# Interactive Fiction Paradox
I wrote an original version of this on 23.05.2019 in Russian.
I wanted to translate it and put it out here, but looking at it now, some things have changed with the advent of AI. So the version below is a new one.
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Playing tabletop games makes me think about interactive stories.
My common experience with interactive stories is that they fascinate me in theory but disappoint in practice. It's such a cool idea to have a story unfold based on your input, in the direction you want, making you live with the consequences of your decisions. My common grievance with this is that player freedom is usually inversely proportional to how satisfying the story is.
The main example I want to use here is Marvel's "What If?" comic books. They can have wonderful and engaging stories, but after you read them, there is not as much satisfaction as after reading the "canon" books. It's similar to reading fan fiction. It's not "real", unless it strays so far from the original that it becomes its own "canon" story.
The games sometimes say the storyline you experience as a player is the canon one. It's *your* canon. This idea holds until the first replay, when you peek behind the curtains and see how it all works. This might be the source of all problems - the ability to replay the game and *kill* its idea in your mind. You stop experiencing the game and start just browsing through the different story branches that might have taken place. If you open a wiki, it's over.
Some games make it obvious and let you see the branches right away. I was horrified when I saw that in a video of *Detroit: Become Human*. You could see the branches, the decisions you could have taken and everything. I was screaming internally "but what about the hard choices, the consequences of my actions, if I have god mode vision into everything?"
Some games make obfuscate the branches. For example, a flash game *One Chance* uses the browser's local storage to prevent itself from being replayable. You can't just reload it and see what would happen, unless you circumvent that limit.
The process of killing the idea of a game in your mind is a gradual one, and the more smoke and mirrors the game puts in your way, the slower its idea gets destroyed.
However, the problem if story branches feeling fake mostly exists when there are *branches*. If the game gives you a total sandbox where you're free to do anything without limits, then your playthrough *does* become your canon. I think it's the same underlying reason why fan fiction can feel canon - different playthoughs are so separated from each other, they feel like different stories rather than different versions of the same story.
The problem with sandboxes though is that there are no actual stories with plot in them. There is no writer who plans the course of your journey and carefully places hints and story beats for maximum immersion. There are few sudden twists that make sense in hindsight. And most importantly, there are no deep and complex characters with plots and agency of their own.
The new part which makes the old version of this post completely obsolete is AI. It's not advanced enough yet to act as a real storyteller, but it's getting close. It's like having an game master in a tabletop RPG who fills in for the writer. A GM can place relevant hints and story beats no matter which turn the story takes. They can create complex NPCs and have them live in the game world without following a set path. An AI would play the same role of dynamically adjusting the story to the player's actions, letting the player make their own path and solve problems their own way.
Maybe I'm mixing up a few concepts here. Interactive stories doesn't necessarily mean branching paths. All my favorite story-oriented games are linear. Even the interactive fiction games I like (Counterfeit Monkey, Horse Master) are linear in their main plot. I think it's just two separate things. Writing a story and letting the player experience *that story*, but not any other one, and making a world and letting the player have adventures in that world, which together form a "story" of sorts.
That's just running away from the problem though, and the original idea of influencing the story instead of merely experiencing it is still appealing. So, what works for me is:
1. Smoke-and-mirror style cheap tricks. Not allowing free saves, hiding plot branches, including branching in the narrative of the game. Anything that doesn't scream at me "this is a game, you found 7 endings out of 12".
2. Sandboxes. Worlds where the events you experience make up the story.