Choose Your Own Adventure?

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DaHeckIzDat
Posts: 1997
Joined: April 9th, 2015, 1:41 pm

Re: Choose Your Own Adventure?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » October 27th, 2018, 12:00 pm

Are the worldbuilding links really that bad? I'm going for a Mass Effect/Dragon Age thing here, where the reader can choose to learn, or not learn, as much as they want about the world the story takes place in. The things that move the story forward will always be at the bottom of the page, so they'll know that if there's a link in the middle of a paragraph, it's an option world building one.

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Stalvern
Posts: 1952
Joined: June 18th, 2016, 7:15 pm

Re: Choose Your Own Adventure?

Postby Stalvern » October 28th, 2018, 5:19 am

Sorry for the delayed reply; I've been particularly busy.

DaHeckIzDat wrote:Are the worldbuilding links really that bad? I'm going for a Mass Effect/Dragon Age thing here, where the reader can choose to learn, or not learn, as much as they want about the world the story takes place in. The things that move the story forward will always be at the bottom of the page, so they'll know that if there's a link in the middle of a paragraph, it's an option world building one.

The difference from those games is the same as the difference from text adventures that I already brought up. In such cases, learning more is a decision that occurs to the player, and the player takes the initiative to act on it. Here, every possible choice to learn more is constantly thrust in the player's face, regardless of interest or importance. This is exacerbated by the formatting. There's nothing to differentiate the links for extra description from the links with story-critical information, and even the links to advance events are visually identical, despite their spatial division. Since two out of these three types of links are so important, it's impossible to tune them out like the links on a wiki, and the player is forced to pick their way through a thicket of superfluous but apparently necessary blue text to get to the blue text that's actually necessary. (See how hard blue text is to ignore even when none of it is important?) The visual clutter is an obstacle that is easily surmountable but will grow tiresome very quickly – in fact, it grew tiresome within the five pages of the preview.

Besides, for all of the extra information that the links provide, they're actually quite uninformative. So the Silver Chain symbolizes Embin's chain of dawniron... so what? How can this have any meaning if I don't know who Embin is? The Kashni are one of Tassendile's three dominant races, and Tassendile is a bunch of letters on my screen. Your options are to define every single made-up name in a chain growing farther and farther away from the game I'm ostensibly playing (in which case I'll just browse Wikipedia for a vaguely constructive version of the same experience) or to recognize that none of this stuff is relevant and that your interface doesn't give you the luxury – a very important word – of extraneous worldbuilding. This is a game and a story, not your notes. You are writing for someone else, not yourself.


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