Some Interactive Fiction Thoughts

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With the release of Carnival of Humiliation, I thought I might share a few thoughts on interactive fiction (hereinafter IF). I actually have a lot of thoughts on the subject; these are just a few of them.

First and foremost, I need to thank Torqual3D, this time for introducing me to the format I used in Carnival. So, months ago I was hammering away at the Haunted House CYOA and I started chatting with Torqual. He suggested a writing exercise, a really simple pyramid structure. Three steps, at each step you have two choices. So, opening on the top level, two passages beneath that, four beneath that, and then eight at the end.

There's a lot to recommend it. First and foremost, it's short, both on the writer's end and the reader's. One of the big problems with writing IF is that, depending on how you structure your story, you can wind up putting a lot more work in than what the reader's going to see. It's a bell curve distribution, but in short: Given a large IF story with a lot of endings, a few readers will read to one ending, then put it down and never pick it up again. More readers will read to two or three endings. The bulk will read to a handful, then decide they've had enough. A small number will find most of the endings, then decide it's not worth the energy to hunt down the last parts they missed. And a very small number will actually explore every nook and cranny of the story and see everything you put into it.

That's a marked contrast to regular, non-interactive writing. Granted, a writer does need to worry about readers getting bored and setting their work aside, but in the main the writer can count on an interested reader reading every single word they wrote. That's not the case with IF. You can have readers who love your story but just don't have the mental energy, or don't quite love it enough, to hunt down every single thing you did with it. And, at an educated guess, I'd say for a typical big-and-sprawling story maybe ten percent or less of your readers will read the whole thing, compared to significantly more of your readers for non-interactive fiction.

What that means is that, in contrast to writing regular fiction, when writing IF there's a good chance that any given passage will be seen by only a small number of your readers. Which also means that, even setting aside the time it takes to do planning and programming, IF winds up being a lot more work than regular fiction. 

There are a few ways to avoid this problem and maximize the amount of the stuff you write that your readers actually read, and all of those ways begin with thinking seriously about the structure of your story before you write your first word. This is one reason I've sort of shifted my allegiance from Inkle to Twine for IF: Twine's basic interface is a quick and easy map of your content, which is difficult-to-impossible to get with Inkle. 

One method, which I employ in much of the Haunted House, is to deliver an essentially on-rails experience, a linear story with a bunch of "what if?" bad endings along the way. Readers can play it as seriously as they like, whether they're actually trying to find the right choices each time, or "playing to lose" and see all the bad ends, or anything in between. At the same time, you have to be careful not to leave the reader feeling cheated out of a genuinely interactive experience. I'd call this the Mass Effect problem, creating the illusion of choice, but then railroading the user in the end. 

I'm generally suspicious of wide-open stories with lots of meaningful choices. Not as a reader, as a reader I love the idea. But as a writer, putting together a sprawling story with lots of significant decisions means writing a Song of Ice and Fire-length epic's worth of text for an experience that, to the reader, may be only a novella in size. So I was, I will admit, deeply skeptical when Torqual approached me with the 8-ending pyramid. It felt very wide-open to me, very branching-paths, which to me says "multiplying work without great results." He challenged me to write a quick story for him in two hours. I laughed. I take days, weeks, months to write stories, there was no way I could dash off a full IF story in two hours.

Well, I did it. In almost exactly two hours, I wrote him a quick-and-dirty Amanda Jones story. Three decisions, eight endings. It wasn't my best work, it was very much doing-what-needed-to-be-done-and-nothing-else, but it was written.

Suddenly my world opened up and I could see the many virtues of the three-step pyramid. It's quick to write! It has a favorable setup-to-endings ratio (7 passages of setup, 8 endings)! It's quick for the reader, which means they're more likely to go back and find a different ending! The openness of it makes the reader feel like they've made the important choices in the story! The writing process is even fairly easy and systematic: Start with a setting or scenario, figure out eight endings, group the endings by theme or location, then work backwards. 

I got extremely excited. I could now easily dash off five IF stories in a week, in just a couple of hours each! I would be a creative dynamo!

It didn't quite work out that way, though, because I'm still me and I wanted to crap things up by making this simple structure complicated. I won't even go into the Really Complicated Thing I came up with for it; that's the Collette CYOA that's mostly-done and you'll hopefully see soon.

Carnival of Humiliation started off as a two-hour writing exercise to apply the eight-ending pyramid to a humiliation/ENF story. It wound up taking two months. What wound up happening is that each ending kept expanding and expanding until it was the length of a full-on short story in itself. Then I had the idea to make the game a loop, so the "endings" weren't actually the end. And, once I did that, I needed a final, "real" ending, since it had to go somewhere once you ran out of endings. 

About half-way into the writing process, I realized it wasn't a proper game anymore. The reader would experience all the same events every time they played, and the only effect they could have was choosing the order things happened in. Not only that, there isn't even a skill element; no matter what choices you make, you will finish the story in exactly the same number of clicks as everyone else playing the story. So why bother keeping it interactive? Why not chop it up and paste it together as a regular, linear story?

I think it still works as IF, though, and makes an important point about what's nice about IF: you can break the story down much more easily as IF than as a linear story. If you're a reader who loves hypnosis as a theme, you can hop straight to the hypnosis segment (where, in a linear story, it might be the seventh story down). And, if you like that, you may then keep reading the other segments. It's also a lot easier to read a bit, then put it away for later, where a linear story where the heroine returns to the park eight times (well, nine) might feel a bit boring, like the author is gilding the lily and couldn't stand to throw out an idea. 

I haven't said this elsewhere, but Carnival of Humiliation is over 52,000 words long, which is the size of a short novel. I've been getting a lot of feedback, quick, for a story of that length. 

One last thing. I want to encourage readers to try out the three-decision, eight-ending pyramid, even if you've never written IF before. It's fun and fairly quick and easy. To get you started, I've got a template built in Twine. You'll need Version 1.4, not 2.0, to load this file. You can find it here: amystories.net/CYOA/PyramidTem… Just save the file to your hard drive and open in Twine.

Thanks for reading, and good luck writing!
© 2016 - 2024 NoComeupance
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Edmere's avatar
Interesting idea, with the whole pyramid structure. I'm always a big fan of your writing, and this is no exception. The prose itself is both hilarious and humiliating for our ill-equipped heroine, especially given the sheer volume of text that this format demands. I applaud the feat. I also loved the situations, a fitting trial for someone of Velvet Glove's smug, surely mentality.

With that said, I'm not sure I'm sold on the whole concept of a pyramid-structured narrative, even with the linearity of repeating through it. I think the biggest mistake is to assume that a story's worth is directly related to its length. My favorite interactive fiction experiences have much more to do with the agency I am given by the options and the impact they have on not just the protagonist's characterization, but the world's reaction to it. Whether a story ends in a mystery solved, unsolved, or simply death, I can enjoy it as the result of a feedback loop between my character and the universe responding, which I think is the key to a large sprawling experience. I did not get that particular feeling at all in this case, since it was clear that the story had been designed to travel each individual path, and made the whole thing feel rather small and simplistic. Not the story, mind you. The experience.

Lastly, I don't know about the justification that this structure allows for an easier gateway into whatever part the reader will like the most. As an art form, books already have the ability to be indexed, such as a collection of short stories, and this narrative seems to do nothing more than let the reader choose their short story. But in any case, I hope you continue to experiment with the formula. Choose Your Own Adventure stories could use some jostling after so many decades of the same setup.