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Authorial intent is a slippery concept at the best of times, but it becomes even more so in the context of interactive fiction (IF), whether multiple-choice games like Choice of Games makes or text adventures with a parser.  In a standard book (or a legal document, which is the context in which I’ve had most of my interactions with the concept of authorial intent), it’s usually pretty clear who the author is.  The difficult questions are how do you determine what the author’s intent is and does it matter?  When J.K. Rowling says that a prominent character in the Harry Potter books is gay, does that settle the question of whether that character is gay?  Does it even mean something significant to talk about whether a character “is” gay, as opposed to how we the readers perceive a character?  Those are significant questions, but I’m going to ignore them for now. 🙂  Instead, I’m going to focus on the question of who the author even is in a work of IF.

If “Choice of Broadsides” were a (non-interactive) book, the question of authorship would be easy:  Adam Strong-Morse, Heather Albano, and Dan Fabulich wrote it.  We received a little feedback and editing advice from some friends and family, but we would clearly be the authors, without even the questions of authorship that a strong editor on the one hand or a ghost writer on the other can raise.  But it’s not a book.  It’s a game, and a work of interactive fiction, and the experience on playing through it depends on the choices made by the player as well as the choices we made in writing it.  In a meaningful sense, the designers of the game collaborate with the player to write the story each time the game is played.  This is similar to the reason that I don’t like terms like Storyteller to describe the game runner in a traditional pen-and-paper role-playing game:  the story is the product not of a single “Storyteller” but of a collaborative interaction among a group of participants.  If the player of a game has any meaningful agency, then they are part of the storytelling team.  Not the whole part, not an unrestricted part, perhaps only a very limited part, but nonetheless part of the storytelling team.

So what does that mean in terms of our games?  Here’s the way I think about it.  Our target should be to offer every option that a reasonable player, playing within the norms of the setting/genre, would want to pick.  We should then try to make all of those options play out in a way that is cool–perhaps not victorious, but cool.  We can’t cover every option, of course, and we have to constrain which choices we offer at all–in “Choice of Broadsides,” you can’t choose to be a cavalry officer instead, even though that would (within a certain broad understanding of the genre) be a perfectly reasonable option.  We just don’t present the choice at all.  But if someone could, playing reasonably, want to pick an option, we should make that possible.  Whenever a player says, “I wanted to do X, but the options wouldn’t let me,” we’ve failed a little.  We’ve gone beyond the parts of the authorial role that we need to retain–what happens when you do X?  What sorts of choices are possible at all? and gone into the parts of authorship that are better given to the player–what’s this character like?  What will the protagonist do when faced with a tough choice.  I think that shares the role of author most effectively.

By that standard, we failed initially in “Choice of Broadsides”, because people playing a gay protagonist wanted to have the option of taking actions to pursue a same-sex relationship at a point in the game where it appears appropriate.  In recognition of that, we’ve added some new options and new text; people who played the game when it first came out and were disappointed about this issue may want to try it again.  (The new version is up on the web and out for Android now; it will take a couple of days to show up in the iPhone version, because of their approval process.)

This isn’t the only approach to authorship possible in IF.  Some IF games are intended to be played until the player has explored every last nook, with the later endings intended to be more meaningful in light of earlier endings already seen.  In that paradigm, the game is really a single narrative that unfolds multiple times and the notion of shared authorship is less applicable.  But I think the notion of joint-authorship with the players, while limited, is a good paradigm for our games.  It provides a useful set of tools for determining what should be in and what doesn’t need to be developed, and it provides pressure to keep the choices meaningful and to allow real player agency.

Have you finished writing a game? Choice of Games encourages you to submit your finished ChoiceScript game to us so that we can host it for you publicly; we’ll give you 75% of the revenue your game produces.

Choice of Broadsides is now available as an iPhone app!

We hope you enjoy the app, and we hope that you tell all of your friends about it! Our initial download rate determines our App Store ranking. Basically, the more times you download in the first week, the better we’ll rank.

Share and enjoy!

… and books are not RPGs.

(By the way—hi there! I’m Heather. I joined Choice of Games as writer #3 just as Broadsides development was starting. It’s nice to meet you, too!)

This post started as a comment to the “Help Us Switch Gender” thread, but I decided not to post it at the time, both because it got way too long and because I couldn’t make my points without risking spoilers. Now I think I can reasonably assume anyone reading this has played the game (but I put the spoilers under a cut anyway.)

The core concept for Broadsides was to write an adventure that allowed the PC to feel like the protagonist of a Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin novel. The heaving waves, the clash of steel, the opportunities for honor and treasure and fame, the danger of storms and mutiny and enemy fleets…

A core tenet of the Choice of Games philosophy is to make all our players feel as “at home” as possible. There are enough games out there where the player has no choice but to play a male protagonist. There are enough women who have been turned off roleplaying games as a result. There are, similarly, enough games where the only romantic opportunities are with the opposite sex. Enough other people are perpetuating those stereotypes; we’d like to do better than that.

Adam and Dan did do better than that, with Dragon. Some of the most enthusiastic positive commentary referenced the ability to play as female and to acquire a same-sex mate. So surely, we thought, we can do it again. No problem.

Except it turns out sailors aren’t quite so simple to stage-direct as dragons. 🙂

And RPGs are not quite as straightforward to write as non-interactive fiction.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you’re writing historical fiction—something like Hornblower, set in the real-world British Navy fighting the real-world French. The worldbuilding is pretty simple to do (though it’s not a trivial task to get it right) because you have a template to work from.

Now let’s say you’re writing historical fantasy—the Napoleonic Wars with Susannah Clarke’s magic or Naomi Novik’s dragons. Here the worldbuilding is less straightforward, but more fun: you change your selected variable, and then map the effects on the world as they ripple outward.

Now take one more step. Let’s say you’re writing fantasy, but you want your world to evoke the feeling of a particular era or type of literature. For instance, a Hornblower novel. From one perspective, writing in your own universe gives you wonderful freedom. It’s suddenly much easier to allow women to serve in the Royal Navy … but now you’ve bought yourself a new problem. Change too many variables, and you’ll wind up with something that no longer feels like a Hornblower novel. You’re free of the constraints of the real world, but if you’re not very careful, you’ll also lose the touchstones.

And here’s one more constraint. You’re writing a game, not a novel. So your scope is constrained—you are telling the PC’s story, and have less of an opportunity to digress into the dark corners of your world and demonstrate how the changed variables affect the people who live there. More importantly, the world you build has to be fun for the player to play in. That doesn’t mean happy-sunshiny-bunnies-and-kittens, but it does mean that the player has to be able to make meaningful choices that affect the flow of the story. The life of the protagonist (the PC) cannot completely suck because of the parameters of the universe. It might be interesting to do that in a novel, but you’re not writing a novel. If historical accuracy means that it is no fun to play, you need to trade off some accuracy to improve the fun quotient.

But not too much, or you’ve lost the feel.

So now every decision becomes one factor in a delicate balance. Is the game, on a whole, historically-accurate enough to feel like a Hornblower novel… and at the same time, does it change enough variables to allow the player to play as a character type with whom s/he identifies? Can the player do most of the things (make most of the choices) s/he wants to? And is it fun when s/he does?

AND—once again, remember you’re writing a game, not a novel, so you have to consider the scope of the project, too. “How difficult will that be to code” is also a constraint. Earlier blog posts (here, and here) discuss the difficulty of balancing realistic decisions with a manageable number of branches.

Broadsides spoilers follow.

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Choice of Games is pleased to announce the release of Choice of Broadsides!  The web version is now live, as is the Android version.  The iPhone version is currently under review at Apple and will presumably be available soon.

Choice of Broadsides is a multiple-choice 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.

We hope you enjoy playing Choice of Broadsides as much as we enjoyed writing it, and we encourage you to play it, tell your friends, and to recommend it on StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.

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.