Choice

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17 November 2004

by Mike Rozak

Chris Crawford's book, "Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling", points out a very useful rule about interactive fiction (or storytelling) design:

A choice is not a choice if:

1. The choice is made blind, where the user has no way of knowing which is the best choice. Asking a player if they want to choose what's behind curtain A or curtain B is irrelevant if both curtains are identical.
   
   
2. The effects of the choice result in the same outcome, such as two doors that both lead to the same room. (For example: Alice Springs' airport has 4 side-by-side, glass, departure-gate doors that all lead to exactly the same place, a covered pathway that guides passengers to the airstrip.)
   
   
3. The effects of the choice all result in "end-of-game" except one, such as the Dragonslayer video game where one of two choices almost always resulted in death.

I agree with these observations.

They effectively put an end to a Choose Your Own Adventure (tm) style game where the player reads some narrative, choses from two to four possibilities, which then leads to more narrative.

The reasons are:

1. Each choice is a branch in a tree of possible paths the reader can visit. Even if there are only 8 branches, with 2 choices each, that's 2 ^ 8 = 256 possible endings, with 511 narratives that need to be written. Obviously, this is too much work, writing 511 narratives when only 8 of them will ever be experienced by any one player.
   
   
2. To get around this, many CYOA-style interactions have branches that quickly reconnect with the main branch, breaking rule #2.
   
   
3. To save work, they also have choices that result in instant death (or the story otherwise ending). This  breaks rule #3.

Chris Crafword, as well as other authors that have made the same point, then goes on to dismiss this form of interactive fiction as a dead end. (He points out one "way out" that I'll get to in a bit.)

Is it really a dead end?

The escape clause

Chris Crawford's escape clause is that two paths can reconnect if they somehow affect the narrative later on. Even if they both lead to the same room, if one door makes the character good looking, while the other makes the character strong, and these attributes are used later on in the experience, then the choice is valid.

In the Stop the buffet article I wrote, I described a slightly different take on how to write quests for virtual worlds. Contemporary quests inevitably start out with a bit of short narrative explaining why the quest exists, followed by the player going to either kill a monster or deliver an item, and are completed with the character's return and follow-up narrative. Thus, the form for a quest is:

NKN or NDN

N = narrative, K = kill, D = delivery

Contemporary virtual worlds are limited to such simple quests because they don't have many sub-games in their palette. Most have a few other sub-games, like gathering raw materials (G), exploration (X), and chatting with other PCs (c). If they added more sub-games, such as conversations with chatterbots (C), and piloting ships (S), they could produce a more complex quest. The quest I described in "Stop the buffet" was:

NcNSKNGNCXKN

Notice that there are no choices in the high-level narrative. Each sub-game, however, has choices; they don't affect the high-level narrative, but they do affect the players and their characters.

What if I added choices in the high-level narrative?

If I do, I run into the same fundamental problems that dog the CYOA books. One choice leads to another, and to another, and eventually there are just too many choices for an author to deal with.

Therefore, I'll use the same tricks that the authors of CYOA do:

1. I'll reconnect branches. For example, I could provide a choice of talking with the mad-hermit chatterbot, or just following (F) the hermit around the island. Both lead to the same cave, where there's a monster to kill, and then the same final narrative.
   
   
2. I'll provide dead ends. Actually, I already have put in dead ends; if a character dies at any of the points in the linear quest, the quest ends (for that character).

Both of these changes seem to break the rules, except that the sub-games, which are components of the larger narrative, rescue the situation:

1. Talking to the chatterbot might result in the player characters improving their "Patience" skill, while spending more time searching the island would result in an improved "Stealth" skill.
   
   Furthermore, even if no "physical" change were made, one player might find talking with a chatterbot more fun that tracking the hermit, while another would find the opposite. Providing this choice, even though it leads to the same outcome, produces a more enjoyable experience for the player. Of course, if the player can't deduce ahead of time which choice he would enjoy most, then this argument doesn't hold.
   
   A more subtle effect of the choice is to allow player characters that have high "Charisma" a better chance with the chatterbot, and high "Stealth" a better chance of tracking. Thus, whichever way the character has specialised, he will be able to complete the quest.
   
   
2. The dead ends aren't necessarily dead ends, only if the players fail at the sub-games.

The new quest "formula" might look something like this:

NcNSKNGN (CX|F) KN

While I haven't tried the concept out in reality (other than as a dungeon master years ago), the thought experiment works.

Applying this revised rules to CYOA and MMORPGs

Just to be sure of my logic, I thought I'd apply my revised rules to existing interactive entertainments...

The reason that CYOA books can't "break" the rules like I have in my hypothetical quest is that CYOA only has one sub-game, narratives (N). Any story with branches is just a series of N's.

NNN (NN|N) NN

It's not too interesting, is it? Well, it can be, but the narrative becomes absolutely critical to the experience.

Looking at slightly more advanced technology, you'll see that a typical MMORPG's buffet of activities is:

(K|D|G|X|c)

Of course, MMORPGs have simple quests that I've already mapped out. They also have dungeon crawls where the branches in corridors provide the menu of choices for the player. Each room is one of the sub-games, such as a monster (K), trap (T), or puzzle (P). A segment of a dungeon could look like this:

(K(T|P) | TK | KKK) K

The formula represents an intersection with four exits. One exit is where the PC came from. The other three choices lead to: A monster to be killed followed by a T-intersection with a trap down one way and a puzzle down the other (K(T|P)). The second choice is a trap followed by a monster (TK). And the third, is a series of rooms with monsters in each (KKK). All three directions eventually reconnect to allow the final fight with the "boss" monster. (K)

According to the revised rules, a dungeon crawl makes for an interesting series of rule-compliant choices. However, for the dungeon crawl to follow the rules, each hallway must somehow hint at what is down it. Shouts of evil laughter might be heard wafting down two hallways, and maybe a short jaunt down the silent hallway would reveal a skeleton of a previous adventurer that was caught in the trap. Without these hints, the player must chose a hallway at random, invalidating the choice.

Asheron's Call 2 had a few dungeons that amazingly managed to break the rule #2, about a choice resulting in different outcomes. In many of the AC2 dungeons I visited there would be a T-intersection. Going left would lead to a monster, and then lead back to the main trunk of the dungeon. Going right would lead to an identical monster, and then back to the trunk. The T-intersection was a useless choice because both choices produced exactly the same outcome.

Of course, in most MMORPGs and CRPGS, there isn't any hint at what's to come. The player cannot sneak up the hallway to listen for monsters because the monster AI is aware of the PC just as soon as the PC is aware of the monster AI. (Perhaps because there's often no way a player can indicate they're in "stealth" mode.) As a result, players are forced to walk blindly into every situation. Additionally, MMORPGs and CRPGs reward players for killing all of the monsters in the dungeon by handing out XP. Players are not rewarded for making intelligent choices and avoiding unnecessary dangers.

The same analysis can be applied to adventure games. The only difference is that the palette of sub-games in an adventure game is different than those sub-games available in a CRPG or MMORPG.

Conclusion

In some ways, none of what I've been pointing out is new. Anyone who has designed a dungeon for Dungeons & Dragons knows these techniques already. It's obvious that CRPG and (most) MMORPG designers also know them, at least intuitively.

I intuitively knew them from my experience being a dungeon master in high school. I never sat down and figured out why the rules worked though. Now that I have written them down, the concept has become much clearer to me.