Standard patterns in choice-based games (2015)

This is great. I've been a game dev for about 30 years, much of which I've spent working with narrative design/writing teams. One thing I've learned to watch out for, especially among junior designers, is what the author labels the "Time Cave."

Narrative branching, done well, is fantastic—it gives the player agency and lets them make the story their own (as it were). But when you're creating the story graph, it's easy to get lost in it and lavish care on one path at the exclusion of the others. You can easily end up with one or two long, greatly-detailed paths, and (because dev time is finine, and you need to move on to writing other parts of the game) a pile of other paths that are shorter and less interesting. If the player takes one of the shorter ones, they end up missing out on all your coolest stuff. The tools I would design for the kinds of games I created specifically made it easy to create a main story trunk with side paths (that rejoined the trunk), and more difficult to branch/loop/etc.

Of course, that's not the only (or even the best) way to do narrative design—Disco Elysium is a masterwork because it did the branching, merching, loops, jumps, random checks, and so forth, so well!

This is fun, and holds true in the creative writing group I run. We use a website I programmed that helps us collaborate on writing branching fiction. We have a mapping utility that creates graphs like in the article, except more animated (d3.js, elkjs).

As different authors can start their own new stories, one thing I often have to deal with is that they want to design their story to have both long path lengths (multiple chapters before an ending), and also high choice count. Those of you who know something about geometric series know that this causes problems. I often have to tell them they can't have everything they want, which causes minor drama. :)

As a result, one of our stories basically shot its "choice budget" in the first few chapters, leading to many linear paths in the latter parts of the narratives, which is fun in its own way.

Another of our stories has just started playing with the "gauntlet pattern" as the article describes. For this one, we decided that all chapters must be in the "same universe", just following different characters' perspectives, and are planning for certain "anchor chapters" where all characters come together for a meeting. Probably the detective questioning them as a group (it's a murder mystery).

All of our stories are supposed to be literary, so usually in third person, sometimes first, never the second-person. So we don't tend to use choices and chapters as directions and rooms; it's all about how the plot moves. We also don't track state; they're designed to be able to be printed as books people can page through.

Overall a super-fun project for me and a handful of other writers, it's been a consistent way to spend a few hours of fun each week.

This is very interesting, thanks for posting! Makes me think of the big choice diagrams in Detroit: Become Human. I wonder if there is any literature about this?

Reminds me of Disco Elysium Explorer[1]. Conversations 7, 8, 9, and 10 are great real life examples.

1. http://134.0.119.41

gauntlet looks like GTA V's pattern

This is fantastic. Does anyone have any book references that help you do writing in some of these formats.

Nier Automata is my favorite example of the relatively rare "Loop and Grow" pattern. You play through the game three times, with each iteration enriching and elaborating on the story and characters. Brilliant and weird narrative structure.