Lots of very intelligent people have already weighed in here, and I’m sure I don’t want to overload you. However, this is an interesting topic and I’d like to share my two cents on it, if nobody minds.
You haven’t actually specified what the story you want to create is, apart from hoping that it is more ‘literary’ and possibly lacking in choices you feel shouldn’t be left to mere readers. Perhaps IF isn’t necessarily your medium if your first thought is how to limit your readers’ agency?
This is an interesting point, but perhaps you’re getting a little too wrapped up in the trappings of more ‘traditional’ static literature. Regular stories need a character that is fairly rigidly defined for a whole host of reasons, they can’t shift and change from page to page because they require consistency to separate themselves from the other characters. Their identity isn’t really linked to the reader.
IF stories such as these place the reader in a unique position of responsibility in the narrative, one that leaves them indelibly attached to the main character. In short, they won’t ever have trouble knowing that character intimately.
This is because the events of the story aren’t happening to Bella Starscream: Warrior Priestess of Hath, they’re happening to the reader personally. When you’re making choices that (for roleplay purposes) change people’s lives for better or worse, feeling constricted and blinkered by what the writer wants you to do is disruptive or even destructive. Readers (Players if you’d still prefer to make the distinction) are not meant to be shut out of the crucial decisions of the story.
That’s not the point of interactive fiction. If you want the reader to follow a certain path, don’t put any choices in there at all.
Part of writing good IF is understanding that the world you create doesn’t belong to you once someone reads it. The reader changes and shapes the narrative based on their thoughts and desires, ignoring the interpretation of the world’s creator if they are repulsed by it. This in turn prompts you to think ‘How would my reader react to this situation?’.
Not many mediums compel you to think of your audience as active participants, but IF demands it.
This extends beyond simple choices about what to physically do from page to page, traveling into the territory of emotions and morality. In the best stories, you make a conscious choice to follow a particular moral path, and this knowledge in turn compels you to view the world through the lens of your character’s own moral identity.
This leads me to another point you make:
I would categorize this statement as simplistic, the character usually begins the story as a blank slate, but each choice the player makes creates an identity, that grows and changes as the story continues.
Once again, don’t know what you mean by ‘quality literature’ but the point of these stories is not necessarily to identify with someone other than yourself (more on that later). Many of these stories begin by creating a stressful or fantastical situation and implicitly asking how you personally would react to it.
If the situation is dangerous, how would you react to it? It encourages introspection, or at the very least the imagination necessary to create someone you feel would be better suited to deal with these problems.
You mention in this section the issues you have with choices of gender, pronoun use and even the naming of a character, and I’ll talk about all three for brevity’s sake.
These choices are actually one of the most interesting deviations that IF has produced, and CoG have taken it in more interesting directions than other IF sources I can think of. It goes somewhat to the heart of the community that grew up around the original CoG games, specifically Broadsides and Romance.
Choice of Broadsides (if you haven’t read it) is an 18th Century Naval story about a young captain attached to the Royal Navy of the fictional nation of Albion. This was really a crucial example because the gender choice didn’t just swap out your trousers for a skirt, it fundamentally restructured society to invert the positions of men and women.
Rather than just making up some series of events whereby a woman finds herself in charge of a ship, it presents a world where all women are out fighting the good fight, keeping their men-folk safely at home to knit doilies and look pretty for when their brave wives come home.
The choice causes you the reader to stop and think about the implicit gender constructs of the time by inverting them. Fundamentally it makes the reader determine whether or not this world is better or worse, prompting them to think about gender identity in a new way.
Choice of Romance was where the idea was furthered. In this story you could not only choose your gender, but you could create a world in which your sexual preference was not just legal or accepted but actively encouraged.
It created a world of total, inescapable equality. In itself a difficult thing to convey, but more than that it had a feedback effect on the readers. If you spend any time at all on the forums here, you will probably note that a great deal of time on every thread is devoted to discussion about gender identity, sexual mores and how to include marginalized groups into stories.
This is taken as pretty serious stuff by most people here, and much of that comes from the games themselves. Interactive Fiction allows people to not just experience themselves, but to actively create someone who is their polar opposite and explore their worldview.
The community has grown up around ideals of total social egalitarianism, which is further refined and reflected in each generation of games released. Where once it was considered pretty risque to have a romance game where you could romance men or women no matter what you looked like, now there are trans characters, disabled characters, even relationship models like polyamory are starting to be included in newer games.
Incrementally, a community of writers and readers collaborate to design better worlds, and the fiction they produce in turn becomes more intricate. People actually devote a lot of mental energy thinking about how a society functions when it is so free, which in turn makes new readers think about how such a world would work for them personally.
As to your notion that these choices don’t seem to affect the story overmuch, try and assess it from a different angle. If someone (let’s say a trans person) plays your game/story and tries to create their own identity.
Do you really think they want to subject themselves to a barrage of abusive behaviour from their neighbours? Or go through a tense work environment where they could suffer disciplinary action or even be fired just for being what they are?
Probably not… Especially if they’re reading a story about flying robots who fight an evil sorceress or whatever…
If you’re specifically writing a story about the trials and tribulations of a particular person or group, IF isn’t really the best medium for it (not that it’s impossible, just difficult).
But once again, you haven’t specified what kind of ‘serious literature’ you’re looking to write, so I can’t possibly comment on that.
Specifically on the notion of names, you mention that you are worried that the reader will choose the ‘wrong’ name, robbing the story of gravitas later on when Mrs McFartBlast storms up and asks the player for a divorce.
To that I can only say… It isn’t your job to force your reader to think as you do. IF isn’t about getting your personal message across through specific actions or thoughts. It’s about creating a world and a crisis that embodies what you think and allowing the reader to agree or disagree with you at their discretion.
Thing of it as Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ cranked up to 11. If you wrote a story about being King of a Castle, you might well think that you know the perfect way to rule justly and fairly.
It is then up to you to purposefully offer choices that allow your reader to do precisely the opposite.
As a writer, you can determine the consequences of these actions, but you can’t make the choice for the reader and you can’t force them to accept your proposal.
To use a game example, think of Call of Duty as a novel (‘serious’ literature, I am sure…) and IF as a game like Breath of the Wild (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Wikipedia in case you were living under a rock somewhere, you never know…)
Call of Duty games are tight, choice-less glass corridors that are all perfectly set up to be moved through in a specific way. All of the movements the characters make, all the set-pieces and buildings and doors and events run on a timer.
You get the distinct impression that the developers think that this scene would be just perfect if it weren’t for all those messy players coming through and ruining it…
A tight, focused experience that conveys a specific set of events, themes and characters as efficiently as possible.
Compare that to an open-world experience like BotW, where the character is silent and the player must construct their character from his actions and the way other characters interact with him. A less focused event, but I don’t think that anyone is saying that CoD is more artistically valid that BotW because it lacks choices…
The stats are necessary to make the game work. You can make them invisible if you like. Some people like them, I personally don’t. That’s another thing that might turn out to have higher meaning further down the road as people refine and experiment with the medium, but it isn’t really a sticking point for a lot of writers.
Very gracious of you.
You’d think so, but it’s a bugger to write in for this medium.
Not sure entirely what you’re looking for with this, as by definition if you’re giving someone a choice, you’re allowing them the agency to make choices in line with their own designs and desires. I suppose you could artificially ham-string your readers by only allowing them to make choices an 'orrible bastard would make, but then why bother with the choices? May as well just write some traditional fiction about an 'orrible bastard and use regular writing techniques to get the reader to empathize with them.
I don’t really know that this is an issue with the medium, as many choices in these games are weighted to produce emotional responses. In Choice of Robots your choices determine who lives or dies, and even whether the player character chooses to possibly kill themselves via a total memory engram transfer.
Those are weighty choices that are given their weight by the smaller interpersonal choices that led you to this point (what should I spend my time focusing on? Should I work on my research or spend time with the person who clearly carries a torch for me?)
If every page ends with a climactic choice, then after the 2nd or 3rd one I’m not going to care whether my character tosses the newly-orphaned kitten into a mincer or pays for it to go to college with a full scholarship. Small choices exist to give meaning to larger ones. Not every page can end with you hanging off the side of a cliff.