A few notes on branching, microbranching, and pants

I am wrapping up work on a preproduction build of a digital gamebook that has me writing a lot of interactive fiction. After exploring my options and spending a few days on a custom engine, I landed on using ink. I have enjoyed working with it, and after a short learning curve, I find that it really does help me focus on the writing. That is, although it has a formal syntax that one must deal with, it mostly stays out of the way.

Coincidentally, a friend recently pointed me to the Game Narrative Kaleidoscope podcast. I just finished listening to the sixth episode's interview with Kate Gray. Two bits caught my attention that I wanted to capture here on the blog so I don't forget them.

The first is just a simple turn of phrase that the interviewers and guest all knew but that was new to me: the distinction between planners and pantsers. Writers of interactive fiction seem to identify as one or the other, the former being those who plan out their story carefully before writing and the latter being those who go "by the seat of their pants." In my case, I had sketched a quest structure with a few important branches, but once I got into writing, I really found that I could pants a lot of it.

The other was a distinction Gray drew between conventional branches and microbranches. She pointed out that many use "branching" to refer to the big, game-changing decisions that a player makes during play. However, there are also lots of smaller decisions one can make, particularly in dialog, that can serve other purposes. Often, this purpose is merely performative, allowing the player to choose a voice for their character. Other times, it is used for subtle worldbuilding. The important thing is that they are not important things, and Gray discussed how much she enjoys attending to them.

This struck me since I spend a lot of time with my students talking about how, in game design, decisions should be meaningful. A decision that is not meaningful is a false choice. Of course, that's a sort of ludological perspective, and it's true in the cases where it applies. Gray's interview gave me a vocabulary to talk about those other kinds of choices, the ones that only matter to the player and not necessarily to the game.

I have been playing Heaven's Vault in part to try to see through the experience to the ink layer below. It presents a lot of microbranches, some of which seem to have long-term impact on the game but many others of which are decorative. The dialog is all brief and punchy, no more than one or two sentences before another choice is made. It has a good rhythm. I am trying to understand the game in the context of other playful narrative experiences. I have been enjoying my page-a-day adventure calendar more than I expected even though it has very few decisions and no significant branching; after all, the next day's page has already been printed. I also picked up The Raiders of the Dune Sea, a gamebook that, at first glance, seems to favor longer narrative passages.

In my preproduction prototype, I have some scenes with lengthy text passages and some with frequent microbranches. Once I pull it together, I need to get it in front of some different representative players to see which best carries the themes I am exploring.