Category: CYOA

Tabletop Storygaming: A Penny For My Thoughts

A Penny For My Thoughts is a short storytelling game about trauma and lost memory. The premise is that the three players are all victims of some disastrous experience that caused them to lose their memories. Thanks to a special mind-enhancing drug, they are able to access fragments of those past events — both their own and one another’s.

To begin, each player writes down on a card three visceral experiences or sense impressions: in ours, these were things like “the smell of rotting lemons” or “vertigo.” Then the players take turns rebuilding past memories for their characters. Each draws a card from the shuffled stack and says, for instance, “I remember the smell of rotting lemons.” The other two players take turns asking establishing questions, such as “Were the lemons from a lemonade stand?” and the player who is doing the recollection must — in good improv style — reply, “yes, and…”, accepting the offer and providing an additional detail of his or her own.

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Meanwhile for iPad and iPhone

Jason Shiga’s choose-your-own-path comic Meanwhile has been around in book form for a while now. There’s even a copy in my household, but I haven’t ever gotten to the point of reading it properly (and there is a “properly”, as one soon discovers). Now, thanks to Andrew Plotkin, it’s available as an iPad/iPhone application, and in that new format I finally finished it last night.

Meanwhile is a puzzle story: there are many endings, but you’ll know when you’ve reached the point where you finally understand. Structurally it has more in common with Möbius, Rematch, or other replay-puzzle IF than it has with, say, the Choice Of series. Going through the choices with the right knowledge puts a new spin on the things you see, and equips you for a couple of combination lock puzzles that otherwise would be laborious to guess your way through. And — like many games of this ilk — it uses time travel and parallel universe tropes to explain its loops of repetition and discovery, so that you can if you wish rationalize all your playthroughs as belonging to one(ish) reality.

Meanwhile is self-graphing CYOA — you don’t just jump pages, you actually see the lines of narrative — and it plays with that fact frequently and intentionally. Embedded in the story are many witty moments: places where you find yourself stuck in an infinite loop, points where two paths reconverge for comic effect, panels that mirror or summarize other panels in surprising ways. Sometimes the lines connecting panels spiral or tangle or knot, indicating narrative complication or a breakdown of causality.

As a book, it’s a pretty cool artifact — lines running out from the comic panels to the edge of the page, leading to tabs leading to new pages.

As an iPad app, it’s more solvable. All the elements of the story are assembled on a single infinite canvas, making it easier to see how panels relate to one another. A trace records where you’ve been on the current playthrough, so you can easily jump backwards to the last choice or to an earlier segment of the story if you want to try taking a different route. There’s even voiceover functionality for the visually-impaired, though I didn’t experiment with this myself.

If you’re inclined to read Meanwhile, I highly recommend the app version. The crazy, mindboggling outcome is worth getting to — and worth getting to honestly — and it’s easier to do that with those helps.

IF Comp 2011: The Play

It’s comp time, so I’m going to short summaries in my RSS feed in order to avoid dumping spoilers into the aggregators. And, as usual, I will be skipping games that have no evidence of beta-testing.

“The Play” is an Undum piece by Deirdra Kiai (Life Flashes By, Pigeons in the Park). “The Play” concerns the dress rehearsal of a play about a statue come to life, her artist, and an escaping gladiator. There’s a certain amount of slapstick humor, but mostly the story is about juggling the moods of the actors you’re overseeing in an attempt to get through the evening.

In the review to follow, there are some comments on thematic content at the beginning, then spoiler space, then a more detailed discussion of structure. That said, even the thematic comments give away a certain amount of what the game is about, so if you want to encounter it entirely fresh, don’t read on.

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Charlotte: Prowling For Enchantment

“I’m a vampire. It’s very boring.”

Thus Ryder, one of the love interests in the CYOA Charlotte, Prowling for Enchantment (Take Control) (also available for iOs). Personally I think it a little risky lamp-shading the tedium of your own characters, but Charlotte doesn’t have much fear on that front. Or how about this:

The bubbling sexuality eating at her flashed into steam.

This is one of those metaphors that’s not so much mixed as fatally mangled at the blender factory. How can a liquid both bubble and eat? Are we talking about a flash-boiled acid here? Or, speaking of hot things you don’t want to be dipped into:

Lava tickled the tender skin between her thighs.

Such a tease, lava. Or

She needed a drink. Of skin.

You just don’t really want to think about that too hard.

The prose is not good — not keenly observed, not stylish or lyrical, not surprising — but it has a glossy professional assurance. And, indeed, the author, who works under the name Mima, has apparently published a whole series of non-interactive paranormal erotic romances.

The premise is that the protagonist has gone on a cruise, not realizing that (a) the cruise is a singles cruise for fantastical beings and (b) she has paranormal powers herself. At once she is being fought over by a vampire and a werewolf (where have I heard this before?). The first choice, therefore, is about which of the two she’s going to spend the night with. From there, many of the additional choices are about whether she is going to use her power, as it turns out she can command people to do her bidding. You would think she would have noticed this before the age of 29, but apparently the power is activated by proximity to bodies of water, and she was raised to avoid them all her life.

Some of the paths have a fair amount of plot; others are almost entirely porn, the kind of porn consisting largely of boggling euphemisms. (“The pleasure roared past like the blue line metro had missed its stop.”)

As CYOA, it’s structurally unusual. The passages between choices are long — the app calls these chapters, and it’s not wrong to do so — and there can be only three or four choices in a complete play-through. This makes the choices seem more surprising when they appear, because there’s so much that Charlotte decides to do of her own accord that getting agency back is a little startling. It is also a bit of a drag on replay (at least, I thought so), because there’s necessarily such a lot of previously-seen text to reread before one gets to any new branches.

It does offer a fairly polished interface, though, and the credit text on the iOs version is interesting: it invites published authors or professional writers to contact Branching Path Books to get their adventures out there.

The tactic of approaching static-fiction authors with an established fan base and getting them to write various types of interactive fiction has been discussed before, but I don’t know of a lot of cases (post-80s, anyway) where it’s happened. Mima isn’t exactly Stephen King, but there are those 19 published erotic romances; and the result is a CYOA that feels fairly different from the average example of the genre, both because of its subject matter (mostly the “silken bar” the vampire has in his pants) and its structure (choice points are rare and feel arbitrarily placed, with the emphasis of the experience still mostly being on the author’s story vision).