Candle Craft 8: Writing Good Choices
By Royal McGraw
Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.
Welcome! This is the eighth installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with 10 Quick And Actionable Adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling. Some of these process adjustments will be strategic, offering suggestions to improve how you think about storytelling from a big-picture standpoint. Some of these process adjustments will be tactical, offering suggestions to improve how you think about tackling scenes or even individual lines of dialogue. In all cases, these lessons have been hard-won, gleaned from over 20 years of experience writing across a variety of different mediums.
Last month, we did a player poll to see what readers were interested in hearing me cover. Many readers wanted to know more about crafting good choices for players in interactive narratives.
As this subject dovetails well with Character Reactions, I’m going to sneak this topic in before we move on to Fractal Storytelling. Don’t worry… we’ll get back to that topic soon!
What are Interactive Narratives?
Interactive Narratives are stories where readers (or players) are given the opportunity to shape the arc of the story via the choices they directly or indirectly make.
Even if you haven’t played a visual novel or narrative RPG, most people have had the experience of flipping through pages in a Choose Your Own Adventure book and making choices.
Cover and Excerpt from The Cave of Time by Edward Packard
We’ve all made dozens, if not thousands of choices in the games we’ve played, but what exactly is a choice?
Here is my definition:
a CHOICE is a MENU OF AVAILABLE REACTIONS to a PRESENTED SITUATION.
In the excerpt above, the reader must consider whether or not to engage in the risky exercise of reaching the Cave of Time. By my definition, this is a choice. There is a presented situation and a menu of available reactions to that presented situation.
Even so, by looking at this page, you might instinctively feel that this is not a Good Choice. Why is that?
Elements of a Good Choice
The first reason that this choice is not good is pretty simple: doing something moves the reader into a new presented situation where new choices to further shape the narrative might arise. Not doing something leaves the reader in the exact same presented situation. That reaction is effectively no reaction.
No reaction is a valid reaction, but it’s not exactly fun.
So we can say that Good Choices need to:
Move the reader/player into a new situation
Also be fun
But what is fun? Fun is subjective, of course, but I would posit that interactive fiction is just another flavor of fiction. That would imply that fun comes from the exact same place it comes from in most fiction: reactions.
Elements of a Fun Choice
In previous installments of Candle Craft–most specifically, Matriarch, Patriarch, Scholar, Fool and The Spider Test–we discussed how to handle character reactions.
Expert writers of interactive fiction understand that readers/players are characters in the work. Therefore, they should be afforded the same basic set of reactions that your other characters are – with the big difference being that the player gets to choose which reactions they embody!
In general, the Matriarch, Patriarch, Scholar, Fool paradigm is a great way to ensure that you have presented your readers with a diverse menu of available reactions.
That doesn’t mean every choice needs four options, but using this paradigm does help you:
Avoid reaction overlap
Instruct divergent tactical behaviors
Avoiding reaction overlap ensures that no two choices feel the same. Tactical behaviors will be discussed in depth in the next section.
Doing both is what makes choices fun.
Tactical Behaviors
In interactive narratives, when a reader/player makes a choice, they are providing the narrative with specific short term instructions to affect a desired outcome. Or in other words, they’re not just telling the story what they want to do, but they are also telling the story how they want to do it.
This is tactics, and it is hugely important.
Some people think that good interactive narratives arise from complex branching plotlines. This is not true.
Good interactive narratives arise from good tactical reactions… which in turn can sometimes result in complex branching plotlines.
Screenshot of a good choice in Mass Effect.
As an example, in the screenshot from Mass Effect above, we see a menu of available reactions presented to the player.
“Nobody needs to die.” - The Paragon option (indicated by blue text) is clearly for the Matriarch/Scholar role-players. This is the best emotional and logical outcome for everyone in the room.
“Kill him, and you’re next.” - The Renegade option (indicated by red text) is clearly for the Patriarch/Fool role-players. It threatens forceful action in response to a gut-level moral revulsion to murder.*
These choices imply different tactical behaviors: either an appeal to empathy or an appeal to force. From here, depending on the choice made, the plot could vary wildly, or basically not at all. At the moment of the choice, we can’t determine what the results will be, only how we will approach it tactically. Or in other words, this choice:
Moves us into a new presented situation
Is fun to make
This is a Good Choice.
In Review
In interactive narratives:
A Choice is a menu of available reactions to a presented situation.
Good Choices move the reader/player into a new presented situation and are fun.
Fun Choices are Good Choices that avoid reaction overlap among menu options and instruct for divergent tactical behaviors.
Next time, we’ll look at the role of Strategy in making for great interactive narratives.
Until then, do you agree or disagree with what I’ve written here? Why? And what are your favorite choices in games?
*Technically, the white text choices overlap with the Paragon and Renegade options (which is something I advised against), but we should give the writers a pass here. First, not all players will see all four choices as shown in this image, and second, Renegade and Paragon options are often viewed as a reward for committing to a specific style of roleplay. That gives the options some strategic divergence. We’ll cover the role of Strategy in making Good Choices next time.