The limitations of the text-based Choose Your Own Adventure books is that it was difficult to deal with multiple branches and conditionals; you might have a lamp, but what if you got the lamp and the candle but not the bell? With text, you’d have to write a passage assuming lamp, another assuming lamp and candle, another assuming lamp/candle/bell, another assuming lamp/bell…. Of course, your good CYOA author made it so that there was only two such possibilities available.

CYOA mostly died out because it couldn’t provide complex experiences…. you couldn’t choose five different paths to walk, for instance, all with your own choice of turnings. By necessity, CYOA books had to limit the choices. Before computers, the only way to have a more in-depth experience was through role-playing games, where an intelligent (presumably) human could create turns and twists on demand, and the players could be very creative in their solutions.

Later on, computer versions of Choose Your Own Adventure came into play. Now a player could make more choices of their own, because the computer can keep track of what has happened and deal with it in more complex, logical ways than a book could. Just being able to say

“You walk into the cave.”
if (have_lamp) {
“You see glittering treasure on the floor.”
saw_treasure = true
}
else if (have_rope and rope is magic) {
“You fall, but your magic rope pays out and saves you with a jerk!”
}
else {
“You fall, and die.”
}

is very powerful, and easier to manipulate and change than writing different text for each possible case.

For a while, interactive fiction was semi-popular entertainment through the Infocom stories, which were written in a language that allowed writes to construct pathways, rooms, objects the player could pick up, and logic points similar to the above.

For more on Infocom stories, see http://www.cs.uwo.ca/Infocom/ .

Eventually, Infocom died out for two reasons. The first was its purely text format; when video game graphics came into play, even primitive ones, of course the visuals became popular. Mind you, a lot of people still preferred text because it could still be more evocative than 8-bit. When the primitive gave way to cartoons and 3D graphics, Infocom’s coffin was sealed. There is no way Infocom could ever compete with games like Myst and its brethren.

The second reason Infocom died out was due to the advent of the ‘net in the form of MUDs and MUCKs, the text versions of today’s World of Warcraft. Those environments are ever-changing, and there were real people you could talk and interact with. The very good Infocom story is hard to find, because interactive storytelling is so hard. Whereas real people are by their nature unpredictable.

But because MUDs and their MMORPG descendents are less controlled experiences, the storytelling quality goes downhill. The addiction to such things are fed by fighting and leveling for most people, and by object and environment creation for the rest. Your most valuable experiences in places like LambdaMOO or, these days, Second Life, are usually created by focused users. There are even the equivalent of Infocom and Myst-style stories that are constructed within such places, as well as the equivalent of RPGs.

(A lot of MUSHs are, in fact, text software to conduct remote RPGs through.)

Where was I… oh yes…

At some point fighting and rendering became really important, because they are lowest common denominator in a sense. Most people will enjoy them and they are, when it comes to storytelling, easy because they involve no storytelling. Creative, yes, in very difficult ways; storytelling, no. But we should still thank this phase, because what it did was increase flexibility even more, to the point where users can now do ANYTHING and the world around them is now realistic enough to induce some serious reality issues in the truly addicted.

The lessons of Myst, which was mainstream popular, were lost for a while. But even so, the games that get the most kudos are the ones that have good storytelling—there’s reasons why Twilight Princess was such a hit, and they are rooted in environment creation, characters, and storyline.

I want to underline environment creation several times, because one thing that MUDs/MMORPGs do is allow infinite exploration of a fictional world, which people frankly really like to do. That’s why mileau works like Lord of the Rings are so popular, and why world-building is a valued skill in science fiction and fantasy. That, of course, is just flexibility, and gives video game writers a lot of headaches.

:ponder:

Storytelling has always been popular in video game user base. It’s just that new ways of rendering things “real” or creating new controls, those became the flashy bits. The really difficult bits. The ones you had to pay really skilled people the most money to do. As with all budgets and schedules, what’s left? You need the foundations first. It’s only now, when most graphics and controller issues have been laid aside and most lessons learned (although unfortuantely not by all game companies…) that storytelling is starting to get some decent planning and budget.

Of course, we must still apply the 99% crap rule, but still, the pie is bigger these days.

Half Life 3 astonished me. As improvements over Half Life 2, the game now has separate “episode” modules that you can buy that continue the story of the main character. That’s almost true interactive entertainment.

Plus it’s a way towards addiction. Addiction = double plus good. And that is truly why story is important in any venture.

:)