The Data-Driven, 21st-Century 'Choose Your Own Adventure' | Hacker News Reader

The Data-Driven, 21st-Century 'Choose Your Own Adventure'

theatlantic.com

8 pointssaraid2162 comments

I'm glad to see this happening, as someone who's been following the "visual novel" form for some time. But like those and the original "choose your own adventure"s, they seem largely to be aiming for the lowbrow audience. I've heard suggestions that it's harder for an author to maintain the integrity of a vision when offering a branching story; I hope that's false and we'll see a growth in more literary content as authors become more familiar with the form (as has happened with visual novels to some extent).

Done right branches can be very immersive, increasing the impact of a story dramatically. While legitimate copies are very hard to come by these days, I highly recommend Phantom of Inferno if you are interested in this kind of storytelling.

My intuition is that a branching story is exponentially more complex than a linear story. However, there might be devices that make it manageable. I understand the form of the novel took a while to be established, so why not this too.

An alternative use of hyperlinks might be to tell the story from a different character's point of view; books often switch view-point characters. Orson Scott Card exploited his Ender's Game with a whole new book retelling the same events from another character's perspective (Bean).

A difficulty is that changing view-point is often tied up with narrative - e.g. it's used as a way to reveal/hide events as part of a story - which would be undermined if the reader could switch at will. It could be done so as to not affect this, but then the different view-points don't affect the plot; of course, it could add colour and texture, by exploring different perspectives. It's just that you can't use them for sequence: suspense, reveal, resolution, movement.

[or, if you do use them for sequence, you then have to deal with the exponential explosion - and even if you do manage that, it's not necessarily interesting to the reader, except to admire the virtuoso performance.] I don't mean to sound harsh, just thinking aloud.

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