My apology for any interruption … May i ask what was the request regarding the criteria of outlining why HR trilogy did it well ? may i know, you want clarification in term of which “field” ? On why HR trilogy did it well ?? Was it just a general explanation on why we think HR is a good interactive novel where choice matter?
I’d say the argument “but if this thing (you critize) would not have happened the protag’d been screwed” is a tricky one.
There’s two ways of doing this:
- Put in a scene/event to have it in an afterwards give a reason (if any) ignoring other (often more likely) possibilities
- Built the scene up on what is already there.
There is the general example of the fork in the road:
Imagine the protagonist(s) are on their way to a town and come to a fork in the road. One path leads down into a forest, the other leads to the town (visible on the horizon already).
Now. The author wants two thibgs to happen. One: The leads find something in the woods thst will become relevant later, and Two: the leads arrive too late to fight back an attack on the town.
However, there is zero reason for them to head into the forest.
In approach one the author would, maybe just have them go there with some excuse, often stemming from a behavior they before never displayed.
In approach two the author will give them a genuine reason to head into the forest. Maybe have them head to town and find their contact went there and they are in a hurry.
Or, easier and much more effective: Remove the fork alltogether. Put the forest into the leads’ path.
Both approaches do lead to the same results, yes, but the first one is prone to open up plotholes etc.
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Agree with you on that…
for your example… assuming protagonist can’t fly , you can put that the forest route is a more direct route back to town, presumably reduce the time required to reach town… while the road lead back to town is more twisted and will take longer time to reach…
Hence it may “trick” protagonist into thinking that taking the forest route will reach town faster, but instead he/she encounter obstacles in the forest that further delay the time
Ah, should have clarified that the fork splits to the left and the right. So if they would head into the forest theyd move away from the town.
But as said, removing the fork alltogether works.
EDIT: To illustrate how well that can work, allow me to use an example from a (non-interactive) novel I’m working on:
I have a scene in there that called for a character to be at a certain place at a certain time, in a certain state of mind.
Now, originally the plan was to have the character ride into a magical forest for a shortcut, and get spat out weeks later entirely elsewhere. There he’d run into a guy who’d update him on everything and give ominous hints as to what is happening in that certain place, getting the character into a certain mood and rush there.
The second character was also intended to be a literal god, namely that the forest belongs to.
I did write the scenes, and… they felt wrong.
For several reasons:
- The character is not careless enough to just ride into the forest. He’s a dork, but he knows the dangers. Also him just riding into there took away everything I tried to build up about the dangers or forest beforehand.
- By having a literal divine intervention everything afterwards suddenly felt meaningless as there was the underlying idea of ‘this is how the gods planned it’
- It was lazy.
So I went back and rewrote the scene to make more sense for the character and the setting.
The result? Going from roughly 6k words to 45k, a bit more than a dozen new characters and several new plotthreads that tied into the mainplot…
Yes …i understand what you meant, your idea and concept is similar to that of the movie “Inception”, where the role of the author(s) in this case is to plant a Seed in the mind of readers and let it naturally growth into an acceptance within their sub-conscious …
Just like when the Protagonists of Inception want to influence and persuade that Antagonist Billionaire’s child into believing that he must break his father’s empire… while they can’t simply “Told” him that it was his destiny to break the empire, so they design multiple layers of sub-conscious within sub-conscious to form a story and conclusion in the end that convince the Antagonist into breaking his own empire …
Hence get back to the topic of "Fake choices of Hero Rise , the so called “Railroads” can be consider as the author’s attempt to design multiple layers of sub-conscious within sub-conscious in the mind of readers where in the end, most readers (including me) truly believe that it is destine as it was… although i must stress that there were major choices in Hero Rise which influence the final outcome of the ending , such as if we don’t chose to romance Pedigral, we won’t feel so Lost with her demise…
Just like Inception (who creates a dream) , require a chemist , an architect and the enforcers …
a Novel (who creates a story), require character interaction (in the role of chemist to mesmerise the readers), a plot-line ( in the role of architect to design a dream) and finally the action (in the role of enforcers to execute the story) …
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I think that’s because the question doesn’t really make sense. Of course it’s IF. It’s fiction that’s technically interactive. Sure you can try to add all sorts of highly subjective emotional arguments to muddy the waters but by anything close to an objective standard it is definitely interactive fiction.
@Eric_knight That’s nothing like what I’m saying. I’m giving my opinion on why I don’t think Heroes Rise makes sense as a power fantasy because of the things I said about it… which are my opinions. Your example is someone saying that people shouldn’t eat meat for protein because of objectively false “facts” about eating meat. You’re comparing my criticism of a work of fiction to pseudo science based dietary advice. Apples to Oranges. The only thing I can really get from it that might be similar is the “tone” but this is text, any tone that’s there was put there by your own mind, so there isn’t much I can do about it.
You’ve stated that you disagree with me on basically everything, but you only provide a single counterpoint on one thing I said, and it’s based on personal speculation rather than information that’s actually in the game.
In the end you actually pretty much say that it’s not power fantasy… So… really… what are you saying?
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Except that there are people that have been arguing for weeks and even in this thread, that it isn’t.
Well said.
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Well maybe they just needed me to come along and explain it. 
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I’m a little…disturbed though at how we have people in this thread that seem eager to try and elevate HR to be THE ultimate example of deep, multi-layered, hyper-planned through IF.
Like, dude…
it’s not that deep
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Not all IFs are deep and multilayered. HRs just so happens to be an IF that isn’t deep and multilayered as some of the other games published by CoG and HoG, but it’s an IF regardless.
Yeah, but look around how people seem out to declare it’s sooo deeeeeeeeeeeeeep
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And they’re entitled to their opinions. Just like we’re entitled to ours. But differing opinions or not, it doesn’t change the fact that HRs is an IF.
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Just on a note, your insistence on ‘it’s an IF nevertheless’ ‘it doesn’t change the fact it’s an IF’ strikes me as trying to say
‘you don’t think it’s an IF thus all your opinions are wrong’
Just noting.
Do not misrepresent what I am saying.
I’m not saying that your opinions are wrong; I have never said your opinions are wrong about the content of HR. Opinions are something that can’t be “wrong”.
But by the CoG and HoG standard definitions, HR is an IF. They’re the company that’s publishing these games and so it’s their standards that ultimately matter most because they’re publishing IF games.
If you started your own CYOA publishing company then you could create your own standards for CYOA and CS and that would be that. You could control and determine if a possible CYOA story would pass your criteria. HR, by your company standard’s would not be a CYOA, and thus not be published.
But HR was published by the CoG company, so clearly it met their standards of a CYOA. Otherwise they wouldn’t have published it and suggested that Sergi go back to the drawing board.
I am one of those people that disliked the role that I was forced into in HR and its successors. I didn’t like that my choices didn’t seem to matter and that I was punished if I didn’t conform to the author’s ideal instead of being punished for the choices that I made. In Choice of the Dragon, I would be punished if I wasn’t Cunning enough and my Hoard would be plundered - a choice/path that I had to commit to in order to get punished. In HR2, I was punished if I wasn’t interested in alliances. Now that could be excused because the setting was a league of superheroes within a game show, but I thought it was unfair and soured my opinion of the game.
If your opinion is HR isn’t a work of IF, then there’s nothing saying that you can’t hold that opinion and it doesn’t mean your opinion isn’t any less valid than anyone else’s. But the company CoG is responsible for publishing Sergi’s games. As consumers of the company’s products, our opinions are valid, but their standards have more weight than our opinions because they’re the publishers and they control what meets their criteria, what doesn’t, and thus what stories are put out for our consumption.
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Alright, I should have clarified something before this thread was found necessary:
I can agree that HR is an IF. But a CYOA? Not so much.
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That’s probably a topic for another thread altogether. 
Thanks for the clarification.
I think (correct me if I am wrong) that @Eiwynn made this thread because others and I were arguing that HR is not a CYOA and not much of an IF.
I think the misunderstanding stems from how individual people use the term (I know I did use them as interchangeable too, sorry)
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That’s a good point.
@Eiwynn - Could you include the definitions of CYOA and IF in the first post? Just so people could have a starting point, of some sort, thanks to the given definition.
Edit: I think Eiwynn created the thread because people were arguing that HR wasn’t an IF - if the thread’s title is anything to go by 
Like, going from what you wrote I believe we agree on two things:
IF is fiction that require more interaction from the reader than just opening the book and turning the page.
HR tends to railroad the player around in an amount that can be viewed as a fancy way of turning the page.
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Yes, I believe we do.
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