Read Bruno's post about "meaningful choices"
Bruno posted today about the impact and utility of different approaches to choice in narrative games. It's a very good post! You should read it!
Bruno approached this topic, in my opinion, with an enormous amount of restraint. He's responding to a Narrascope talk which annoyed me so much I was unable to finish it.
So I'll say something more emphatic than Bruno: if you read Bruno's post and the stuff he's saying about choices feels very natural to you... or if reading it opens up a landscape of subtle options in your mind, inspiring you to impact the player with choice in all sorts of different ways... then you are ready to write expressive and inventive choice-based dialogue.
If however you read the post and "agency" still strikes you as the only lens through which to consider choices... then you are not ready to write good choice-based dialogue and you gotta go back into the mines. I sentence you to play a bunch of twine games written by high-schoolers. They are better at writing choices than you are, probably.
I don't believe you need to have watched the Narrascope talk to read Bruno's post. It functions on its own as a good high-level summary of what choices can accomplish in a story, and it contains good 101-level lessons like:
- Choices and branching are different things
- When dialogue choices are a core mechanic (or only mechanic) in the game, they can and should accomplish many different things in the story, including things which are not actually challenging or consequential
- You can communicate things about characters or the world through palettes of choice
It's very frustrating to work in a field which suffers from an "eternal September" - a constant influx of people who are not caught up on the things we've all been talking about for decades. As a result they may be unaware that they're about to recapitulate old conversations that the community has previously explored in depth... for example, in twelve year old blog posts, or on the intfiction forums, or in plenty of other places. Those old conversations are still preserved and accessible to interested readers. The sternest thing I can say is that if you want to say impactful, consequential things about your art form at a professional level, engaging in these older scenes and reading these 101-level posts is required. You absolutely must do it, and you must put in the hard work of finding this writing and talking to your peers about it and making sure you understand it. There are already paths hacked through the undergrowth here!