Disdain for Set Main Characters

[Havenstone]

@ElliWoelfin

Would it be fair to say it’s a misuse of the medium, then? Or at least a mislabeling of medium

I’d actually be happier with misuse than mislabeling, since the latter drifts back toward the “deception” implication. Saying an author is misusing their medium is totally fair criticism. People said it about Stravinsky and Super Mario and will keep saying it about all kinds of art. Often they’ll be right; sometimes they’ll be missing the way an artist is doing something new (or retro) and cool.

An author needs to be able to hear critics saying “you’re misusing the medium” without getting panicky or defensive. Either there’s a lesson there to take on board, or the author’s happy with their take on the medium and can shrug off the criticism.

But if the author does shrug it off rather than agree, then the critic should take care not to accuse the author of lying or cheating by continuing to work in the medium. The situation then is one of disagreement over what the medium requires, not bad faith on the part of the author.

The “should have been a novel” meme annoys me, not because I’m a big fan of railroady CSGs, but because it seems clear to me that that’s my taste, that other readers in large numbers love their linear IF as IF (they like the experience of choice, without caring if it’s “real” choice) and that there’s every reason for writers who enjoy that kind of IF themselves to write for that audience. When that meme curdles into “the author is trying to trick me into playing their novel because they couldn’t get it published as a novel…” Yeah, that goes beyond annoying into offensive.

In CSGs, there isn’t a consensus on what level of interactivity the medium requires, so I don’t know that labeling would solve the problem. Like Devon, I think playing the demos is the best answer.

[MultipleChoice]

I want to give you a genuine answer, but I also want to preface everything with the fact that having a strong dislike for set main characters is a completely valid opinion to have. There’s a lot of reasons why someone would hold a strong stance against them. What I’m talking about here has nothing to do with that.

“When was the last time I felt something misused its medium?”

That question was in the back of my mind all of yesterday. The very idea of something misusing the medium in which it was created in is so weird of a concept, that I really struggled thinking of ANY movie, tv show, game, drawing or piece of writing that I ever felt was a misuse of its medium.

At most, I could recall some very strange and experimental stuff that I personally really didn’t like. But even then, I never felt that the tools which were used to create them were in any way misused by their creator. It just made no sense to me how anyone could feel that way.

The only explanation for it is that, in this instance, you can’t possibly be viewing choicegames as a medium at all. So then I changed my thinking: I replaced medium with a “very specific sort of thing I enjoy”.

“When was the last time I felt disappointed by a game because it betrayed my expectations of that specific type of game?”

Now this question makes a lot more sense. But even then, I struggled to come up with a single game that invoked such a profoundly negative reaction from me that I felt that the creators of the game had deceived me.

I had to go all the way back to 1999, when I was 10 and my mom rented Pokemon Snap from Blockbuster for me. As a pokemon game, I expected to be capturing and leveling up pokemon, but it turned out to be an on-the-rails shoot-em-up with a camera instead of a gun. I felt very disappointed.

But even then…as a child, who had my expectations broken, I still ended up being able to respect and appreciate the game for what it was. And it turned out to be pretty fun, just way too short.

I hope going over my thought process helped illustrate my point. The crux of it all seems to be that you aren’t viewing choicegames as a medium at all, and you’re unable to sympathize with the authors making them.

Being able to appreciate something for what it is, even if it isn’t for you, is an inherent part of growing up. This appreciation is gained by creating stuff of your own–not just consuming. It’s the act of creation itself (and the struggles therein) that adds this missing compassion.

[ViIsBae]

That’s usually the other way around, actually. The less variation of choices you have in a game, the more words per playthrough you’ll see of that game. A game with varying dialogue that takes you to view the same scenes might have 500,000 words and an average playthrough of 350,000. Whereas a game with diverging pathways and completely different scenes for choices would have a total of 500,000 words and 100,000 per playthrough. The closer to 1 the average words per playthrough is, the more choices/divergences there are usually.

[cup_half_empty]

No. I divided total by average, the closer to one, the less variation. The higher, the more variation. And yes, there’s no way to distinguish branching from flavor text, just variation. But it’s already better than nothing.

[ViIsBae]

Ooooooooh, I see what you did now. Yes, okay, that makes more sense, thank you for clarifying!

[Hannah_Minger]

None of these are inherently a dealbreaker for me. I like games that explore a character or a situation and give me lots of stuff to theorize or think about. I don’t need the mc to be customizable for that, though it can be fun when I can. Even then, though, it’s whatever gender/sexuality/whatever fits for the run-through of the story I want. I actually prefer the mc having a few set characteristics, because it lets me have a buffer between myself and the story. (Can’t explain why I need the buffer lol, but I’ve always used it. I used to replace first-person pronouns with third-person when I read traditional novels as a kid.)

@dreamofeden

Twenty years ago, paper Choose-your-own-adventure books would likely be considered “interactive fiction” and in those the main character is very set and there is very little flexibility in choices. My software development professor in university considered any video game to be IF since you could “interact with it” while another professor thought games that were primarily text like Disco Elysium were IF but other games like Elden Ring were not.

Funny enough, I was summarizing this discussion to my mother this morning, and she just cackled and said something like “when I was a kid, all we had were CYOA books. You could go left or you could go right. And half the time you just got ate by some monster.” But are CYOA adventure books really not considered IF anymore? I think that would be sad. There should be lots of different ways to make an IF and lots of different uses of the mechanics. I believe it’s like any other art form – a painting can be all sorts of paints on all sorts of surfaces in all sorts of styles. The specific choices the author makes in the way they choose to tell the story or present the themes is part of how you interpret it.

[Keller]

I’m having a hard time reading this response as anything other than “When you grow up you will see things my way” Which is difficult to swallow.

Moving past that, I’ll explore the idea with my own thoughts. I think a movie that is nothing but a scrolling text bar would be a misuse of the medium, though scrolling text bars have their place within it when used judiciously (such as the iconic intro scroll for star wars or the tickers at the bottom of a news program, et cetera). Silent films interposed text slides between video elements before sound was easy to package into film, and closed captions allow lots of people to better enjoy films while having words added to the screen to help understand dialogue or musical cues or other important sound effects that the viewer is otherwise expected to receive to understand the context of the film. The reason all of these other examples aren’t misuses of the medium is that they have practical and complementary effects within the context of what the medium is best at, they are all ancillary to the action on screen, whereas a film that is absent any visuals beyond scrolling text would combine the limitations of the medium (movies go at one pace, viewers read at variable paces) with not utilizing the strengths of it.

It is a hyperbolic example, to be sure, but I don’t agree with the claim that we cannot see the objective strengths and weaknesses of a medium and note when products fail to use the strengths and exacerbate the weaknesses.

A more small-scale example of misusing a medium would be a novel, wherein the author has an action scene, and then in that action scene, they describe the action as if telling a friend only what they are seeing in an action-packed… I dunno, lightsaber dueling film sequence. “He slashes at him with his lightsaber, and then the other guy slashes at him with his own lightsaber and he blocks it, and then he slashes back at the other guy who dodges, and then they windmill their lightsabers through the air for a few seconds ineffectually… and then… and then…” This isn’t utilizing the medium’s strengths, and it highlights the weaknesses of the medium. In a novel, you cannot impart the thrill of a movie’s action sequence simply by describing what visually happens, because it doesn’t carry the same impact as seeing it on screen. Instead, you should be leaning into the strengths of the novels, which allow you to get into the mind of the people involved. You can work through the inner struggle of two former friends fighting for their lives in a struggle where neither is willing to back down. You can explore the mental dialogue, communicate how one reads the tells of the other and impart how that comes from their years of experience fighting alongside one another, how even as they fight, they feel their heart breaking at what they must do.

Misusing a medium is unavoidable as nobody begins as a master, they must struggle through the hardship of learning the medium through experience and examples and building on what works and recognizing what doesn’t. And if you refuse to believe that some medium has any weaknesses or that any use of it is objectively a misuse, I don’t know how you can define anything within any medium as even having a concept of quality. Opinions are subjective, but that doesn’t mean there are no objective realities within creative works.

[Clary_Fray]

Who are we to dictate how authors use IF codes? Not all create IF stories with huge ambitions, and there are a wide array of IF codes used that give limited choices, or make links decorative. It’s almost like there’s no correct use of the codes.

[will]

Oh there are definitely incorrect uses of code lol. Let’s not wade into the radical subjectivism pond here – ChoiceScript has things it does well and things it doesn’t do well, and if you’re leaning too far into the latter then, yeah, you should probably change the medium.

In fact, I highly encourage people to constantly be asking that question. CS is incredibly labour-intensive, way more than a traditional novel, and requires a completely different set of organisational tools just to plan out. Even compared to other IF platforms, it lacks certain features while doing others really well – if you find that you want to do things that CS doesn’t do that well (or at all) then absolutely you should consider moving to a different system.

The problem with radical subjectivism is that not everyone has perfect information and doesn’t always know what the best choices are. By pretending that everything is possible and everything is equally good, you’re setting up harmful expectations. People work years on CS projects. If they’re one month in and another type of system would suit the game better, then tell them! It’s the kindest thing you could do.