find anything important about that”. Then clicking blindly will become a waste of time instead of saving time, and will force the player to actually read the text.
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Oh, definitely.
This made me think of audio games such as games made for personal assistants like Echo or Google Home.
I noticed EmShort had a couple blog posts recently about them and I have started playing a few of them myself to see what they’re like and if there’s a viable platform for IF there.
Edit- also agree with the point that all types of medium can tell any type of story.
Not to make this a discussion about the subgenres but adding to the above I suppose you could have an Audio Game VN, an Audio Parser-Based IF, or (arguably most popular in the format) Audio Choice-Based game.
One way around this is to conceal unmarked options in the text — the equivalent of “examine,” perhaps. The link is present but formatted to look like plaintext, so the user must read carefully and mouse over every word.
That requires very careful control over the presentation of the text, though, and in my experience often fails when accessed with different methods. As well as not truly being an obstacle to a thorough player, assuming the player is fairly informed of the possibility.
One fix for this would be to create a “penalty” for clicking the wrong word. Like a message saying “you don’t find anything important about that”. Then clicking blindly will become a waste of time instead of saving time, and will force the player to actually read the text.
Or not permitting the player to go back and choose again. That requires a careful weighing of options before making a selection - and the disabling of the Undo feature.
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Another fix would be to make clicking the “wrong” word simply advance the story. So kind of a smoother “not permitting the player to choose again.” (Or a version of what I did in Synesthesia Factory, just not in parser.)
Or not permitting the player to go back and choose again.
Another fix would be to make clicking the “wrong” word simply advance the story.
To be honest, I really dislike the idea of both of these options. To me, it’s basically taking what most people dislike about hyperlink games (the fact that you never know what’s going to happen when you click a link in the description) and turning it into the worse possible outcome. That’s just my opinion, of course.
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I have always speculated about a system which would essentially be SCUMM for text.
In SCUMM games like Maniac Mansion there is a block of verbs, and you make commands by clicking on those and nouns in the graphical environment. I think it would be interesting if all the text was clickable and the player made sentences with the text onscreen instead of typing…which could then be parsed, or “scenery” would just pop up a box like EXAMINE. It would solve guess-the-verb since it would be necessary to write text that included every action the player could take at the time.
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I also thought about a system like that. Although your idea sounds more advanced than mine. My idea was closer to Monkey Island with simple “look”/“take”/“push”/etc commands. I was thinking left-click could be examine and right-click could be the list of actions.
However, that idea doesn’t play very nice with browsers (especially mobile browsers). But it’d probably work well in a non-browser framework (or electron or something). On that note, it’d be interesting to see a Twine game take advantage of what electron offers… 
Hanon, I see you were one of the testers for it, but for others who may not know, Texture is fairly similar to what you’re describing.
https://texturewriter.com/about
It does suffer from a lack of explanation on the website though! They want you to dive in and see for yourself, I guess.
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And if we’re talking about commercial viability, then don’t forget that the cost of producing a visual novel is waaay less than a video game, so you don’t have to sell a million units before you get your money back.
The feature I’ve always dreamed of is of having links reveal themselves when the player presses SHIFT or some other key. That way the presence of a link in the text doesn’t upset the rhythm of the language when the player first reads it.
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