I have browsed the wiki and a few threads which have discussed the fact that writing a ‘wide’ game (which has lots of choices and branches) is not particularly worthwhile. Apparently most readers do not replay a game. This was mentioned specifically in the random section of the choice script documentation.
This struck me as highly unusual as the point of a story with meaningful choices is that it is meant to be replayed. So I was wondering if CoG have published any stats on this? I’d especially be interested to see if there’s significant variation by game. I think of Choice of Rebels and I find it hard to believe that most players only have 1 or 2 goes at it.
If there are stats generated in the backend, are these visible to authors?
And is it possible to harvest and output data from individual players games? Nothing personal of course, but just the ability to see how many times people play and what choices they make.
Is there a consensus that readers prefer interactive fiction with simple choices?
I’m not a novelist and will never write one, but I would like a go at a more classical choose your own adventure where there’s a lot of replayability.