Serialized stories don’t appeal to me. Their structure is “watered-down”. Short stories have a similar problem in that their structure suffers from their size, just in the reverse direction. They are so small that it is hard to find enough detail to be interesting.
All this to say, a story’s structure is a major love of mine.
Interactive media currently struggles with structure.
This can only be alleviated by a framework with its own jargon. For my studio, I’ve spent an absurd amount of time considering and theorizing the look of this. I am nearing a “90% solution” — this is one of those matters that a 100% solution is never discovered — but there are still areas I am buffering out.
Namely, the branching paradox.
As a creator, I wish to present stories that take advantage of the medium. I hope the story and the interactivity to be inseparable. This, however, seemingly creates a paradox:
- If a project is non-linear, this means that content will be missed on a single run.
- In a clean story, if any element is removed, the story is fundamentally changed.
This paradox, at first glance, seems impenetrable. If pieces are missed, but all pieces are required for the story to be understood, doesn’t this mean it is an impossible problem?
If you were to think this way, you’re not alone. When I consider how most works solve this, I notice that either rule #1 or rule #2 is tossed away. Either no or minimal content is missed, or much content may be missed, but it is ancillary to the main narrative. Similar to how television used to be structured, where, yes, the characters remain, but if any individual episode was missed, the consumer would still receive a complete story. Nothing was essential.
But I don’t want to do either of these.
Instead, let’s break down the rules and see where there is flex.
For #1, there is little flex. The only element that could, in theory, be useful to us is that it specifies that content is only necessarily missed if the user does a single run. This implies that on multiple runs, the user could get the full story. Unfortunately, however, it seems that this will not work for me for a couple reasons.
First, in a way, the variability becomes moot in a way. If the user is expected to see everything on offer, are the choices real? It becomes non-linear only in the way that a non-linear film is “non-linear”. The only real choice is what order the user sees the elements in. Why would I want to give them control over this!? I know the story better, I spend an egregious amount of time learning how to order these things, and now I’m giving it to someone who has neither the context nor the experience to lay things out correctly? I’m unloading my job onto someone with little to no expertise on the matter. Doesn’t seem very nice.
Additionally, it is counter to the spirit of Modern Visual Novel rule #2, which states “obstacles must branch rather than halt or reverse the user’s progress.” Yes, technically we’re branching, yet important “progress” is being halted by the branches themselves. This is no good.
So, not much flex for #1 on its own… So let’s look at #2. This is where we find some mobility, I think. Namely in that it doesn’t say anything about needing every element to give the user a complete story, but instead that each new element fundamentally changes said complete story.
This is to say, I believe the best tactic is to make it so that the user is certain to receive a full story on any given readthrough — a story that the author would be satisfied leaving the user with if they decide never to come back. A “closed loop”. However, if the user does decide to come back, and finds new elements through branching, the complete story that they received is fundamentally not the same as it was the first time they saw it. The new elements must become part of the equation for what the story is “saying”.*†
*I should do a blog about this sometime, but I view all human communication as “mantle” and “core”, with the “mantle” being what is literally said and the “core” being the implication. All story elements in this situation should affect the “core”… I don’t really care about the “mantle” for reasons other than aesthetics… Whether or not I should, however, is a serious question.
†It does pose the question whether or not the spirit of the MVN rule #2 is still broken. The reason I say no to this is that the loop becomes closed, so “progress” is not gained through the navigation of these branches.