Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
When you play a story-game and explore every branch, replaying or returning to the same
moments to make different choices, you can experience the totality of what the creators have
made available to you, but it's still a constrained choice.
These choices are a little bit like choosing what to eat off a restaurant's menu. You can't simply
make up your own dish, but the availability of options is still meaningful since it lets you pick
your own experience, and not everyone has the same taste. A branching story that lets players
express their own preferences allows each person to look for the story
she
wants to pursue,
within the branches that you've provided. Many people enjoy sweet, happy endings, just as
many of us like sweet food (especially at the end of a meal), but players of games with mul-
tiple story endings can choose whether they want a happy ending or not. Some might choose
different paths simply to see what happens, or because certain decisions simply work better
within the narrative logic they perceive or bring a satisfying resolution to the struggles of the
characters.
Sometimes it's nice to choose what kind of story you'll experience, just as it's nice to choose
what to eat for dinner. At other times, we can take pleasure in leaving those decisions to some-
one else, as in a dining experience with a set menu, or a traditional story without branches.
Telling a good story is a skill, and crafting a multibranched story is a particularly complicated
task for that skill. For one thing, branching stories simply have more story and naturally end
up involving many more words, animations, or video to tell the story than a linear story that
recounts one version of events. As a result, many creators of story-games try to limit the
amount of effort and complexity involved by creating small branches—choices that cause the
story to move off in one direction but reconverge into the main plot, or choices that happen
near the end of the game, where a change in the plot can feel significant without involving a
huge amount of additional storytelling.
Creators of story-games employ many kinds of techniques to create branching structures. One
structure, sometimes called a
shrub
, gives players choices at every turn, resulting in many pos-
sible variations that continue to branch—and sometimes lead to abrupt or unresolved endings.
(If you've read classic
Choose Your Own Adventure
topics, many of the dead ends in those topics
involved your character dying.) A structure with
reconverging branches
tries to solve the issue
of endlessly branching shrubs, which also require a lot of creation of plot and writing by having
the branches split up and come back together. This sometimes means a relatively linear plot
with a single resolution but multiple paths to reach the final outcome that can differ in their
details and feel. Finally, many story-games end in a branching set of choices that result in differ-
ent endings—a practical moment to create multiple branches, since each one ends and doesn't
need to continue branching or extending (see Figure 7.7).
