Interesting Link - Some of my favorite writing about interactive fiction
This post was previously published about a year ago on Cohost. Check out this post for more information about that site and why these posts are here.
Please read some of my favorite writing about interactive fiction
This article from 2009 by Christian Swinehart uses interactive graphs and visualizations to explore the structure of traditional Chose Your Own Adventure books in a variety of interesting ways.
I was absolutely blown away the first time I read it, because there are SO many different interactive visualizations in this website. Click on one of the 12 grids of pages early in the article to go to a visualization page with six separate interactive visualizations that demonstrate different ways of looking at the book's reading experience. There are more books here.
Anyone who has ever written interactive fiction will recognize the itching desire to see or understand your story in its full, true form--a nonlinear story "volume", full of common and rare and catastrophic and beneficial moments for the player all mixed together in a mess that cannot be understood linearly. In the same way that a book contains peaks and valleys of reader experience--emotional highs, moments for learning, moments of ambiguity and reflection--a nonlinear story contains these as well, but without doing a bunch of math, there's no simple way to know how a player might experience them, or how common certain experiences are, or how many different distinct experiences exist.
These interactive visualizations offer that kind of enticing clarity to the CYOA books. It is a clarity that most authors of branching stories--these days, largely independent artists, hobbyists, and students working in free tools like Twine, Ren'py, and others--never get for their own work. The multiple visualizations and comparative graphs in the article aptly demonstrate that interactive books cannot be fully understood through any one lens.
The graphs here have inspired me to wonder what type of graphs I could create of my own interactive projects. Seeing this article made me realize that the Twine node map was perhaps an insufficient visualization of the work I was creating... only one way of looking at the player's experience of the story. You end up wondering: what could I learn from other visualizations that I have limited myself from learning by an over-reliance on the node map? Without the ability to do this kind of visualization, however, I had to settle for simply thinking about my work in a different way. Reading this article strongly affected the way that I playtested my games, and led me to do some deeper thinking about the types of emotions I focus on when playtesting my branching narrative games.
Anyway, it's a great article. I love it. Please check it out! The ending is particularly beautiful.