Thoughts on writing/designing CYOAs?

[HulkHandsome]

@Morgan_R

To me, I think I’d prefer something like:

“You enter the room. There’s a [[chair]] and a [[table]] here.”

(clicks “chair”)

“It’s a chair. Nothing special.”

[[Keep looking around]]

(clicks “Keep looking around”)

“You look around the room. There’s a chair and a [[table]] here.”

Basically, enough change to reflect what you just did, but still letting you return. I just don’t like being whisked away from a page of links that I expected to be able to explore at my leisure.

I used this technique in the OLD AGE section of Machine of Death. I’m quite happy with how it turned out, though a few reviewers criticised it because they felt it was a CYOA trying to be traditional IF or some such.

[Sequitur]

@namekuseijin

This moving forward thing is what buggers me about CYOA: every action leads into a new page. I don’t understand why they keep calling you “you” when you’re just a reader as in any other static fiction. Meaning: you can’t simply connect with the protagonist, feel like you’re really there, able to mess around and experiment with things at hand in your own pace.

Non-interactive, traditional fiction can and has been written in the second person, purely for literary effect. Much like how IF has been written in the first and third persons.

[joningold]

@namekuseijin

This moving forward thing is what buggers me about CYOA: every action leads into a new page. I don’t understand why they keep calling you “you” when you’re just a reader as in any other static fiction. Meaning: you can’t simply connect with the protagonist, feel like you’re really there, able to mess around and experiment with things at hand in your own pace.

Well, that’s with multibranching choice-based CYOA. Twine hypertextual approach effectively allows for that bond between reader and PC. You can click away and interact with stuff, perhaps even altering things here and there.

For myself, I love the moving-forward nature of CYOA; it’s a promise by the author not to waste the player’s time; that everything they do will - or at least could - matter. I like the way it crystallises the player’s involvement into the moment-by-moment action, rather than letting you be this semi-distant observer, floating around a static world like a ghost.

So long as the author doesn’t write a dull story, of course. One thing I like about Choice of Games/Hosted Games massive output is you get to see a decent bell-curve of writing and writers so you can see the effect of skill, rather than simply medium. Some of their games are pretty dull. Others are pretty great. Not surprising, but it’s useful to consider what about the good ones makes the difference; it isn’t merely skill at crafting sentences.

jon

[Healy]

@joningold

So long as the author doesn’t write a dull story, of course. One thing I like about Choice of Games/Hosted Games massive output is you get to see a decent bell-curve of writing and writers so you can see the effect of skill, rather than simply medium. Some of their games are pretty dull. Others are pretty great. Not surprising, but it’s useful to consider what about the good ones makes the difference; it isn’t merely skill at crafting sentences.

jon

That’s an interesting point. Would you mind me asking which ChoiceScript games you feel do things particularly well, and which ones aren’t as good, and in what ways? Mainly I’m asking because I’m thinking about making a ChoiceScript game myself.

[Sequitur]

I think a mistake a lot of first-time CYOA people do, especially when coming to Twine from parser games and Inform, is to treat passages as though they’re rooms. They’re not; they’re story beats. CYOA can feel like it’s ‘on rails’ when it’s constructed such that you can’t revisit a room you just walked out of, because we expect to be able to revisit a room we’ve been to; we do not, however, expect to be able to revisit moments we’ve experienced. Thinking of passages as moments in the story as opposed to places for the player to visit helps keep the writing propulsive, which makes more sense with the always-moving-forward nature of CYOA. In Howling Dogs for example, the passages in the framing story are all freely visitable because they represent parts of physical space, but the passages in the vignettes are ‘propulsive’ because they’re moments in those dreamlike stories.