For modern video games and computer RPGs, Choose Your Own Adventure Books pioneered the key elements of branching narrative storytelling.
Computer RPGs like Disco Elysium owe a lot to old school text adventures like zork, classic tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons, and a non-linear genre of literature called ‘Gamebooks’, the classic example of which is the Choose your own adventure series. These analogous forms of interactive fiction introduced and refined many of the concepts at the heart of modern video game storytelling — branched narrative routes based on player choice, multiple endings, and so on. Early works of interactive fiction such as the Choose your own adventure novellas or those of Steven Jackson Fight fantasy gamebooks also acted as a kind of testing ground for text adventures and similar video games, teaching game writers how to give players story choices that were meaningful and satisfying.
When computer RPGs like the Elder Scrolls games and MMOs like Ultima Online To become successful franchises, there were gamers in the gaming community who speculated that titles like these classic tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons out of order. In reality, tabletop gaming as a hobby had a renaissance around the early 2000s and 2010s thanks to a mix of good promotion, creative new RPG products, Actual Play live streams such as Important role, and game developers embracing the various strengths of tabletop role-playing games. A Game Master with good story-writing skills and an invested table of players can improvise stories with theoretically infinite possible choices and narrative results; video game stories, which are pre-programmed, intrinsically have a finite number of player choices and ending scenarios (although recent games such as Wilder myth managed to get around this technical limitation through procedural story generation).
Non-linear video game plots with multiple endings are more common in computer RPGs, text adventures, and visual novels — genres where character interactions are an essential part of the gameplay and advanced graphics aren’t as critical to the game’s success in the marketplace. Video game developers and writers can only make so many narrative choices (and puzzle solutions in the case of a point-and-click adventure game like myst) over the course of development, making it all the more important for them to create “game routes” that are thematically different, fun for players, and in-character for the story’s protagonists. This kind of narrative design process can be very tricky – Bioware’s Mass effect 3 RPG was criticized post-launch for making the choices in the endgame separate from the choices players made earlier in the game, while The Stanley ParablThe adventure game is kind of a meta-commentary about how many video games claim to give players freedom while also following the choices players make. Video games where you choose and navigate a multitude of narrative paths (the D&D-inspired Disco Elysium the strangest and most famous example of the moment) illustrate the potential of video games as a medium for storytelling and how much story-rich games owe to the gamebooks of the 20th century.
Consider the consequences, a novel and the first modern gamebook
The first modern gamebook was a novel called Consider the consequences, co-written by authors Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins and published in 1930. The cover illustration of this book, which depicts a woman on a chess/checkerboard with playing pieces belonging to her suitors, references both the book’s pioneering game structure and the love triangle is central to the novel’s many branching plots. According to an article on Smithsonian Magazinereaders begin a play-through of Consider the consequences by choosing between three points of view – a woman named Helen Rogers, or one of her two suitors, Jed Harringdale and Saunders Mead. In addition to pioneering typical gamebook conventions, such as telling readers to move forward to certain paragraphs/pages, Consider the consequences has a branching plot structure that puts many modern visual novels to shame, with 43 different endings that readers can reach depending on their choices and chosen protagonists.
Choose the influence of your own adventure on the mechanics of video game choices
Gamebooks as a concept really took off in the 1970s with the cover art-heavy Choose your own adventure series of children’s books published by Bantam Books. The History of CYOA page on the Choose your own adventure website explains how the original CYOA books were the brainchild of RA Montgomery and Ed Packard, who each wrote the first novels in the series. The CYOA book series quickly grew into a highly successful franchise with a team of authors contributing hundreds of original stories, each in different genres such as adventure, mystery, fantasy and science fiction. While the quality of the CYOA books and the choices they offered readers varied at times (with certain story choices leading to very abrupt and literal “dead ends”), the accessible, kid-friendly narrative choices and second-person “you” perspective of these novels inspired the developers and dangerous muds from mass effect 2, along with developers of other narrative video games with dialogue trees and multiple choice story options.
Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks Also Influenced Computer RPGs
Like the Choose your own adventure books, the Fight fantasy gamebooks were written for a young audience, although their themes tended to be darker, and they were marketed to fans of early role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone first came up with the idea behind the Fight fantasy books in the 1980s, eventually co-authoring a hugely popular gamebook called The Warlock Of Firetop Mountain that was published by Puffin. American gamer discusses how the entire library of Fight fantasy game books (and the sorcery! spin-off series) combined the multiple choice page turning of Choose your own adventure with basic versions of D&D-style fantasy RPG rules, allowing players to overcome dangerous or reckless story scenarios with a good dice roll; effective, the Fight fantasy series offered young gamers a role-playing experience that they could play solo.
While increasingly sophisticated computer RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate began to replace interactive gamebooks, franchises such as Fight fantasy and sorcery! are still reaching new audiences through video game ports and classic paperback publications. At the same time, many modern video games in which battles are resolved through dice-based skill checks (see in Disco Elysium and similar homemade RPGs) share many design elements with the gamebook genre pioneered by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.
sources: Smithsonian Magazine, Choose your own adventure, American gamer
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