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Hello world! My name is Jason Hill, and my old friend Dan recruited me to join the Choice of Games team earlier this Spring. Being between jobs as I am, I’ve had plenty of time (some might say too much!) to devote to our next release, Choice of the Vampire.

While our audience hasn’t expressed overwhelming desire for a vampire game, my personal interest in the genre lead me to write this. So, I know that you’re all looking forward to Dragon II and God and some of the other games we’re thinking about, but I hope you’ll deign to enjoy this one in the meantime. Right now, we’re almost finished testing the first portion of the game, and we estimate that we’ll release it by the end of the month.

CotV has some radical differences from the other Choice of Games to date. First, it has a very different relationship to history and our world. This is not set in Albion and Gaul, nor a world of dragons, but rather in the Antebellum South. Thus, while you can certainly play a woman or an African American, the rest of the game-world does not change for you. Instead, the character will have to confront the very real forces of tribalism and discrimination that have defined so much of America’s history. (I will discuss the philosophical and aesthetic choices behind this in a later blog post.)

Another immediate difference is that, put simply, being a vampire sucks. (Sorry, it had to be said.) Being a vampire is something tragic… perhaps Romantically so (specifically big-R “Romantic”, not little-r “romantic”)… but still tragic. The way I’ve drawn vampires, they’re miserable, back-biting monsters who squander their immortality by making the lives of their fellows miserable. Some of our early testers have criticized the game for setting up a “heads I win, tails you lose” situation, but hopefully, if you trust in the narrative, the longer arc of the game will justify any early feelings of frustration.

But that brings us to one of the great things about the game: its scope and breadth. Vampires don’t die of natural causes, and that leaves me with two hundred years of rich history to play with. Of course, that’s also meant that I’ve had to do my research. (Uncovering the antebellum street names of the French Quarter was no easy task, let me tell you!) Really, that’s a large part of what made creating this game so enjoyable: the history of these times and places is rich with moments ready to be mined for drama.

I’ve designed this game with expansions in mind. The first portion spans 1815-1863; later installments will feature Chicago in the 1920s and Boston in the present day. I’ve already sketched out parts of these future installments, and we’ll try to release them on a regular schedule over the next few months. In theory, the game can tolerate any number of expansions, and I hope that I will have an opportunity to continue adding to the game for some time into the future.

When writing a ChoiceScript game, it’s tempting to think that you should write the game the way that it will be played:  start with the first vignette (maybe with some character-generation questions), then write the second vignette, then the middle vignettes, and finish with the concluding vignettes and epilogues (if any).  That can work, of course, but I don’t think it’s the most effective way to approach a ChoiceScript game.  In this post, I explain why and give my suggestions for how to pick a vignette to start with.

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Some people who are starting up the process of writing a ChoiceScript game have asked how to plan/outline/storyboard/etc. a game before writing.  I don’t presume that we know the best way, let alone the one true right way to do things, but I thought people would be interested in how we plan our games.  This is a monster length post, so I’m going to put it beneath a cut.

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“Villeneuve is way cooler than any of the boring boys at the dance! We made such a good team.”

Quoth my friend Becky, explaining her surprise that it was not (at that time) possible to pursue a same-sex relationship with Villeneuve. A common sentiment, as it turned out.

“I think there’s such an interest in this aspect of the story,” wrote Spider in a comment to an earlier blog post, “because Villeneuve is the best-fleshed-out character. You don’t have the same level of interaction with the three marriage interests, and relationships with them feel rushed…”

And Spider is quite right about that. We didn’t design the possible spouses to be less interesting than Villeneuve… but the fact that many players viewed them that way says something about modern (visceral, not intellectual) reactions to 19th century courtship rituals.

Nowadays, we tend to want partners for our spouses. We seek out a member of our preferred gender with whom we share values and interests, with whom we can talk and upon whom we can rely. “We make a good team” is something you expect to be able to say of your spouse. Nowadays.

This is not the case in a Jane Austen comedy of manners, because it was not the case for gentry of the early 19th century of whom Jane was writing. The Season, as ridiculous as it sounds to us now, was a real thing. Upper-class young men really did meet young ladies at balls, court them under strict supervision and in highly artificial circumstances, and propose marriage after three to six months’ acquaintance. The spheres of men and women were so profoundly divided that for a wife to have full partnership in her husband’s world would have been an absurd thing to contemplate. It’s an unfortunate side effect of putting women on a pedestal: it’s kind of hard to be partners with them afterward. When they’re all the way up there and you’re not.

So of course most players were going to have a more genuine emotional reaction to Villeneuve than to the boys at the dance. Villeneuve is like them (like their characters, I mean, and of course depending upon choices made) in a way that the boring boys at the dance just aren’t. It’s possible to have a full partnership with Villeneuve.

The trade-off appears to be (again) between genre conventions and instinctive emotional resonance. A more modern relationship between the PC and his/her spouse might have been more emotionally satisfying… but then again, might have felt less true to the feel that Broadsides was attempting to evoke.

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!