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The hardest thing about writing a multiple-choice game in ChoiceScript is creating interesting choices for your players. Here are five rules you can follow to make decisions you write more fun and engaging.

Rule 1: Every option should have real consequences

If my decision has no effect on anything, why am I even making a decision?

This rule is pretty uncontroversial, but in practice it’s hard to follow consistently. It’s easy to write a collection of choices where nothing really happens; the player moves from place to place pointlessly. If you catch yourself doing this, consider just deleting those false decisions and skipping ahead to the good part!

It’s also possible to take this rule too far, requiring that every option needs to branch into a completely different story. That would be pretty cool, but unfortunately it’s impossible to write a game like that; you’ll never finish.

Fortunately, as a multiple-choice game designer, you have alternatives to branching the story completely. For example, sometimes player decisions don’t branch the story right away, but they have an effect on the main character’s attributes (the “stats” on the stat screen) or on other variables in the world.

Some options may have no effect on the game, but have a big effect on the player’s imagination. For example, choosing a gender in Choice of the Dragon doesn’t really change the story at all, but it can completely change the way you think about the game, especially when it comes time to find a mate!

Rule 2: The player needs some basis to make a decision

Even if you’ve guaranteed that every option has consequences, if players have no idea what the consequences of their decisions will be, it becomes impossible to make a meaningful choice.

One of the classic “choose a path” series of books broke this rule all the time. As an example, here’s the very first choice from  Journey Under the Sea (the 2005 edition):

The cable attaching you to the Maray [research vessel, above water] is extended to its limit. You have come to rest on a ledge near the canyon in the ocean floor that ancient myth says leads to the lost city of Atlantis.

You have an experimental diving suit designed to protect you from the intense pressure of the deep. You should be able to leave the Seeker [personal submarine] and explore the sea bottom. The new suit contains a number of the latest microprocessors enabling a variety of useful functions. It even has a built-in PDA with laser communicator. You can cut loose from the cable; the Seeker is self-propelled. You are now in another world. Remember, this is a dangerous world, an unknown world.

As agreed, you signal the Maray, “All systems GO. It’s awesome down here.”

• If you decide to explore the ledge where the Seeker has come to rest, turn to page 6.
• If you decide to cut loose from the Maray and dive with the Seeker into the canyon in the ocean floor, turn to page 4.

How am I supposed to decide whether to explore the ledge or explore the canyon? Both of these options are exploratory; neither of them has any clear advantages or disadvantages. Without more information, I’m forced to decide at random.

The goal of a multiple-choice game should be to make the player care about what happens; random decisions force players to disengage from their options and select an option unemotionally.

Rule 3: No option should be obviously better or worse than all the others

If one of the options is significantly better than the others, the player selecting that option loses a sense of agency—the feeling of making a decision. It’s like that Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert creates a computer with just one big button: “We push the button for you before it leaves the factory.”

If you’ve got one really great option, try to improve the others to match it. Similarly, if one option is much worse than the others, fix it or remove it.

When you break this rule, resist the temptation to “fix” it by giving the player less information. Hiding the consequences just turns one mistake into another, by removing the player’s basis for making the decision.

Instead, make an effort to ensure that every option is appealing in some way; even “wrong” choices should be fun. For example, in Choice of the Dragon, it’s possible for your dragon to die, sometimes rather gruesomely, but we tried to ensure that your death would always be pretty cool.

Make the player say, “Wow, that was neat!” and not, “Oops. That was lame.”

EDIT: One particularly common way to make an option worse than all the others is to have an “opt-out” option, where you can choose not to participate in the story. If you’re telling a story about a big adventure, don’t put in an option to stay at home and not go out on the adventure. Either you’ll have to override the player’s choice, (which breaks Rule 1 by removing the consequences of the decision) or you’ll have to give the story a boring ending. “Opt-out” options are inherently uninteresting.

Rule 4: Know your players

Multiple-choice games are role-playing games. If you can learn what it means to be a good RPG gamemaster, you’re well on your way to becoming a good game designer.

A great deal has been written about how to be a good gamemaster, including an enormous body of role-playing game theory, much of which is highly relevant to multiple-choice game design.

One of the most important tips for good gamemasters is that not all of us play games for the same reason; different players can prefer vastly different games. Traditionally, three types of players stand out in role-playing games:

Gamist

Gamist players want to “win” the game; they win when their character is successful. They want victory to be difficult but attainable. Gamists usually prefer “power fantasy” stories, where they can take the role of heroes accomplishing great deeds.

Dramatist/Narrativist

Dramatists want to tell a great story, even if their characters are unsuccessful; they play for emotional impact. A dramatist would enjoy role-playing an epic tragedy, whereas a gamist would find a tragedy “unfair” because there is no way to win.

Simulationist

A simulationist strives to ensure internal consistency within the rules; they want the game to be plausible. In multiple-choice games, simulationists prefer options that make sense for their characters, even if those choices don’t help them “win” and don’t make the story better. Simulationists especially dislike “unrealistic” consequences; for a simulationist, “that’s not what would really happen” is a damning critique.

These types don’t have to be distinct; most players will have more than one of these goals. Multiple-choice games have another category which I think is distinct to computer RPGs:

Explorationist

“What will happen if I push this button?” The explorationist wants to discover what’s possible. They may become obsessed with finding every ending—good or bad—and trying options simply out of curiosity.

Since a good multiple-choice game will be played online by thousands of strangers, it’s hard to “know your players” the way you know your friends. However, you should still decide which type(s) of players you’re trying to satisfy. Are you writing a story? Building a world? Crafting a game?

Due to the nature of the multiple-choice game format, it’s not impossible to satisfy many of these goals at once!

Which will you choose?

• The action that helps me win.
• The action that creates the deepest story.
• The action that my character would most likely choose in real life.
• A mysterious action with unknown consequences.

Rule 5: Break these rules

Knowing when to break the rules is almost as important as knowing when to follow them.

• Fake choices. A decision with no real consequences can be almost as fun, as long as you don’t let the player realize that their decision had no effect. (Of course, players are certain to discover the secret on future replays, so try to avoid using this technique too often.)
• Unfounded choices and the spirit of exploration. The old “choose a path” books were fun to explore, despite not always having clear reasons to choose one option over another. Some people tried every option anyway, just to see what would happen. If you want your players to explore all of their options, make them all equally appealing and let the players try them all. (But beware: exploring a large tree of choices can be a chore, as you try all the options nested within option 1, then all the options nested within option 2, and so on. It feels a little like mowing the lawn.)
• Just do it! Theorizing about games can be a fascinating exercise—almost as fun as playing and writing them—but theory can also clog up your creativity. If you’re tying yourself in knots trying to make all of your options equally satisfying, to explore every possible branch of your story, or to satisfy every category of player, then just forget about it. If you miss something, you can fix it later!

As we’ve mentioned, we’re currently finishing up Choice of Broadsides.  That means that we’re also working on picking our next couple of games for development– whether that’s Choice of the Dragon II, Choice of the God, Choice of the Consort, or something else.  We thought it might be interesting to discuss our method for selecting projects.

The first thing we did was do some brainstorming for some ideas that we thought would be fun to write, fun to play, and popular.  We came up with a long list of ideas–really, any nifty genre with any nifty character type can be the basis for compelling choices.  We also had some suggestions from e-mails we’ve received, which basically provided more support for ideas we already had–various people have suggested werewolf games or vampire games or other ideas that we were vaguely talking about.

So, the question, is which game should we make?  That’s where the interesting choice is.  The first thing we did was to toss up a blog post asking people to vote for their favorite ideas.  We’ve gotten some great feedback, but that’s still pretty limited.  The key step is our next approach:  using Google AdWords to test a bunch of different games.  Google AdWords is a service that serves short text ads to lots of websites on the web.  The key is that AdWords ads can be cheap– we’re aiming to pay about 5 cents per click.  That means that $100 will get us 2000 clicks.  And AdWords can rotate among a bunch of different ads.  So we’re building ads for a bunch of different games, none of which we’ve written yet.  The AdWords robots will rotate our ads for us.  If one game idea gets 500 clicks over the course of the experiment, while another gets 10, we know that there’s more market demand for the 500 click game.  We can also try tweaking the ads as we go– if one ad is doing badly, we’ll pull it and replace it with a variant for the same game.  If it then does better, we understand what aspect of the game to emphasize.  If all ads for the same game idea do badly, it’s probably not the most popular idea.

So that’s how robots will pick our next game.  But they won’t really, because while we’ll take into account demand, we’re also going to focus on which games we most want to design/write.  (That’s how we chose Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides–those were both ideas that we were particularly excited to write.)

There are a couple of reasons why we’re going to take into account our preferences.  First, we’re writing these games at all because it’s fun.  (That’s also why we encourage you to try writing your own ChoiceScript games.)  Choice of Games isn’t anybody’s main job– it’s a hobby job for all of us, although it produces some real money, and we hope it will make a meaningful part of our incomes.  But more generally, we should be doing things that we like and that are fun–that keeps us motivated, productive, and satisfied.  That’s what we aim for in our day jobs, and it’s doubly true for Choice of Games.

Second, if we tried to write things we weren’t interested in, we would do it badly.  When you care and are excited, your work is better.  We would make worse games more slowly if we were just doing what we thought would get us the most downloads.

Third, if we’re excited about it, we think others will be, too.  The blog voting provides us with some useful information, and the AdWords experiment should provide even more, but it’s still all tea leaves.  There may be many thousands of people who will download our game or play it on the web, but would never click through an AdWords ad or vote in a blog poll.  And some people who click on an AdWords ad may be looking for something very different from our style of games.

So, robots will pick our next game.  But they won’t pick it on their own.  They’ll more identify particularly strong contenders, and then we’ll pick our favorites to do now.  We think that will be an effective strategy, but equally importantly, we think it will be lots of fun, both for us and for you.

As we finish up work on Choice of Broadsides, we’re starting to plan our next couple of games.  We’d like your opinion on these ideas.  We’re also happy to hear if there’s another game that you would really like to see.  We don’t promise to make the game that gets the most votes–our preference as designers also matters–but your votes will definitely influence our decision, and all of the options we’re presenting are ideas that we’re interested in writing.

Let us know what you think of these ideas!

We’re also interested to hear if people would prefer more games that are a similar length to Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides, or if people would prefer a smaller number of longer games.  Longer games are harder to write, so the choice is probably something like four games the length of Choice of the Dragon or one game that is three times as long.  If there’s a strong preference one way or the other, that will affect our planning.

UPDATE 2010/Aug: Crossed out Vampire and Consort/Romance, since those are the games we already picked.

UPDATE 2010/Oct: Now that we have a PayPal donation button, we’ll give strong weight to votes that are backed by donations. Voting with your donations is worth more than just voting with a comment. (Though voting with comments is always welcome!)

As I mentioned in my last post, we’re working on finishing up our next game, Choice of Broadsides, a game set in a fictionalized version of the Napoleonic Wars.   Of course, the real-world Royal Navy was an (essentially) all-male institution at the time.  We wanted to avoid embracing the sexism of both history and of the source materials we draw on, but at the same time, we concluded that having a mixed-sexed Royal Navy would be both too complicated to implement and would also make the Jane Austen inspired bits of the game very strange.  So instead, we let the player choose the sex of the protagonist, and then that choice defines whether the gameworld is patriarchal or has all gender roles reversed in a matriarchal society.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with how it works.  It’s not too difficult to code, it lets us include the assumptions of the day while still letting people play female characters, and some of the jarring mismatches between expectation and practice may be thought-provoking, especially when playing the female version.  But it has created some difficulties with terminology.  Historical gendered terms have a lot of baggage– “Mrs.” does not have the same connotation as “Mr.”, but “Ms” feels anachronistic even in a gender-bent world.

We first encountered this issue with the word “Mr.”  In the Napoleonic Wars Royal Navy, officers were addressed as Mr. So-and-so, ordinary sailors as So-and-so (no Mr.), and midshipmen as Mr. Midshipman So-and-so– marking them both as sort of officers but also distinguishing them from real officers.  This was of course tightly tied to the class system of the day.  The question this presented was, what should the form of address be for female officers?  We toyed with Mrs. So-and-so (regardless of marital status– marital status matters for a sex that derives its status from the opposite sex parent or spouse), but my co-writers didn’t like that, especially finding Mrs. Midshipwoman So-and-so to be a bizarre form of address for a 13-year old.  We settled on Madam So-and-so and Madam Midshipwoman So-and-so.

Likewise, it was fairly easy to agree to make “Master” the equivalent of “Miss”– in the real world, “Master” is traditionally used for male children, and so by extension we used it for adult but unmarried men in the female-dominant version of our fictional world, just like the polite term for female children was also traditionally used for unmarried adult women in the real world.

But we’ve hit a couple of weird cases that we’ve had trouble coming up with terminology for.  In real-world British usage, if John Smith is married to Jane Smith and receives a knighthood, he becomes Sir John and she becomes Lady Smith (instead of Mr. Smith and Mrs. Smith, respectively).  There is no comparable shift for when a woman becomes a Dame (again, because of the patriarchal assumptions of the British class system)–Mrs. Smith would become Dame Jane, but Mr. Smith remains Mr. Smith.  The difficulty is how to apply that to our gender-bent world.  The husband of Madam Jane Smith is presumably Mr. Smith– that’s straightforward.  But what should the honorific be for the husband of Dame Jane?  We initially used “Lord,” but that doesn’t work well– “Lord” feels like a higher title than Dame, not a lower/equal one.  We’ve come up with several possibilities, but they’re all strange.  “Mr. Smith” undercuts the importance of the knighthood and makes the game less parallel.  “Sir Smith” is a weird looking construction, and again not parallel.  “Gentleman Smith” or “Esquire Smith” or some other non-real-world construction could work, but the husband of a gentlewoman is presumably already a gentleman– the point of “Lady Smith” is that it marks her social class as higher than the wife of a gentleman or an esquire, not equal, so the male equivalent should do the same.

We also hit a problem with the “Lords of the Admiralty,” which is the body roughly equivalent to the Secretary of the Navy in U.S. practice.  “Ladies of the Admiralty” feels weird–because the term “Ladies” does not have the same implication of power as the word “Lords,” it reads very oddly.  But all of the other terms we tried also seem weird:  “Dames of the Admiralty”?  “Baronesses of the Admiralty”?  “Lady Dames of the Admiralty”?  “Grand Dames of the Admiralty”?  “Peers of the Admiralty”?

Partly this just underscores the degree to which English incorporates patriarchal assumptions, particularly with regard to British class distinctions.  But we still need to come up with the terms we will use.

So, what are your thoughts?

Sir John and Lady Smith, but Dame Jane and ___ Smith?

The Lords of the Admiralty, but the ____ of the Admiralty?

Feel free to express a preference for one of the possibilities we discussed above, or suggest your own possibilities.

Many of you have asked whether we have other games besides Choice of the Dragon.  We’re pleased to announce that our next game, Choice of Broadsides, will be debuting by the end of March.  Choice of Broadsides is a swashbuckling naval adventure, in the spirit of C.S. Forester’s Hornblower or Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin books, with a dash of Jane Austen as well.  Will you become the hero of Albion, defending its shipping from the dastardly Gauls?  Or will you end up marooned on a desert island by mutineers?  Only your choices can determine the answer.

As with Choice of the Dragon, we plan to release Choice of Broadsides on the web, for Android phones, and for the iPhone at launch.  Other apps are in the works but won’t be ready until later.

We’re also pleased to announce that we’ve accepted our first ChoiceScript game that we didn’t develop:  “Popcorn, Soda… Murder?” by Pauzle.  “Popcorn, Soda… Murder?” is a different sort of multiple choice game, where you must gather clues and ask the right questions to solve a murder.  We’ll be making it available as part of our new hosted ChoiceScript games section of the website.  The hosted games section of the website should also launch by the end of March.

If you’ve been writing a ChoiceScript game and think it’s ready for the world, you should submit it, too.  We’re eager to host as many ChoiceScript games on our site as we can, and we will split the advertising revenue from our hosted games with the games’ authors.  Anyone who has a game that they would like us to look at should contact us at support@choiceofgames.com.

We have now made the ChoiceScript interpreter available through GitHub, a public repository for shared code.  You can download the ChoiceScript interpreter, a very simple sample game that you can edit, and some automatic testing routines for debugging purposes at http://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript/.  Clicking on the Download Source button on that page will download an archive with all of the relevant files.  As we mentioned before, the ChoiceScript Interpreter is available under a free non-commercial use license.  Contact us if you’re interested in a commercial license.

We’ve added some more explanation to the Intro to ChoiceScript page that should help explain how to start editing the sample game into a real game.  That said, it’s still very rough and incomplete. We’ll add more information over time.

We’ve also set up a GoogleGroup for discussion about coding in ChoiceScript:  http://groups.google.com/group/choicescript We encourage you to ask any questions you have about coding in ChoiceScript there.

We’re very excited about the community’s interest in ChoiceScript, and we’re happy to help you get up to speed.  Good luck with your projects!

Many people have contacted us about the possibility of developing their own multiple-choice text-based games using ChoiceScript.  We’re very excited about other people writing games like this.

We have a short, incomplete introduction to the ChoiceScript language available at http://www.choiceofgames.com/blog/choicescript-intro/.  We encourage anyone interested in writing a game in ChoiceScript to start by reading that and trying to write a sample vignette or two.

We plan on releasing our interpreter on a public repository in the next couple of days– there are just a few minor administrative details we need to take care of first.  The interpreter (and related tools, like an automatic scene tester) are currently pretty rough.  We plan on making available a series of tools to make it easier to use our interpreter when we can, but it will take at least a few months for the complete suite of tools to be available.  We also continue to improve on and expand the language, so we should be able to support some additional functions soon.

We plan on releasing the interpreter under a free non-commercial use license, so people can get to work designing right away.  While the free license is only for non-commercial use, we encourage people who’ve written games to plan on releasing them as commercial apps– whether using an ad-based model like we have with “Choice of the Dragon,” an approach where people pay to download the app, or a “freemium” model.  We’re happy to discuss a paid commercial license, and we think that the terms we will offer will be reasonable even for very small projects.

Finally, we would like to develop www.choiceofgames.com as a premier site for text-based games about choices.  If you write a game in ChoiceScript, we’re interested in hosting it on our site.  Please contact us at support@choiceofgames.com if you’re interested.

We’ll be sure to post an update here when the interpreter is available and as additional coding tools become available.

UPDATE:  The ChoiceScript Interpreter is now available, with a free non-commercial use license.  You can download it from GitHub by going to http://github.com/dfabulich/choicescript/ and clicking the Download Source button.

We’ve also created a GoogleGroup for discussing coding in ChoiceScript, http://groups.google.com/group/choicescript.  Anyone can join, and we encourage you to ask your questions about coding in ChoiceScript there.

Finally, we’ve updated the Intro to ChoiceScript document to describe (in cursory terms) what files to edit and how to make your own game.  We’ll continue revising and expanding that document over time.

One of the questions we’ve gotten most frequently about “Choice of the Dragon” is whether it’s possible to get a mate and, if so, how.  (Actually, we’ve both gotten that as a question and as a complaint asserting that it’s not possible but that it should be.)

To answer the not very spoilery part of the question:  Yes, it is possible to get a mate.  The code provides for it, we’ve successfully gotten a mate in playtesting, and some of our players have as well.  It is difficult, which was intentional on our part– we think that having some things that take a little more effort and are more of an accomplishment adds depth to the game.  But it is definitely possible.

I’m putting some hints about how to get a mate below the cut.

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We discussed the treatment of gender extensively as we were planning our first game.  I self-identify as a feminist, and I’ve worked to promote equality for the LGBT community in my non-gaming professional life.  So I started off with a firm commitment to the idea that our games had to be good on gender issues.

Many video games assume a male protagonist, and I actively wanted to avoid that presumption.  At the same time, our games require a certain amount of identification between the player and the character.  A game that’s written in the second person runs into problems if the player can’t accept that “you” means both the character and the player.

Once we settled on a dragon as the protagonist of our first game, “Choice of the Dragon,” many of the gender issues became easy.  No need at all for us to assign a sex to the player’s dragon—it’s perfectly easy to ask the player what their dragon’s sex is.  Likewise, even the mating scene could be done in a purely gender-neutral way.  Players who wanted to play a straight male dragon could.  Players who wanted to play a female dragon seeking a female mate could.  And people who wanted to leave that whole issue vague could as well.

The next step was simply being conscious about the genders we assigned to the various other characters that the player meets.  We (or at least I, without objection from the rest of the team) wanted to make sure that we didn’t apply patriarchal assumptions about the gender of a knight or a wizard.  We did end up switching around the genders of the dragon’s clutchmate and the evil wizard, but that was just because Dan thought that Axilmeus was more of a male dragon’s name.

The biggest sticking point was really the most iconic.  Dan was committed to the idea that dragons kidnap princesses.  From his perspective, that was a necessary trope in the fire-breathing dragon genre.  I was equally committed to the idea that kidnapping princesses but not princes conveys a message of dependence and incompetence about women that was not acceptable.  We ended up deciding to directly confront the player with it with a choice, which we thought was sufficiently amusing to put into our screenshots for promoting the mobile versions.  Working on balancing the issues between using tropes and avoiding the long and ugly history of patriarchy in fantasy ended up producing fun gameplay.

Handling gender in our next game, where the protagonist is human, is a much more complicated issue.  But that’s for another post…

Choice of the Dragon is now available as an iPhone app! Please download and review it.

Coming soon: Facebook integration. Sign up for other mobile versions here.