intfiction.org

I think IF's strength lies in the fact that you can program it much quicker versus video games. And it has the ability to make a story really interesting by giving the player a choice. So my question is why do most IFs still go so linear. Why aen't there many branching story lines when that is something that can easily be done?

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Ever notice how the "happy face " looks more like a "trying to pass gas face"

I’d guess because writing a linear game is a lot easier than writing one with multiple paths through it. And as a lot of people will finish your game once then never replay it, one with multiple paths through it would be a lot of wasted time and effort.

The most obvious (to me) reason is that not everyone is that interested in branching stories. As a player, I don't always mind nonlinearity, but it certainly isn't a selling point of a game as far as I'm concerned.

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"The thing I like about deadlines is the wonderful whooshing noise they make as they go past."
- Douglas Adams

I'm really not sure why people write very linear games. I've played some like "The P.K. Girl" where almost no matter what you type, you get a response like "You really should be doing X instead". I think it's often because the author had a specific story in mind that they wanted to tell, and they're not going to let a little thing like player agency get in the way of that. In the case of the game "Rameses", it's because the author wanted to make a point about the powerless of his protagonist, but whatever the reason, I find it extremely irritating. IF should at least provide the player with the illusion that they are driving the story, otherwise they might as well just be reading a book.

I think, first of all, you're underestimating the amount of work that it takes to write an IF game well, even a highly linear one.

Secondly, most IF games are written by individuals working in their spare time.

Thirdly, there's this thing called combinatorial explosion. What it means is that every time you give the player a substantial two-way choice, you double the amount of work you're going to have to do. More generally, the more variation is allowed, the more work the author has to put in, and this number increases faster the more variation there is. Give a player four branching choices and you now have sixteen times as much work. So, if you were working on a game that was going to take three months to write (a fairly fast, but reasonable schedule for a normal comp game), that game would now take four years, for a story of the same length as the linear three-month game. And four choices is not really very many, and binary choices are kind of lame: what if you want there to be three options with every choice? So, branching is not a trivial effort.

Now, that's overstating it a bit, perhaps; a branching game might be able to re-use much of the content between branches. But that generally means more special behaviours to manage, and therefore more bugs to find. And many players won't replay the game, or won't replay it enough to see all the branches, so a lot of your effort will go into things that any given player may not see. Any way you do it, heavily branching narratives are expensive for the author. Even in CYOA, where narrative choices involve considerably less work than in IF, you see authors pulling all kinds of tricks to restrict branching.

I see this differently mostly because I am more familiar with visual novels than I am with IF.

Visual novels tend to have multiple endings. Players know this and often replay the game over and over again to get all the endings. A feature common in visual novels is a gallery that show the graphics that you have unlocked so that you can gauge your progress in achieving all the endings. Another feature is the ability to skip through already viewed scenes to get to the decision menus.

I think it is possible for IF to incorporate some of these features to give the player more incentive and make it easier to replay the game. (I said possible -- not easy )

maga is correct that more branches = more complex to write. For the same amount of effort you could have really short game with 3 endings, or a longer better written game with one ending. Many visual novels are going in this direction to create a better story.

Mostly my point is:
- I agree that IF is not "multiple ending" friendly for players
- I agree that multiple endings require exponentially more work
- I think that it is possible to do in IF

Order of effort required by me to create something of equal artistic value:
Visual Novel
CYOA
IF
RPG (2D)


Susan

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Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.
- Larry Wall

I think this really is the key. If you reuse actions and events, but give them different effects depending on various world/character states, it's possible to give players many meaningful choices without dealing with combinatorial explosion.

It just hasn't been done very often because it requires substantially more design work and testing -- and of a different sort -- than a linear game does.

Well, you have my personal guarantee that none of my text adventure games will ever have a linear storyline. On the other hand, you have my personal guarantee that none of my text adventure games will ever have a set of branching storylines, either. So I guess that's a wash

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Games, Fonts, and Font-Toys For Gamers - http://www.cumberlandgames.com

Most great games I've played are fairly linear, even the ones that don't look so. A skillful game designer is able to figure out that giving the illusion of choice is way easier than branching the narrative in multiple non-interesting branches.

Suppose you give the player a clear goal, but he's not interested at all. He just wants to explore the surroundings, headshot passerbys, run over pedestrians and have his sandbox junior fun. Many players these days don't seem to care about engaging in a plot, they seem to just have fun poking at the technical bounderies in games. Thus it happens that you can't account for all of these guys actions. And you shouldn't really, because they're not here to enjoy, just to poke fun. "The king has made you his knight. > fuck you"

So, simply ignore senseless input and focus on telling an interesting story as an author and to engage the player. And interesting stories are linear. As Curses put it:



if the player is not enticed enough, just let him go down through the trapdoor...

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IF without puzzles is simply like a novel where you turn pages by typing "go north" or other silly and useless nonsense.

I'm curious: Which end of that list is the high effort end?

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"The thing I like about deadlines is the wonderful whooshing noise they make as they go past."
- Douglas Adams