on writing games

choose your own story beats

I was remembering that choose your own adventure books used to have a magic that I can’t find in many current games.

So I dusted off one of them and started to review with a designer’s eyes what was generating that magical feeling for me.

This has nothing to do with it, but: it was quite interesting that one makes choices blindly in these books. It is not clear what one is choosing by following an option and obviously that is not necessarily bad, otherwise these books would not have had the success they had.

Now, the most relevant thing in my opinion is the variety of paths that are generated by choosing these options.

We can find ourselves on a spaceship making friends with aliens or underground leading a revolution of subterranean beings, all in the same book.

Obviously, the writers of choose your own adventure already understood something that many writers today forget: the intense variety of story beats generates an agreement between the player and the designer that invites to replay the experience.

Another agreement that these books have is that each story is relatively short: another property that works very well for replayability.

How is it possible that we have forgotten these two characteristics?

Why do we fall into minor variations when we could invite players to explore alternative stories but as alternative as they did in the choose your own adventure axis?

I’m not going to tire of repeating it, I prefer a game with 10 one-hour stories than a game with a 10-hour story.

And don’t come to me with production efforts and that it’s very expensive: a 10-hour game is just a little less effort than 10 one-hour games.

And if you run out of money, it’s better to have 3 releaseable one-hour stories than a third of a 10-hour one, which can’t be released.