Chapter 7 Simple Strategies That Don’t Work
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN EXPERIMENTING with interactive storytelling for years, and many approaches have been tried. Some have proved to be failures; I have mentioned a few of them elsewhere in the book. In this chapter, I shall address these examples in more detail.
Branching Trees
Everybody seems to make the same mistake when they first approach interactive storytelling: They build a branching tree structure (see a simple example in Figure 7.1). They start off with a beginning (“Once upon a time, there was a handsome young man…”) and then attach a choice to it (“and he either a) went off in search of adventure or b) stayed home to care for his sick mother”). Then they attach another choice to each of the ...
Get Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
