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Bad Horse


Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.

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Feb
8th
2014

Questions about choose-your-own-adventures and "Moments" · 9:42pm Feb 8th, 2014

Some people loved where “Moments” went. Some people hated it, and believed something different should have happened. But I can’t satisfy everyone.

Or can I? I’m thinking about rewriting it as… drum roll...

…a choose-your-own-adventure clopfic.

Wait! :twilightoops: Ow! :pinkiegasp: Put down those pitchforks! I can explain.

I wanted to stuff a lot of different things into this story, and only some of them got in. And it is an adventure story, which lends itself to the choose-your-own format.

As for the clop… well, that was one (or two) of the paths I didn’t take in the original story.

This raises some questions:

1. CYOA books often have different branches that are incompatible with each other, because they reveal inconsistent facts. Branches in interactive fictions like Infocom made were always consistent with each other—there was only one starting situation before you began, and you explored it by taking different paths. CYOA-style explores possible worlds; Infocom-style explores possibilities within a single world. What are the pros & cons of each?

2. Similarly, different branches could diverge into different styles. Does a CYOA get more stylistic/atmospheric leeway, to change between branches? As a linear fiction, I can take Moments through a chapter or two of black comedy, but I can’t end there. As a branching fiction, I think I can have some branches that end in black comedy, as long as others don’t. Not every story leaf (an ending to a branching structure) has to have that final consistent closure, because it doesn’t have the final word. How far can I stretch those endings? Can one branch end in cloppy comedy?

3. While graphing out the tree structure, I found I couldn’t go straight from chapter 3 to 4, or 4 to 5, or 5 to 6 in a CYOA format as they’re written now. The CYOA format needs to end a chapter with a question, such as, “Go to chapter 8 if you think Twilight should tell the townsfolk that they’re going to die.”

In order to do this, you have to have presented some new info in the scene, and then had your protagonist reflect on this information after the scene, so that that action doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is the “scene and sequel” structure advised by Dwight V. Swain and Jack Bickham. Whereas “Moments” currently leaves out the “sequel” portion in chapters 3, 4, and 5, so that you have to start reading the next chapter and infer what Twilight was thinking. And those chapters in particular seem to have lost readers--they kept reading the story, but they disengaged emotionally and started wondering about plausibility (see this comment by Titanium Dragon).

If I imagine rewriting a story as a CYOA, and there’s a chapter break that I couldn’t end with a “Should the protagonist do X or Y?” followed immediately by the next chapter, does that mean there’s a problem with the original (non-CYOA) story?

4. AFAIK, nobody has ever written a “serious” CYOA. All the ones I’ve seen are adventure and/or comedy fics, without any theme. Why? Can CYOA not support “literature”?

5. Should I post it as a separate story, and leave the original linear version up? Can I, or would that be against the site rules?

6. How does it effect the tragic or sad-heroic endings if I have a happy ending? Would you still feel the impact of the story's original ending if there were a different branch that led to saving the ponies?

Report Bad Horse · 1,195 views · Story: Moments ·
Comments ( 52 )

At university, I had a professor who kept going on about 'hypertext' fiction and how it was the NEXT EVOLUTION of literature. This was basically CYOA. It uh, never took off.

I am 99% sure a choose-own-adventure clopfic has already been done before, but hey, that's never stopped writers in the past. Personally, I thought you did a bang-up job with the ending, and wouldn't want to see it changed, but in the end I'd be glad to see the story expanded upon. Also, CYOA is something I haven't seen much of on this site, so it'd be interesting to see what you do with it in a more serious fashion. :twilightsmile:

Comments driven story yes please

All the CYOA stories I've ever read are in second-person POV, to better accommodate the "What do you want to do next?" question. I wonder if you'd have to edit Moments to fit that. Also, all of them featured a blank-slate character (the reader) as the protagonist instead of a preestablished character like Twilight Sparkle.

You're breaking new ground here, and I'm excited to see where this goes. :rainbowkiss:

1811586 You'd think that was what hypertext meant. But the people who did it, like Robert Coover, didn't write CYOAs. If they thought that was what they were doing, they misunderstood. They gave you "choices", but ones with no cues to make you care which one you took, and no resulting narrative significance.

Really, they sucked. They displayed a complete lack of understanding of story, probably because they were written by literary elite types like Robert Coover who prided themselves on not writing anything so vulgar as stories. That's why they didn't take off. If they had written things like this instead, literary history might have been different.

And if a professor told you that while you were at university, you're older than I'd guessed. :rainbowwild:

1811633 I've read a fair number of CYOA stories that weren't second person. Just finished a Zelazy Amber spinoff where "you" were Random, in fact, which was pretty nicely done.

I'd be very interested to see a CYOA version of this. I think the nature of the original story with its repeating versions of that same time period actually quite lends itself to the idea. That's really what Twilight was doing, living out that time the way I always read CYOA stories, where when I reached an ending I'd just loop back and see what other choices I could have made.

1. In the Infocom style (which continues to the present day in fan and indie works), the tree of branches as a whole is treated as a single, coherent work; parallel branches are part of the same story*, even if they don't belong to the same timeline.

By contrast, the CYOA style offers more diversity, at the cost of the artistic coherence of the gestalt. Infocom-style is a triptych; CYOA-style is a gallery.

(* That is, not just set in the same universe, but part of the same work, in a way that e.g. sequels aren't.)

2. Branching genres probably works better in the more schizophrenic CYOA style. Diversity of genres in a single work can work, as in Doctor Who or The Sweetie Chronicles: Fragments, but in that case the diversity itself tends to become one of the main themes of the overall work.

3. I don't think there's a question in section 3; I only included this line so it wouldn't look like I missed a number.

4. You might find serious CYOAs in the Electronic Literature Collection, but on the other hoof you may just find wankily pretentious Modern Art; Sturgeon's Law applies. You could also look for CYOAs at the IFDB, but not all of those are serious.

I like the idea of a serious attempt at a CYOA. That would be great. I'd read that.

I don't like the idea of a clopfic, though. Especially with a story like Moments—the premise isn't suited for that sort of thing, and I think it would harm the story. I probably won't read it if it's a clopfic.

I enjoyed Moments very much. Personally, if you're going to rewrite it, I'd leave the original up for posterity. I'd rather see it as a separate story, so that users with their filter permanently on can read the original, but I'd also put a link to the other story in each of the other's descriptions.

That's just my two cents, but I think it does have potential.

:trixieshiftleft:

I.....

I suppose I can see why you would do this with "Moments." I think I took enough damage from it as a linear story though.:ajsleepy: Skip the clop though.

Oh, in a only slightly related note, I did a brief spat of research on the Mesozoic era. The story would have ended with the impact event that ended the Cretaceous period (65 Mil years ago), the Triassic period (which ended 200 mil years ago) did not end with a meteor impact (or at least it's considered highly unlikely), it only saw the start of the dinosaurs, and they hadn't gotten very big yet. Certainly not big enough to confuse with dragons. And Pangea was only beginning to break up at it's conclusion. :twilightsheepish:

1811698

2. Branching genres probably works better in the more schizophrenic CYOA style.

I had an ending in mind in which Twilight uses her discovery that she gains a little power every time she has sex to accumulate enough magical power in 23 minutes to leap back farther in time and save the day. Then she asks Celestia, indirectly, whether she's ever done anything similar, and Celly just smiles and glances around at the seemingly-useless Royal Guard.

You're probably right that that ending doesn't belong in this story. :fluttershysad:
...but I still like it. :trollestia:

3. I don't think there's a question in section 3; I only included this line so it wouldn't look like I missed a number.

Sorry; let me rephrase that as a question:
If I imagine rewriting a story as a CYOA, and there’s a chapter break that I couldn’t end with a “Should the protagonist do X or Y?” followed immediately by the next chapter, does that mean there’s a problem with the original (non-CYOA) story?

The IFDB is bigger than I remember. They need knighty to redesign their website. There are some CYOAs there; thanks for the tip.

1811907 Yeah, I just misspoke when I originally said Triassic.

CLOP CLOP CLOP!

If the end of the world isn't a good time for some all-out, pile-driving, furniture-splintering FUCKING, when is? :ajsmug:

Where are you aiming for with the clop sections? Is your objective to write scenes that contain sex or to write scenes that are primarily meant to be erotic for the reader? I don't mean that you can't do both, but the 'ew clopfics no' crowd is usually more receptive to the former than the latter. (Actually when I say both I'm neglecting the distinction between doing both in the same chapter/scene and both but in separate chapters/scenes. Insert "...and in the story!" joke here.)

Well, I like the idea, but I don't see Moments as lending itself to a clopfic and I'm not convinced about a CYOA.

My problem with clopfic is basically that the story is a real mood killer. I could see sex being included from a story / character perspective, but I don't see a reader getting involved enough to enjoy the clop for being clop, rather than a study on the characters involved.

One of the selling points for CYOA is that the reader gets to change how the story ends, but again I can't see Moments ending in a way where the reader would feel that their choices were meaningful. Artistically, I could see that as an interesting comment, but it would be very difficult to make the experience enjoyable.

A CYOA story lets the reader influence the protagonist, which dilutes the protagonist's character and Moments feels very character driven.

That being said, I'd go CYOA rather than Infocom - apart from the easier writing and easier shifts in tone, the CYOA approach would play to character while Infocom would play to the setting.

I don't see question 3 as being a problem with the story, just a possible issue with break points. You could consider the option for the reader to influence the environment rather than the protagonist - rather than say what Twilight does, say how the world reacts to Twilight's changes. Might give a different perspective on things.

CYOAs basically make for difficult serious literature because the main protagonist becomes a cipher. The reader will not necessarily 'role-play' rigorously, which leaves the rest of the story (other characters, the environment) trying to take up the slack. I've seen plenty of serious attempts at serious CYOA games (read: interactive fiction games), but comedy works better than the serious stuff where reality is a little weak and there is no cohesive storyline.

I'd suggest publishing it as a new story, keeping the existing story available, purely so that people can see where the new story came from and the decisions you made in the process. Educational.

1811915 Right then.

3. I don't think it's necessarily a problem; there are lots of ways to end a chapter, and writing advice of the form "you must/mustn't follow X formula" is almost always wrong.

Ursula K. Le Guin on the rules of writing:

[When your story] goes to an editor, it should be typed, double-spaced, on one side of the paper only, with generous margins—especially the left-hand one—and not too many really grotty corrections per page.

P.S. I usually prefer to minimize the splinters in my fucking, personally.

1812093

CYOAs basically make for difficult serious literature because the main protagonist becomes a cipher. The reader will not necessarily 'role-play' rigorously, which leaves the rest of the story (other characters, the environment) trying to take up the slack.

Actually, it's possible to characterize the protagonist very effectively through presenting a restricted range of choices, especially combined with competent narration that conveys clearly why just these options are under consideration.

For example, suppose the situation is that Twilight has just arrived in Ponyville for the first time.

Playing as Fluttershy, you might have choices like:
> Turn and run.
> Back away slowly.
> Try to hide.
> Wait for her to make the first move - maybe she'll decide to ignore you?

Playing as Rarity, you might have choices like:
> MAKEOVER!
> Ooh, is she from Canterlot? She could be your ticket out of this town!
> "I'm so sorry, dear, but I simply must finish these decorations by tonight - I'm sure you understand."
> A customer! And you have simply the perfect color of silk to set off her mane...

This is exaggerated for effect, of course, but I think you get the idea.

1812190

I absolutely agree that each individual choice can be tailored to suit the character, but each choice reflects subtle differences in the character's approach, and the reader is unlikely to be consistent in these choices.

The character does not develop over the course of the story. The reader can learn, but the character probably won't, or vice versa. If the character at the end of the story is the same as they were at the beginning, what has the story really said?

With a story like Moments, I'm just not certain you can get away with an inevitable ending and a character that doesn't learn anything from the experience. If the character doesn't change and the ending doesn't change, what does that leave you to have an impact on? Why chose?

I'll comment more later, but my initial thought:

Whatever you decide to do, leave the original version as-is, and available to read. It's that good, so don't throw it away. :moustache::twilightsmile:

In terms of a serious CYOA with themes that does something literary with the genre, I don't know of any pony ones, but in general, I would recommend Katawa shoujo. While the concept seems completely unserious (a high school anime dating sim featuring girls with disabilities), it is very serious in tone and provides a good example of how involving the reader in shaping the story can enhance storytelling. Although it is a visual novel, the appeal of the story comes mainly though the text and narrative, not the pictures, so it's still comparable to what you're trying to do. However, it might count more as a game than a CYOA, because there are good and bad endings, so implicitly, the readers are making their choices with a goal in mind. Plus, the story is more of a branching, linear narrative rather than one with looping, intersecting scenes as seen in many CYOA stories.

Basically, the story revolves around the lives of five different girls, and the choices the reader makes in Act I determines whose story the reader will follow. Notably, the protagonist is slightly different in the five different acts, reflecting his choices in Act I. For example, getting to one character's (Rin's) route requires acting fairly neutrally toward all the characters in Act I, and in Rin's story, the protagonist is more aimless and detached than in the other routes. Similarly, the different storylines seemed tailored to the types of people who would make the choices leading to the different routes. For example, getting to the storyline of the bossy, aggressive girl requires making a choice fairly early in Act I, even before meeting the rest of the cast. Pursuing that character's story requires the reader to match her decisiveness. This is perhaps an argument for letting the characters develop in different ways depending on the choices the reader picks.

One nice feature of the overall story is that information you learn from one route sheds insight into how characters act in the other parallel storylines. In one of the "bad" endings, the protagonist gets dumped, and another one of the characters goes to console him. The scene is nice although you don't quite understand why that character would come help the protagonist unless you've played her route and realize that she's gone through a similar situation. This is perhaps an argument for keeping some things consistent across the branching story.

One thing that I liked most about one of the girl's stories (Rin's) was that the act of making choices at the end of each scene really added to the narrative. Overall, her story is about whether it's possible for two people to really understand what's going on in each others' minds and whether that understanding is necessary for love to develop. In her route, many of the choices are rather philosophical in nature and really challenge the reader to try to understand what each scene reveals about her character (it turns out that most of the decisions have only minor effects on the story. It's not whether you understand her that matters, it's the desire or need to understand her that's important, reflecting the overall message of her story). Similarly, in other routes, some of the choices help to focus the reader's attention on some of the most thematically important issues. This is perhaps an argument that a well executed CYOA can address certain themes and ideas better than a linear, non-branching narrative.

1812264 The range of options on later choices can be affected by which choices were selected earlier, reflecting the new character. If you chose to follow your friends into the scary forest in chapter 1, then when the big bad shows up in chapter 2, you lose the option to run away but gain the option to give a how-dare-you speech.

1812264 With a story like Moments, I'm just not certain you can get away with an inevitable ending and a character that doesn't learn anything from the experience. If the character doesn't change and the ending doesn't change, what does that leave you to have an impact on? Why chose?

Why would I have an inevitable ending and a character that doesn't learn anything from the experience?

This raises possibly the most-important question: How does it effect the tragic or sad-heroic endings if I have a happy ending?

1812845
It depends on the point of divergence. Does the protagonist make a different decision? Then the bad ends are Tragedy. Is it dumb luck, or an attempt that succeeds instead of fails? Then it's an opportunity that was lost due to circumstances beyond the protagonist's control. Was some sort of background information different? Then the protagonist never really had a chance.

Even in the last case, though, the existence of happy endings makes the story as a whole feel less hopeless. (Edit: unless you get there by blatantly ridiculous means, so that it doesn't feel like something that could have happened.)

For my part, I loved the original version and I'd kind of hate to lose it, especially since it's currently sitting in my Fimfiction Top 5.

That said, I think doing this as a branching story could be really cool and a lot of fun. I think I'd probably prefer the CYOA format inasmuch as I like the idea of exploring multiple possibly conflicting realities (and I figure that's thematically inline with the present story, but I'm an Anathem junkie, so yeah).

I definitely think you could have a lot of fun playing around with stylistic and thematic differences between various branches. I'm not opposed to clop, so having some of them end in cloppy black comedy sounds like quite a lot of fun. That said, my attitude is probably colored by the fact that I feel like the present story has an unabashedly happy ending. If I didn't think there was a good ending, I'd probably find a multitude of endings more frustrating than rewarding, since it'd basically be like taunting me with lack of catharsis.

As for chapters 3, 4, and 5, they're probably my favorite part of the story as it currently exists, so I wouldn't want to see them changed a whole lot, personally—at least not without having a record of the original (expanded) version.

Leave "Moments" as is. Do the CYOD (Choose Your Own Doom) as a new and different story.

All I ask is if it's gonna be a clopper, let everyone know going in. If the sign on the door says STATE SPIDER HATCHERY you pretty much already know whether you wanna see what's behind it.

1812525
Ah yes, Katawa Shoujo. A visual novel with some pornographic scenes about a guy going to a school for disabled people, and he can date one of five differently disabled girls - one with no legs, one with no arms, one who is blind, one who is deaf, and one who is badly scarred (and not in the "good scars" kind of way) but actually otherwise seems okay. Oh, and it was made by 4chan.

And it is good and a fairly serious and sensitive treatment of the subject matter, with shockingly high production values.

I don't think anyone will ever understand how that happened.

1813171
This got added to my book of quotes. State spider hatchery. I'm still giggling on the inside.

1813420

I don't think anyone will ever understand how that happened.

Remember this is the same 4chan that gave us the brony fandom.

/b/ is Discord: often malicious, but fundamentally chaotic. They'll think nothing of the most wretched acts of evil imaginable, but sometimes they'll decide to be nice and beautiful and wonderful just for the hell of it. Because why not?

...holy crap, Discord is /b/. Avatar of chaos, 4chan's random board; ultimately tamed by a combination of the awesomeness of the Orbital Friendship Cannon and the adorableness of Fluttershy.

5. Definitely keep the original version up. I don't know what the site rules would require, but don't disappear good literature.

... No one else is going to say it? Alright, I will.

Bad Horse, you just want to be a real bad horse and put poor Big Macintosh through the most devious and grim sexual experiences ever, don't you? And they be getting worse and worse as Twilight gets more and more bored!

You are a monster. A terrible, happiness-destroying monster that wants to make Fluttershy walk in on Big Mac balls-deep into a squealing Twilight Sparkle as she siphons out his life force to fuel a dark ritual that will break the cycle.

For the safety of our children, I'm revoking your writer's license; maybe some time in the real world will snap you back to an acceptable reality.

... I eagerly await your next work.

1811640 I so wish that someone would make a pony visual novel, or interactive fiction for that matter. I believe that intersection of literature and interactive medium contains lots of unexplored potential, interactive fiction have scratched the surface back in the 1980's but then the mainstream went some other way. Visual novels were lauded as "the best form of virtual reality that we've got" by someone or other, but they only seem to thrive in Japan. I, for instance, keep being amazed by the fact that there were zero commercial attempts to do visual novels on the Web. One could have thought that all new VN's should have gone to the Web, by now, but, somehow there are none. Maybe because they are only big in Japan, and Japan is strange that way, but still - to only sell your software on CDs in the age of cloud technologies? Anyway, if I ever got up to it, I would definitely try to do one.

I would love to try myself at making some tiny little bit of interactive literature with ponies to see how this goes, but, judging by my progress lately... I don't know when, if ever, I'll even get there.

I could ask you to look at Undum - one of the latest (2010) and slickest engines for interactive fiction, all web-HTML+JS. If I will get to doing something interactive-fiction-y, this one is the first on my list. Good examples of what can be done with it are The Play and Almost Goodbye.

4. AFAIK, nobody has ever written a “serious” CYOA. All the ones I’ve seen are adventure and/or comedy fics, without any theme. Why? Can CYOA not support “literature”?

My hypothesis is that's because few ever tried to do anything. The first movies to ever appear also weren't impressive masterpieces by any stretch of imagination, or so I heard. As one enthusiastic explorer of interactive medium have put it, speaking of video games, "We have discovered four letters and eagerly ran off to write words with them. But maybe we'd better discover some more letters first?" (translation mine)

5. Should I post it as a separate story, and leave the original linear version up? Can I, or would that be against the site rules?

I would definitely post it as a separate story. Firstly, the original linear version could act as a teaser for non-linear one. Secondly, interactive fiction is still at an experimental stage; we don't know for sure the capabilities and limitations of it; we don't know what will add to experience and what will harm it. FWIW, the non-linear version may end up worse than the original. So the original should stay.

6. How does it effect the tragic or sad-heroic endings if I have a happy ending? Would you still feel the impact of the story's original ending if there were a different branch that led to saving the ponies?

If I was doing it, I would take away the possibility to go back to the earlier point in the story and make a different choice. This way, there are several possibilities, the reader may choose to go with one or the other, but they must choose one and their choice has palpable consequences. As the reader makes choices, the story progresses forward. You can re-read it, but you can never go back. In the end, you're stuck with what you've got as the result of the choices you made. A short game You Only Live Once has explored the concept of irreversibility a little. Maybe I'd end up with something less radical than that; that could be figured out by experimentation: maybe only let the reader go back and choose another path for real money? And/or limited number of times, or each re-made choice becomes exponentially more expensive? Definitely, something should be put in place; free "save/load" should be disallowed. And yes, that requires some server part; in case of Undum, it is completely absent and should be coded in.

1815108
> Undum
Other leading interactive fiction platforms include Twine (hyperlink-style) and Inform 7 (parser-style). (If you're considering Inform 7, you may also be interested in Playfic, a shiny thing for Inform 7 in the browser.)

1815303 Playfic is kind of YouTube for Inform 7 stories, right?

Would you agree that Undum is the slickest one? I don't know about the features, but it's the only truly web-based interactive fiction platform that I know of. Also, from the looks of it, it's the one that makes interactive fiction authoring looks like the furthest from programming... while actually being programming. I believe a further step is needed for mass adoption of interactive fiction: to make editing interactive fiction as accessible as editing conventional, linear one. One doesn't have to become a coder to write interactive fiction in the twenty-first century. (dreaming:twilightsmile:)

1816162
> Playfic is kind of YouTube for Inform 7 stories, right?
Kind of, yes. There's also an in-browser editor, though, so it's more like Fimfiction for Inform 7 stories.

> Would you agree that Undum is the slickest one?
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any really major advantages of Undum over Twine. In both cases, the games are served as webpages and played in a browser, but no in-browser editor exists (except the pre-alpha Twine 2 the only in-browser editor is for the Twine 2, which is a forthcoming "sequel" to Twine).

My underinformed impressions are:
* Twine has a graphical editor if you're on Windows or Mac, or can use Wine, or are willing to use the pre-alpha browser editor.
* Undum seems to have more support for CRPG-like stats; you can do this in Twine, but Undum makes it somewhat easier.
* Twine is a little easier to get started with.
* Undum is a little easier to use at an intermediate level.

Can you confirm or disconfirm any of these impressions?

1816242

Can you confirm or disconfirm any of these impressions?

Actually, not, since I'm only somewhat familiar with Undum, which I was trying to learn to use at some point.

I went to Twine's homepage, saw downloads for Windows and Mac and understood that this is another IF platform that runs on a local computer. So, it publishes to HTML, and version 2.0 has in-browser editor. Cool! That's what Undum (or any modern IF authoring tool) needs IMO, anyway.

1816329
On further reading, it turns out that Twine 2 is not just an updated version, but a complete rewrite. So I'd recommend the desktop-application graphical editor as the best way to write in Twine.

Edit: Also, there's a cross-platform version of the graphical editor.

1811748
There's a clopfic branch, and it will probably be obvious that if you say "Twilight should run immediately to Sweet Apple Acres, and seduce Big Mac," that sex is about to happen. Bad Horse could even pull a Dragon Age II and put a heart emote by the options that will lead towards clop.

1812190 This is done to great effect in Gamer Mom, especially because the UI is used to convey more information than just text.

6. How does it effect the tragic or sad-heroic endings if I have a happy ending? Would you still feel the impact of the story's original ending if there were a different branch that led to saving the ponies?

Three gaming experiences I've had that come to mind, not counting Gamer Mom:

A. Did you ever play One Chance? It's a CYOA flash game that is set up so that you "can't" play it more than once. (It's not difficult to trick if you know what you're doing, but that alters the feel, so I'm not sure you should.)

I found it from someone saying the ending they got, and knowing that that ending existed made it easy to recreate the path that led there. I recommend playing it blind. Once you've done that, then look in to the other ones- and it may give the choice you made more weight.

B. One of the things I found interesting about The Stanley Parable was how the endings reflected the choices you make, which was only obvious when you saw many of the endings. When you always did what you were told, the run ended with a pleasant scene and the narrator telling you that you did a good job and you won. When you always did the exact opposite of what you were told, the run ended with you having to commit suicide while the narrator begged you to not--you have so much to live for!--and you had to attempt multiple times to succeed. The violent disobedience led to a violent end, and it made it all the more sad to have experienced both endings, and imagine choosing the violent one.

C. Mordin in Mass Effect 3. Incoming wall of text with spoilers, though I'll minimize any ME-specific jargon to make it understandable if you haven't heard of ME3. (Also, other ME3 players, focus on the on-topic part of this, not the game itself or my description of it.) So, as the 3 suggests, this is third in a line of RPGs where you make choices that you can import from one game to the next. My second favorite NPC in the series is from the tech-race. In the semi-distant past, the violent-race was poised to crush everyone else and dominate the galaxy, so the tech-race engineered a plague that dropped their children-per-women to about 2, from ~200, by making it so that only 1 out of 100 children survives pregnancy. (The numbers are inconsistent in various ways, but oh well.) As a side effect, this huge amount of personal tragedy destroys the pleasant parts of the psychology of the violent-race, and their numbers dwindle as they murder each other and don't even try for the 200 pregnancies they need to replace themselves.

However, the plague is genetic, and the ones that do survive are the ones least affected, and it looks like they're a threat again. The simulations all agree: huge probability that there will be galactic war that everyone else will lose, unless they design a new plague. A few years before you meet Mordin, he was part of the redesign team, and it works.

But then Mordin has a change of heart, and decides that he should cure the plague before he dies of old age. For plot reasons, this is dangerous and will kill him if he does it, but he's dying anyway. Nothing about the broader situation has changed, though- the simulations still predicted war and destruction if the plague was cured. My character trusted Mordin, and said "don't do this; I will stop you."

Mordin says "Okay. Shoot me." then walks into an elevator, ending the conversation and starting a cutscene. Mass Effect sometimes has "interrupt" actions during cutscenes, where you need to click a button to do something, and if you don't it won't happen. The interrupt icon showed up, telling me that I needed to click a button to actually follow through on my threat, and shoot my second favorite character because of a major disagreement.

I went through with it, and did not sleep easily that night. That was probably the most emotionally affected I've ever been by a game.

And then after I finished the game I learned that if you made a different choice than I did back in the first game, it was possible to convince Mordin that the violent-race was not saveable, and he would give up on curing the plague when you ask him nicely, and then he survives. This bothered me, but I don't know how much of that was because the way they laid out the tree, and how much of that because the situation I found myself in, and the hard choice I made, was avoidable.

Actually, a CYOA format might actually be really really cool! This is the first story in which you can actually justify the format in a narrative quite easily. I remember when I used to read CYOA books when I was a lot younger I would go through and read every option. In this story, that wouldn't feel like a narrative contrivance. It might even be able to get the feeling along of twenty-four or somesuch minutes of helplessness even better.

So yeah, could be cool.
At the same time, I feel a little bit how Bradel feels in that I revere the original format quite a lot.

1816162 I've moved in the opposite direction. My latest IF engine was a "text physics engine" in Prolog, that also had a planning engine and a set of social-convention rules, to let characters reason about what other characters (or the player) might do, based on their beliefs about their goals and what they had seen. For instance, a character who had been with you in a room where you had seen something would know you had seen it, and would be able to infer that you would return to that room if you had a goal that required getting that item.

I think we're closer to making IF that's read by the masses than written by the masses. It's almost a pre-requisite.

My latest IF engine was a "text physics engine" in Prolog, that also had a planning engine and a set of social-convention rules, to let characters reason about what other characters (or the player) might do, based on their beliefs about their goals and what they had seen. For instance, a character who had been with you in a room where you had seen something would know you had seen it, and would be able to infer that you would return to that room if you had a goal that required getting that item.

Sounds rather cool. Did you end up making anything readable?

I think we're closer to making IF that's read by the masses than written by the masses.

Either way would be nice, I think.

1826512 Sounds rather cool. Did you end up making anything readable?

No; I just kept hacking at the game engine until I got too busy & moved on to other things. It was too slow at the time. It would take about a minute per turn on a Sun workstation in a small world. I decided to wait until computers were faster. It would probably take a second per turn on a modern quad-core desktop. I wonder if Prolog's Rete network could be run on a graphics processor.

My dissertation work was related, in taking a system like Prolog and restricting it to pursuing only certain lines of logic, using environmental cues. It didn't work very well, and my advisor wasn't interested, so I never finished that.

There's a trade-off in making the characters use the same knowledge base as the physics engine. It saves a lot of time, but it means they can't deal with uncertainty in their predictions & plans.

1826614

No; I just kept hacking at the game engine until I got too busy & moved on to other things

That's what might be happening to most attempts at innovation in interactive media (interactive fiction, and to some extent, computer games, though games are better off). Writing a story while coding a game engine while at the same time figuring the capabilities of the new medium is hard, unnecessarily so, I presume. It's so much more realistic if you're doing just one of these at the same time. Thus, with regard to your earlier statement

I think we're closer to making IF that's read by the masses than written by the masses.

I would say the most likely way I see for the former to happen is through the latter. The way I see it, technology is strongly democratizing art and enabling new forms of it, by making the impossible possible and the possible easy (also sometimes the common obsolete, like photography had killed portraiture as a source of income). Say, like the emergence of electric instruments spawned new genres of music, and I believe the advent of chromatic printing is not coincidental with the rise of art nouveau that happened about that time? One would think that with computers becoming commonplace, the potential of intersection of fiction and interactivity would have been explored long ago, and today we would have the established formats for interactive text (like we do for static text, graphics, audio and video), and FiMFiction would accept it, likewis other fiction websites. Alas, to this day, to write interactive fiction, one still has to be both a writer, a programmer and a researcher. That's too much to ask of everyone. You will only get a few masterpieces done that way by someone with mad skillz (like that game Another World: the guy wrote the script and the graphics and coded the engine in assembly, and made level editors with them and the game is awesome) or, maybe, you will get nothing. When we'll have accessible tools for creating and publishing interactive fiction, with a usability of FiMFiction or blog, then, of course, I think, there'll be people exploring the capabilities of the medium in all different ways, and they'll figure out what works, and someone talented will use it, and then we'll see what this medium is capable of. Till this day, I believe, we're stuck in the dark age of interactive fiction, like the guys who learned four letters and eagerly ran off to write words with them, instead of learning more of the alphabet.

Now, I always wanted to see if I can to do my little bit about the situation and hack together a little interactive something that's better than the current status quo. My plan was to hack on Undum to make a) some fiction with it that will hopefully show off some potential benefits of interactivity, b) make a tool for easier writing of IF out of it. I'm not there, though; I'm still learning Javascript/node.js. Now I'll have to check out what is possible with Twine and the general state of the art. Engine in Prolog sounds plenty cool, but it must be harder to implement and harder to make other people write stories with it, so for now my sympathies lie with Undum. I also like the fact that in Undum the book writes itself as you're reading it, the text adds to the book (in The Matter of the Monster the author experimented with adding text at the beginning rather than at the end; it took me 3 playthroughs to grok it.). One thing that needs to be added to it, IMO. is finality and persistence: when you turn the last page of the book, the ending will still be there when you'll return back to it; and the minute after that, and the year after that, too. I'm not sure which features will be actually worth copying from the physical books, but just in case by default I want to leave the same anything but what we deliberately change.

Now, motivated by this exchange, I'm going to:
• contact authors and/or pro users of Twine to arrange a video demonstration of the capabilities of the system
• see if I can arrange a group couching course with a node.js guru and split the cost between the participants
If anyone is interested in any of these, please contact me.

1826968

Now, motivated by this exchange, I'm going to:

• contact authors and/or pro users of Twine to arrange a video demonstration of the capabilities of the system

• see if I can arrange a group couching course with a node.js guru and split the cost between the participants

Are you aware of Fear of Twine? It's not really what you're talking about, but it might be a starting point.

Also, this is a video tutorial. Again, not exactly what you want, but related.

...Can the CYOA clopfic have hoof tickling? It's bondage to a lighter degree. I'm sure S&M would be a choice in this, so it would stand to reason something that's the opposite but still in the same vein should be another choice.

Or bastinado. With hooves.

*drools*

Do this and I'll be your personal emo slave for a month. I know you like feeding on bronys' emotional negativity, and I like producing said emotions. I'll bring chains and crap (just gotta stop at Rona). Or maybe find them rusted outta a dumpster. Ooo, it can have a grungy dirty aesthetic!

It'll be like make believe Hostel, except instead of scythes and cutting torches there'll be super sad shit in the form of various media.

It'll be awesome... where did I put that collar? The cute one with the giant bell?

And then I read the rest of the post, not homing in on the word "clopfic" this time.

I don't think I'd like to see Moments with clop scenes heavily ingrained. Maybe separate from the main story, yes, but I dunno... I like it how it is currently.

Would clop add or take away from the story?

I can kinda see why you considered going with this. The whole time loop thing is like a jab at CYOA. How many times have you fucked up in a CYOA book and backtracked, effectively going back in time to stop that ending T-Rex from falling on its ass on top of you? For me, quite a few. Cause when I checked that book out in elementary, some asshat tore out the pages that had the other choices. Seriously, who the fuck does that to a CYOA book? I feel like part of my childhood was taken away... think being annihilated by a comet is bad? How about being sat on by a T-Rex over and fucking over.

As for the clop scenes... I can kinda see Purple Panderer wanting to steal Red Assed Baboon from Butter Bitch.

Stop those technically virgin lips from being technically virgin... wait, how does that work in a time loop? Bah...

Twilight could have infinite first times with Big Mac for all infinity, thus causing humies to never be created... does this count as a bad ending? When sex ruins the greater good, maybe the greater good wasn't so great.

Just a CYOA version of Moments would be amusing just to screw with Twilight's whole damning situation. The sex might be lulzy.

Eey... this is kinda as interactive as when defender2222 put the Mad Libs chapter in Secret Origins of Scootaloo.

As for putting a CYOA Moments on fimfiction, if it isn't allowed, maybe posting it on a different site and putting a link to it on your blog or something? The only other fanfiction site I can remember is mediaminer.org but I dunno if they allowed CYOA... maybe they didn't care. Maybe they're dead. It was a shitty site. BTW, don't search up any Witch Hunter Robin fics on there, I'm warning you...

I think I'm going to go with I liked Moments because I found it fucking hilarious. The idea that somepony screwing up and stagnating her world so many times before finally accepting deth amuses me.

Eey... there's 22 minutes in an episode without commercials. Bet Twilight wished she had some commercials.

1829468 1813171 1811907 1811748 When I said clop, I really meant adding sex in one or more story paths. Not changing it to a Penthouse-letters confessional. Maybe something like 1814155 said...

Twilight could have infinite first times with Big Mac for all infinity, thus causing humies to never be created... does this count as a bad ending? When sex ruins the greater good, maybe the greater good wasn't so great.

It does sound like a pretty appealing scenario, doesn't it?

A very large survey that had people record what they were doing and how happy they were at the time found that the thing that made people the most happy, by far, was sex; and that a large fraction of the sum of human happiness comes from the small amount of time spent having sex. Makes you wonder why we don't do it more often.

1829945 I know what you meant. The difference between a sex scene and a lemon (what bronies call "clop") is that one describes that the characters are having sex, and the other goes "his big, bulbous penis was squashed into my face".

I do not want a clop.

1830155


1829945
That's more or less what I figured you meant. I just am with Ed on this. "Moments" is fine the way it is. A CYoD (I am in love with that term forever.) sounds really interesting, with a few naughty bits or without, but I think "Moments" should be left be.

If you DO go ahead and do it with "Moments" though, then have one of the sex bits actually have two possible choices at the end of it. One choice leads to ruination of all, the other results in saving the day. Because I think that would be cool.

It does sound like a pretty appealing scenario, doesn't it?

...Point.

A very large survey that had people record what they were doing and how happy they were at the time found that a very, very large fraction of the sum of human happiness comes from the small amount of time spent having sex. Makes you wonder why we don't do it more often.

:trixieshiftleft:
You would think, wouldn't you...

Comment posted by yamgoth deleted Feb 26th, 2014
Comment posted by yamgoth deleted Feb 26th, 2014
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