I have nearly all of my writing saved from about 7th grade onward. From 7th grade, I’ve got a single essay about Of Mice and Men; after that, I have nearly every essay or story I ever wrote saved in whatever file format I wrote it in. It’s incredible. I’ve got every typed Latin translation I did in 8th grade. I’ve got the application I wrote to my school’s yearbook committee in 9th grade:

From 10th grade I have an incredibly insulting poem I wrote in rhyming couplets about my English teacher, who was notorious for sloppy grading and passing out in her office on Robitussin. I actually distributed this one to my classmates, who never revealed me as the (extremely obvious, in retrospect) writer:

From 11th grade I have another poem, untitled, in a document called “hmm.doc”, which, among other things, claims that we’re going to be graded poorly at the end of the world by god if we eat too much salad:

From 12th grade I have an incredibly elaborate script I wrote for my partners in a history class mock trial. We did an extremely large number of mock trials in 12th grade AP Euro, and for several of them I wrote all the prep materials for my partners and tried to get them to memorize various arguments. I once made a classmate cry in a mock trial:

I have most of my notes from college; a few years were lost to broken hard drives. The most impressive schoolwork I’ve found so far is a folder full of notes and drafts I made of a paper about plays about Robespierre. I took 43 pages of preparatory notes from the various papers and plays I read in prep for this piece:

The result of all this was a paper titled “Why Robespierre has no ‘personal life'” which was so good and so much fun to write that I physically shook and cried when I finished writing it. My history professor liked it so much that she offered to submit it to a competition for me; unfortunately, she sent the email after the end of the term, and I did not read it until the next year, when the deadline had passed. I just reread the paper now and I love that I got to write something so bizarre and interesting. It includes stuff like this:

It’s fun to look back at my old schoolwork; I really truly and deeply loved being a student, and I had some fun successes, and the research work I produced as an undergrad is still entertaining for me to read today.

The fiction I wrote as a child and a teenager, however, is physically painful for me to read!!

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Some background information: when I was in 6th grade, my close friend Liz approached me in the after-school program and handed me a floppy disk containing a 30-40 page fantasy story she had written. She asked me to read it and tell her what I thought. I remember that I said quite nice things to her– nicer than I really felt, because it was a romance story and I did not like or understand romances. It took place in a world highly similar to the Stock Fantasy World we all read about in Lord of the Rings and Lord of the Rings ripoffs, but the horses had six legs, and that really bothered me, for some reason.

I had an astonishing number of uncharitable private thoughts about her story, actually. I remember sitting in the after-school program room and giving her suggestions and suddenly clamming up when I became aware of the sheer number and crankiness of the suggestions I had stored up in my head. I’d written my own “books” in composition journals before– lots of talking-animal tales– and after seeing Liz’s work I was suddenly consumed by the desire to write an entire novel on a computer. My own novel, following the suggestions I’d been telling her before I suddenly recognized them for my own taste.

So I basically started writing fiction because I wanted to privately show up one of my best friends. This doesn’t reflect well on me. But right there, that very day, at that exact computer, with Liz’s story open on a window in the background, full of indignation that her horses had six fucking legs, I began writing a fantasy novel in 10-point Arial font.

It ballooned to over 300 pages by the end of 8th grade, when I finished it. It absolutely consumed my free time. Throughout those years I kept various version-controlled copies of the story burned to CDs and hidden in jewel cases taped to the back of my dresser and the underside of my desk drawer. I still have all those copies, saved on various external hard drives:

This means I can go back in time to the earliest version of this story and read it. It’s the one down at the bottom in .rtf format, and it is the actual file that I typed and saved on that school computer where I read Liz’s story. (I actually kept it saved there at school for months until my dad mentioned at dinner that it was possible for hard drives to fail.) Anyway, here are the first two paragraphs:

That, right there, is my 6th-grade storytelling. I absolutely love my strict dedication to sticking the exclamation point after the parentheses.

I hate absolutely everything else about this story. Not only is it silly young-person writing, but it embodies some life attitudes and political sensibilities that I no longer agree with, and it makes me very uncomfortable to see my child self proselytizing them in a book about wizards who wear color-coded clothes like karate masters and spend a lot of time arguing about the semantics of the word “werewolf”.

The biggest reason these stories make me uncomfortable, though. is that I am still subconsciously excavating them for writing material today.

Between 6th and 12th grade, I wrote four different novel-length stories. Three of them were rehashes or recyclings of the story I started writing when Liz showed me her six-legged-horse romance in the after-school room. The first version, above, started out as some kind of weird action story political thriller thing with wizard politicians sentencing one another to imprisonment before racing to kill an evil wizard at the north pole who lived with t-rexes in a cave. (It’s deeply uncomfortable to read now, but I have to recognize that it was badass.)

The second story I wrote was a super-confused sequel. (It had no t-rexes.) The third story, though, was a complete remix of the original premise. I saved the city names and two of the character ideas and completely redid everything else while keeping generally to the same themes. But one of the characters I saved was a wizard– and then he got recycled again when I started rewriting the story as an adult, and guess the fuck what– he’s been recycled a couple more times and now he’s in Six Months. He’s your research assistant in that story. He’s completely different and I no longer write like an 11-year-old, but the bones are still visible to me, and Jesus Christ, guys, this is terrible! This is terrifying! I’m trying to write a novel-length game which I now completely and fully realize is based on recycled material I created in the sixth fucking grade!

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The cool thing about writing is that your time spent doing it is never wasted. Even if you write something that is never published, you are getting better every moment you spend toiling away. I once wrote well over a hundred quests for a cancelled game, and freaked the fuck out when I learned we were ceasing development. The next day, though, I woke with some kind of spooky icy calm and told myself that I’d learned so much doing it that it wasn’t actually a waste. Spooky-me was right. Writing is the hard work we do to communicate with other people, but even if other people never get to see it, you’re getting better at the communicating, so it’s fine. It’s fine! It’s okay.

It seems however that I’ve been subconsciously saving a lot more from my middle school works than I thought I was. I wasn’t just taking new skills with me when I moved on. I wasn’t just recycling place-names. My work is built on some really old fucking bones and I had no idea how old and how obvious those bones were until I read all this shit today.

Everyone tends to have their own private-but-obvious themes that they gravitate to in their writing– even their most commercial and crass writing. In 2014, I wrote like three different versions of the same relationship in three different failed writing projects, and in December of that year, I suddenly laid all those stories out next to one another and nearly shat myself.

When it comes to stories about wizards who live in renaissance-era cities, I have been writing for like fourteen or fifteen fucking years about, apparently, the same couple people, doing the same couple things off and on as they skip between stories and contexts and shitty fucking magic systems. Soller in Six Months combines the ignorance and cunning I gave various of his older selves in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2010, and 2012. Simon Villano is actually this humble old regent dude from the 2006 story, which I wrote in high school:

Later in that story he is so nervous about fighting a battle that he barfs in a closet. I knew I was recycling those themes, but I had no idea how closely I was sticking to them!

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A lot of people keep elaborate moleskins of notes so that they can refer to them later and mine their passing thoughts for good creative work. I used to do this in college. These days, though, I am almost never more than two feet away from something with Google Docs on it, so I actually try writing out a couple paragraphs of any idea I have to see if it feels good or not. I have hundreds of page-long moments saved in my Drive where I tried an idea out and realized it sucked, actually.

But the very first idea I ever had is still haunting me, apparently. Does that make it shitty? Sure feels that way to me, even though I know that feeling’s wrong. Maybe recycling these ideas over and over again for fifteen years has made them extra good. Maybe I tumbled the sediment out and only the gems are left.

Or maybe I’m just lazy. Who knows? We’ll find out, eventually.

I mentioned a while ago that I might upload the prompts I wrote for the Imaginary Games Jam, the jam I created OBAWCATRVOS for. For this jam, we were asked to review games which either did not exist or could never exist. I invented a few impossible hardware platforms (augury, interactive bathroom mirrors), genres that never existed (Japanese cowboy games, games where you lie completely still and pretend to be a corpse), and a prompt even I cannot completely understand now (what the hell was I thinking the editing game would play like?)

Someone picked Sub Way to inspire their work for the jam; the rest were passed over. Anyway, here they are:

I recently participated in the Fermi Paradox Jam, a game jam organized on itch.io by Loren Schmidt and Katie Rose Pipkin, two creators I seriously admire. The jam encouraged people to make games inspired by or somehow related to the Fermi Paradox– a concept which tries to dissect why we haven’t yet met any space aliens. Even if we assume that very few planets can or do support life, space should be crawling with aliens, because space is full of planets. So why haven’t we met any of them yet?

My submission, The Galactic Snub, posits that all the aliens are hanging out in space together already and have simply chosen to ignore us. You pester them for explanations, and they give you excuses:

This game includes a background sound/music track by my friend Ford which is honestly the best sound I have ever had for any of my sound-including personal projects. Ford is looking to do more sound design! He did the music for Plus Ultra projects Slaughtertrain, Monstr, and The Ritual for the Mysterious Godforce Which Unites Us All, and he is pretty dang rad.

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UPDATE: Someone has letsplayed my game!

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I played several other Fermi Jam games and liked some of them! Here are some of them:

The Echo Initiative, a cool, toy-like little satellite that you must puzzle out

The Fixed Stars: A Primer, by Loren Schmidt. A hypertext work that requires a little active exploration. Some really really nice stuff in here.

Hero and Leander, a pair of twitter bots who are searching for one another across the “space” of thousands of hashtags

No Stars, Only Constellations, a game about stargazing/disappointing your boyfriend, by Robert Yang

The Planets are Occupied by Living Beings, a deeply strange Twine game containing the fictionalized tale of a (historically real) Russian theoretical rocket scientist prophesying our ascension into space

Paradox is a surprisingly robust little space exploration/trading game with a command-line ship and docking-bay interface that I found rather charming. The UI and artstyle reminded me a little of Capsule, which I played in a state of profound anxiety for hours while lying on my friend Kent’s couch during a Los Angeles apartment search in 2014– and which has had quite a big impact on me, I suppose. It was fun to see reflected in Paradox here.

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Anyway, there’s like 80 games in this jam, so I’m sure I missed some good ones. It was a really, really good jam prompt– both specific enough and open enough to inspire a lot of very very different and differently-interesting games. A+. The next game jam I’m likely to do is the Pippin Bar Game Idea game jam, which also has a ton of good good prompts.

When I tell people that I work on choose-your-own-adventure -type projects, they usually think of the original Choose Your Own Adventure-brand books from the 80s and 90s. They think of stuff that looks like this:

In the original Choose Your Own Adventure books, choices were presented in separate blocks of text at the bottom of the page. There was often a horizontal line or other marker between the story content and the choice itself. These choices were usually all italicized and right-justified– they looked different from all the rest of the text on the page. They almost all used the same very specific language: “if you insert action here, turn to page X.”

When I was a kid, I accepted that this was “how choose your own adventure stories work.” As far as I knew, separating choice text from story action was the only way to handle choice at all. It made these books easy to read. It standardized them. This uniform look was part of “the brand.” It was also similar to the way that all of my favorite narrative videogames presented choice.

I pretty much continued to believe this all the way until I started writing my own stories with Twine.

Over the past four years I’ve come to realize that the way you present choice to the player has a huge effect on the overall mood and internal logic of a CYOA story. Changes to the way choices appear in front of your audience can totally alter their understanding of themselves as a character in the story. You can make a reader feel differently about themselves by presenting choices in a different way!

This is probably obvious to a lot of you who have written Twine pieces before, but I’d like to dig into this phenomenon a little bit. I want to write several blog posts covering ways of presenting choice in hypertext stories, and discuss the ways that each of these can make the reader feel differently about themselves and their role in the story’s world.

I plan on covering traditional CYOA choice formats, inline keywords, cycling text choices, color coding, and other tools I’ve seen used in hypertext stories.  First, however, I’m starting with…

Standard old-school Choose-Your-Own-Adventure choices: what they are like, and what they do

So, anyway, remember this?

The big fat bold number at the top. The stand-out questions at the bottom. The strong visual distinctiveness of the different elements on the page. The clarity of their purpose. The characteristic “If you do X, turn to page Y” language. These are all part of the classic CYOA choice system, and those of us who read these books as kids have the whole “feel” of the experience carved indelibly into our brains.

I’ll be classifying any choice structure that uses separate lists of choice options at the end of a narrative passage as “CYOA” style. This classic structure– as it appears in the old books– makes the story very simple to read, and makes it easy to tell that the story is branching. It was designed as a way to talk to kids. The page elements I listed above provide clarity. They’re pretty foolproof!

They also directly address the experience of reading the book. “Turn to page 200!” There’s no attempt to disguise the experience or couch it in “immersive” explanations. Every page admits that this is a book, a non-traditional book, with its own particular way of being read. The whole page is set up to be clear and honest about what you are doing. It is also relatively honest[1] about how the story works.

But these clearly-demarcated, foolproof page-sections also make the experience of reading CYOA stories into a staccato, irregular experience. Choices, sequestered away at the bottom of the page, take place in a realm of frozen time– in a dimension where only the choice exists. They are separated physically and stylistically from the rest of the story. The narrative pauses– time stops. Choice happens. Time starts again, and the story continues. The reader is the story’s analog operator, and the reader needs to do the work to make it move forward. This takes time.

But the reading experience isn’t the only thing this staccato organization of time affects. Separating the choices away on their own part of the page also has an affect on the way the plot of the story can leap and bound across time. As a child I was always bemused by my CYOA books’ erratic relationship with time and space. The choice region of the page was capable of eliding whole months and years, skipping over whole continents, totally eliminating whole characters and problems in a single sentence. In that frozen moment of choice, your future reached out to many different times and places at once. On page 18, you’d be boarding a pirate ship; when you turned ahead to page 72, suddenly a whole month would have passed, and you’d be tackling the next problem, whatever that was. The choice-dimension can eat whole chunks of timeline effortlessly. If you would like to go through boot camp, turn to page 99. If you would like to be digested by the Saarlac, turn to page 302. If you would like to sleep for a thousand years, turn to page 12.

The CYOA question style also does funny things to the player-character. The “you” in traditional CYOA statements, like the ones above, was frequently the player themselves:

These books addressed your external control over the story in a very frank and honest way. You’re not really always a character living in the world of the book; you’re a reader of a complicated text, exercising your intuition and wisdom to beat the challenge of the story.

And despite what that introductory warning says, as I play more and more experimental games that push boundaries with narrative, these traditional, hyper-frank-and-honest CYOA books seem less like immersive stories that take me on an adventure, and more like trial-and-error puzzles couched in the language of power and fantasy. They do not really make me feel as if I am in control of anything. They are so clear and honest about what they are doing that they expose the author’s control to me quite clearly. Each time I choose, I think more and more about what the author is trying to communicate with the choices, what the puzzle of the book wants me to do, and so on. To adult-me, CYOA books feel more like a weird, alienating puzzle than like a participatory story. This isn’t to say that I don’t like the books anymore! These are merely the emotions and thought-processes that sequestered-choice, page-turning CYOA inspires in me.

Even if you disagree with me about this, however, it’s undeniable that CYOA choice format can influence the way the reader thinks and feels about themselves and about the story.

Let’s summarize. The traditional, interrogative CYOA choice format as seen in the books can have the following effects:

• The choice section of the page often gives the impression of existing “outside time”, in the “choice dimension”
• The choice section of the page has a strong visual distinctiveness that can interrupt the flow of the story
• It can very quickly leap over time, space, and events
• It makes choice and plot-branching into a clear, explicit, foolproof experience
• It frequently addresses the reader as a reader, acknowledging their controlling input

To some extent, all of these problems and advantages can appear in Twine/hypertext games which use the CYOA choice model. But with modifications, the traditional CYOA model can be altered to avoid the form’s pitfalls and amplify its advantages.

CYOA-variants for hypertext

Most of the cool CYOA variants I typically see in Twine stories are all about re-contextualizing the voice of the choice to make the reader feel differently about their relationship to the protagonist and to the story.

I’ve seen choice statements which continue sentences found in the main body of the story. For example:

These continued sentences are a good way to link choices to the story– to tear down the wall between the body text and the “choice dimension.” Although these choices are still abstracted from the physical space of the story passage, they are not entirely removed from the flow of the story’s language. There is less of a stop-start feeling to the reading experience.

I’ve also seen choice statements written from a personal, first-person perspective:

These first-person choices are also good at reducing the player’s abstraction from the text. They sometimes make the story sound as if you are talking to another person– they mimic the conversation of a dungeon master and a role-player. If you write your CYOA story with choices that follow this prompt-and-response structure, you create a logical explanation for why the choices are separate from the flow of the story in the first place. It sounds like conversation, and feels less artificial than the “If yous” of traditional CYOA.

Then there’s choice statements written in the personal idiom of the main character, or as the character’s thoughts.

Choice statements written conversationally can be used to express a character’s innermost thoughts. They can be used to show exactly what the character would say, how they’d say it, and how they would justify it to themselves. There’s a good reason why many western RPGs write out the whole choice text as if it were a sentence the player would say! In many stories, you want to ease the player into sharing the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. How does this person think? What idioms do they use? Write it all out as a choice on the bottom of the page, and you’re turning the “choice dimension” into the “inside of the character’s brain dimension.” I think this is a much more helpful use of space on the screen.

Of course, this isn’t to say that traditional CYOA language has no uses. For example, it’s very good at rustling up strong feelings of nostalgia. If you want to bring your readers back to 2nd-grade reading-hour, there’s no better way to do it than with the traditional CYOA tropes, the traditional choice sentence-structure, etc.

Traditional CYOA choice setups are also extremely foolproof. They list precisely what you are about to do. They make it very clear that the story will branch. I never met a kid who couldn’t eventually figure out how to read a CYOA book! Because they address you-as-reader so directly, without the conceits of “immersion”, they’re great for stories that are more “gamey” or puzzley. Maybe, unlike me, you like pausing time in the choice dimension! Or maybe the game is intended for young audiences, or for people without experience in hypertext stories! Traditional CYOA is definitely one of the most accessible ways of presenting choice in Twine. It is appropriate for all audiences, and for many writing styles. In the end, a lot of writing is not made any worse by CYOA’s pitfalls.

Subtle meanings conveyed by CYOA choices

And in some cases, it is made better. It can do stuff that other choice schemes do not! What quiet messages does a list of choices send that is impossible with inline links, cycling links, and other choice methods? Here’s a couple things you can only do with lists of choices:

The first and most obvious is list-based humor. Lists provide good structure for joke arcs. When I was in undergrad, I had a column (a bad one) for a humor magazine entirely focused on telling jokes in list form. You can arrange a list of statements in such a way that the list order and format is a big reason of why the things are funny. The same is true of choices in a CYOA story.

You can use the list to replicate a series of thoughts. Although this is also possible in in-line link setups, like the one I used for Swan Hill, it gains very elegant expression in a CYOA story.

You can also use the list to make some choices appear more important than others. Typically, the first and last choices in a list are considered more important or distinctive than the others.

You can even use the choices section of a story to reveal information about the setting or the protagonist that you have not previously revealed in the body-text of the story. This can sometimes be quite good for story pacing. It can also be very silly:

Presenting choices in a list allows you to add subtle shades of meaning that are not possible– or not possible in the same way– with other choice-presentation systems. There are plenty of jokes and emotional arcs that are much, much easier to achieve when you  have a set-aside space to put lists of options.

Conclusion, I suppose

So what does this all mean?

If you’re going to use a CYOA structure for presenting choices in your stories, you should be aware of the subtle shades of meaning you’re adding, and the way in which your reader is experiencing time and space while they read. You should be aware of the ways in which your choice-presentation affects the reader’s concept of self. Are you using the word you? The word I? Are you telling the player what to do? Are you having a conversation with them?

And, most importantly: will your story benefit from the staccato treatment of time that CYOA choice-lists create? I have seen extremely long fight scenes written out blow-by-blow in CYOA format and, let me tell you: it isn’t pretty. I’ve grown to prefer addressing action in hypertext in different ways– ways which resonate more with the action they describe:

I hope to write soon again about inline links and why I prefer them for the kinds of stories I like to tell. They help to arrange a reader’s thoughts about themselves and their character in a very, very different way– and they pose some challenges of their own.

I think CYOA will always be the simplest and perhaps most elegant way of organizing choice on a screen or a page. But it’s worth stepping back for a moment and realizing that it isn’t necesarrily the default, and it isn’t neutral. It’s a way of organizing the reader’s thoughts and feelings. It has an actual impact. And we ought to start recognizing it, everywhere it appears– even in AAA videogames, where it’s begun to change and morph in ways I never expected as a child.

[1] With some beautiful exceptions; see the Many Conclusions section of this wonderful essay.