Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The emergent story of her experience would then be affected by the choices she makes, by
how she pushes into the game's system.
Even before the beginnings of digital games, the idea of stories with choices was being
explored in written literature. The 1941 short story “An Examination of the Work of Herbert
Quain,” by Jorge Luis Borges, describes an imaginary novel structured like a branching tree.
After the first chapter, each of the next three chapters relate a different version of subsequent
events, and each of those chapters diverges again into three more, so that the story has nine
endings. Whereas a conventional narrative can be read linearly from beginning to end, this kind
of work less resembles a straight line than a
tree with many branches (see Figure
7.5
).
Chapter
Five
Chapter
Six
Chapter
Seven
Chapter
Eight
Chapter
Nine
Chapter
Te n
Chapter
Eleven
Chapter
Twelve
Chapter
Thirteen
Chapter
Two
Chapter
Three
Chapter
Four
Chapter
One
Figure 7.5
The structure of an imaginary novel described in Borges's “An Examination of the Work of
Herbert Quain.”
A few decades later, this narrative structure had started appearing in actual topics—the best
known being the
Choose Your Own Adventure
series, marketed to kids. These branching nar-
ratives were sometimes called
gamebooks
, for obvious reasons. They're systems that players
push into by making choices, often with the aim of reaching a happy ending, at least in the
early topics. It's no surprise that videogames started to use branching stories as well, and for
increasingly adult subject matter. In an inversion of the gamebook label, a game where the
primary verb involves “choosing” which branch of the story to pursue next is
sometimes called
a
story-game
.
Text-only story-games like Zoe Quinn's
Depression Quest
(2013) and Anna's own
Encyclope-
dia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree
(2011) carry on the tradition of gamebooks in
digital form. The story is told in the second person, describing how you, the reader, experience
scenarios that involve choices. After reading a section, these games ask the player to make a
choice. When you visit your girlfriend's house, will you eat dinner or make sexual advances?
